Tag: college

July 2, 2011

The frivolous college

Whitman College, my alma mater, sent these out to all graduates the other week. It’s a mini, laminated diploma “to put in your wallet or a very small frame.” This seems about the worst possible way to spend funds.

When tuition is increasing along with cutbacks in staff why in the world is money being spent on frivolous things like this?

If I choose to go to a small private college with tuition over $40,000 it’s for the small class sizes, relationships with professors, and opportunities to get involved in a variety of things. 1 It’s not for a laminated mini diploma one year after graduation.

Instead of wasting money on creating, laminating, cutting, and mailing hundreds of these to graduates around the world Whitman could have covered the cost of books for a student who otherwise would have to borrow for them.

Notes:

  1. Which Whitman does provide and I am thankful for and benefited from. ↩

June 24, 2011

The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers

But not knowing what plagiarism is isn’t really the problem. It’s unfortunate that right now the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism. And the reason the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism is because their product is less and less valuable these days. When students plagiarize, there’s an implicit recognition that “I’m just doing this for the grade.” That’s why they do it. And that’s the way that the majority of students look at the university, and have been for some time now. At my college, the frats had rooms full of file cabinets full of plagiarized papers. Plagiarism is old news. It’s really not just that plagiarism is getting easier to do, with the Internet. The problem is now that the grade doesn’t even get you the job.

The New Inquiry – The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. (via Robin Sloan)

June 24, 2011

What Can You Do With $20,000?. There’s a lot you can do with $20,000 a year. Instead of a traditional college tuition payment you could travel, cover living expenses for 6 months, seed a couple small businesses, and much more. Bonus is that you can end your 4 years with an investment fund of $40,000, no debt required.

June 10, 2011

College for $99 a month

Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.

College for $99 a Month

May 25, 2011

A Different Path. Really astute analysis of why a college degree is not the only path to success. Those years should be spent finding, learning, and expanding your passion. Related reading from Daniel.

May 21, 2011

Disrupting College

It’s taken a while but I got around to reading the Center for American Progress report, Disrupting College. 1 It was a really fascinating read, highly recommend it.

One quote particularly stood out. While describing the disruption that occurred in the computer industry the authors characterize the old mainframe model by writing:

We had to take our computational problems to these centralized computer centers where experts solved them for us.

This contrasts with the current smartphone era. We now have the computational power for many daily tasks residing in our front pocket. This all got me thinking about college.

With the traditional college system we have the same mainframe model. We take our knowledge problems and inexperience to a centralized place where experts with many years of training help solve them for, or in the best case with, us. Carry the analogy from mainframe computing over to education and holy mind explosion Batman! If we could even achieve half of the transformation accomplished with computers we’d be in for some wonderful times.

A future where the tools for education are accessible on an individual scale and where geographic location is no longer a limiting factor makes me really excited.

Notes:

  1. Hat tip goes to Daniel ↩

March 24, 2011

Status

Instead of going into debt for a degree take that money and start a company. If that’s too scary, join an awesome team. You might find you learn more working on something than being in school, I have.

March 5, 2011

Thoughts on TKE initiation at Whitman. Go read that. Then read this. Much respect to Daniel for publishing that and for being interviewed by the Pio.

March 3, 2011

College professors and students jump into the wiki world. It turns out that not all universities are content to view Wikipedia as an inaccurate and untrustworthy knowledge pool. Professors at various east coast schools are having students work in groups to improve entries. Sounds like a great use of all that journal access colleges have. (via Three trends that will shape the future of curriculum)

February 7, 2011

The new AP sounds like a good step

Last month the New York Times published a feature on the changes coming to Advanced Placement courses. 1

I finally got around to reading it and found it pretty interesting. They mention the following change, among others, for the biology course and exam:

College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills…The board plans to cut the number of multiple-choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free-response questions, to nine.

It is not a perfect exam but it sounds like a good step forward in many ways.

In the AP U.S. History course I took during my Junior year we had to copy definitions for all the glossary terms to index cards that counted as a significant part of our grade. These index cards then made up a good chunk of the test material for class and, theoretically, the AP exam.

Ultimately I could rattle off dates and dictionary like definitions without really understanding the greater context and relevancy of events. It was nothing like the American History course I took Freshman year in college.

If cutting the number of multiple-choice questions in half means fewer students have to mindlessly re-copy glossary definitions then that’s progress. 2

Notes:

  1. H/T to Lauren. ↩
  2. Until we have our perfect system that is. 🙂 ↩