Sense and Nonsense

Tips for Surviving Freshman Year of College

Over the last few years, I've discovered that the single most frequently read post on this blog (FAR outnumbering any other post or topic) is this item from June of 2008 that contained advice for college freshmen, offered a couple years earlier by Ben Jones, an assistant director of admissions at MIT, to the incoming class of 2010 there.  I think the post was picked up by sites like StumbleUpon, because it gets dozens of hits a day.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who came across that post in the course of doing some research for a piece she was editing, which she wanted to call to readers' attention.  It offers tips for surviving freshman year of college. You can find it here.  It's commonplace fare, not as interesting or fresh as the advice from Ben Jones.  But I offer it to you for what it's worth.  Cheers. And good luck. 

Beating the College Bookstore

Among the marketplaces in America long known for ripping people off, college bookstores rank right up there near the top. Traditionally, there's no competition and no easy way for students to get their hands on needed books from alternate sources.  But that's slowly begun to change in the past few years, and here's a new development that should quicken the rate of change: a textbook price-comparison web app for college students.  Check out this price comparison tool that is the result of a partnership between the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM) and SlugBooks.com.  (Screenshot of web app below.)

 

Excellent.

 

The Benefits of a Gap Year

 

Gareth Cook has an interesting op-ed piece in this morning's Boston Sunday Globe about the benefits many students can gain from taking a "gap year" or "bridge year" between high school and college -- a great opportunity to gain some maturity and perspective.

 

Scourge of the Deanlets

This morning's Wall Street Journal carries a review of a new book about the problem of administrative bloat in American colleges and universities. The author of The Fall of the Faculty is Benjamin Ginsberg, a distinguished political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.  

From the review:

In his lacerating "The Fall of the Faculty," Mr. Ginsberg argues that universities have degenerated into poorly managed pseudo-corporations controlled by bureaucrats so far removed from research and teaching that they have barely any idea what these activities involve. He attacks virtually everyone—from overpaid presidents and provosts down through development officers, communications specialists and human-resource staffers—but he reserves his most bitter scorn for the midlevel "associate deans" and "assistant deans" who often have the most direct control over the faculty. Mr. Ginsberg refers to them as "deanlets," but at my institution they are often called "ass. deans."

From 1975 to 2005, the costs of attending an American university tripled. During that period, faculty-to-student ratios stayed relatively constant, but administrator-to-student ratios ballooned. The number of administrators increased by 85%, and the number of staffers rose by 240%. Administrative salaries shot up as well. Today, 81 university presidents are paid more than half a million dollars a year, and 12 earn more than a million.

Ginsberg has put his finger on a serious problem in American colleges and universities. 

The Dumbing of America

© Clay Bennett

See my piece at The Atlantic's website on this issue, along with follow-ups here and here.

UPDATE:  Also, see this dispiriting op-ed piece by Jesse Singal in the Boston Globe.

World's Top 100 Universities

Harvard knocked out of first place:

For data, go here. 

 

The Great College Collapse

A month or so ago, I pointed to new evidence that America's colleges and college students are heading downward in various ways.  Two new books make the same argument. Craig Brandon's The Five-Year Party describes America's "alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses" as education-free zones. [See a review in today's Wall Street Journal.]  That ought to give pause to the hundreds of thousands of families writing big tuition checks this month.  Brandon's book takes a fairly sensationalistic approach, although his critique surely has merit. 

A more measured, scholarly approach to the problem of American colleges and universities can be found in a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, entitled Higher Education?   The book's subtitle is more informative about its contents: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It. A review in last Monday's WSJ summarized the authors' case: "[C]olleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for 'higher education' or the students who so desperately need it."  Hacker and Dreifus argue that parents ought to steer kids away from high-cost colleges and universities that seem to offer status and prestige but often produce graduates burdened by debt.  They conclude: "A debt-free beginning is worth far more than a name-brand imprimatur."    Amen. 

College Bums

Last week, the Boston Globe reported on data that show American college students today spend far less time studying than earlier generations of college students did.  Read it and weep.  No wonder this country is going down the tubes. The most privileged of our young people are spending more and more of their time goofing off.  

Then, a couple of days ago, the New York Times reported that American colleges are spending a declining share of their budgets on instruction and the amounts they spend on recreation and student services are increasing -- what one critic calls the "country club-ization" of American universities.

Sheesh.  What a waste.  

Boston College: Local Deadbeat

That's the view Brian McGrory takes in his column in this morning's Boston Globe.  I agree with him.  BC is a so-so college that has an inflated sense of itself and doesn't pull its weight locally.  Here's McGrory's take:

Suppose for a second that the ball fell through Gerard Phelan’s fingertips and bounced to the Orange Bowl turf on that famous November afternoon in 1984, the Miracle in Miami rendered but a dream.

Would Boston College admissions be anywhere near as selective these days? Would BC have such a prominent national name?

And would one of its officials, when asked this week why BC doesn’t provide the same kind of money to the City of Boston that other area colleges do in lieu of taxes, respond that the school is “opposed’’ to those kinds of payments?

You see, BC, God love it (and ask any alum, He does), is a unique place. It views itself as a college on a hill, never mind that it’s just Chestnut Hill. It firmly believes that if it were not for its very presence, Boston as we know it — as a center for culture and commerce — would cease to exist.

It wasn’t always this way. BC used to be the place kids would go when they had more ambition than achievement. The school would accept a fire hydrant if it could pay the tuition. Once in, you could be certain of three things: a diploma, a spouse, and a job. Everyone at BC marries someone from BC (and has children who go to BC), and it’s a Vatican mandate that graduates hire BC graduates.

“Your references say you’re chronically tardy, you have a police record, a sense of entitlement, and a 2.0 from BC. How soon can you start?’’

Then the great Doug Flutie threw the ball from midfield to good-guy Phelan and every honors student in New York and New Jersey wanted to be at The Heights. The alumni acted like they had graduated from Harvard with priests. The same tribalism that seemed quaint when the school was adequate became insufferable as it prospered.

College-Admissions Craziness

From Joan Wickersham's op-ed piece in this morning's Boston Globe:

Every year when college admissions season rolls around, I read articles about how the applicant pool is bigger and stronger than ever before. But are we really seeing better kids, or just slicker packaging? We think our children should be academically brilliant; musically and athletically gifted; and dedicated to serving, if not downright saving, humanity. Are there really a lot of people like this? Or are we creating Frankenstudents — artificial monsters, impossible composites of skills and achievements that rarely co-exist in real life?

I look around at the adults I know, and I don’t see anybody who resembles this glossy hyperachiever. I see a doctor who gardens, an architect taking care of an aging mother, a sculptor who plays tennis twice a week. I know someone who does relief work in Africa, and someone who gave a great deal of time and money after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — but those same people don’t also play the tuba and win skating championships and dissect frogs. They have work, families, and friends — and even with that, no one gets enough sleep.

. . . 

This climate of parental anxiety is nuts. The way kids are being packaged for college is cynical and fake. (It reminds me of the old Miss America pageants, where contestants had to look good in a bathing suit, play the marimba, aspire to do brain surgery, and dream about world peace.) But opting out of it is nerve-wracking, too. If everyone else is playing the game, can your child afford not to?

The goal of education is to genuinely enrich people, not to make them merely appear enriched. By trying to manufacture Frankenstudents, we are distorting and cheapening a process that should allow people to experiment, question, take risks, stumble, and occasionally fail. We need to give people permission to spend time doing things that are not quantifiable and don’t show up on a résumé — things like daydreaming; reading for pleasure; learning how to cook a frittata; and studying a subject you’re not very good at, just because it interests you. We need to stop pretending that everyone peaks early. We need to prepare our kids for unpredictable lives and uneven careers, for bumps and jolts and ambiguities. In short, for real life.