September 8. 2008 by Dick.

“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem,” Malcolm S. Forbes said a few years ago.

Hana R. Alberts, Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, writing for Forbes Magazine, have published “an alternative” to the quality report that U.S. News & World Report has long issued about American higher education.

It is not the best ranking system I have seen.

Darn it. It could have been.

Malcolm S. Forbes died young, about 18 years ago. As an interesting (to me) aside, he was born on my grandfather’s birthday, August 19, but the same year my parents were born. As far as I know, my family and his had nothing else in common although I did read his magazine. Mr. Forbes published Forbes Magazine which his father founded and his son now runs.

He was graduated from Princeton University, active in politics and community, and strong-willed about his magazine which he grew large.

Despite the shallowness of the college report, I suspect the aphorism rags to rags in three generations will not apply to the Capitalist Tool Forbeses.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s big idea seems worthwhile at first glance. Ranking the profs, career success, costs, graduation rates, and student recognition are all pretty good tests. Too bad their methodology fell apart at the starting gate. The group of mostly college students at CCAP gathered data from 7 million student evaluations of courses and instructors in a non-scientific, online, “inmates rating the asylum” poll site. That’s a quarter of the grade. Another quarter comes from Who’s Who listings. I have a Who’s Who listing along with a few million other Americans, so I’m pretty sure that’s not a great qualifier. Maybe they should use Wikipedia listings.

I find it interesting that Cal Tech is ahead of Harvard and that my mom’s alma mater, Swarthmore, is well ahead of Yale. Not to mention the fact that Dartmouth offers free tuition but is way down on the list.

OTOH, ya gotta ask yourself How does one really choose a school? I ended up at Stevens Institute of Technology almost by accident. I looked for schools that had belly button design. Webb didn’t accept me. Stevens did. Forbes ranked them number as either 127 or 565. Stevens is a Top-10 engineering school.

I taught in Vermont Colleges for several years. I even survived student rankings. With that caveat, I never thought that students should be allowed to design a curriculum even when I was a student and I have always believed that student ranking of teachers is too much Entertainment Tonight and too little NASA Tech Briefs.

Come on. Students go to school for one of four reasons: get out of the draft, get out of the house, get out of having to work for a living, OR TO LEARN SOMETHING. I can accept a student’s appraisal of courses or teachers after, say, long enough in the workplace to apply what was learned in school and to judge whether it helped her or hurt him.

Let me pose that as a question: Who do you want removing your appendix? The surgeon who has done it a few hundred times or the pre-med student who has read Appendectomies for Dummies?

At least Forbes recognized that “the sort of student who will thrive at Williams might drown at Caltech, to say nothing of West Point.”

That said, Forbes also believes that “these rankings reflect, in a very real way, the quality and cost of an undergraduate education at a wide range of American colleges and universities. And when families have to make a decision with a six-figure price tag and lifelong impact, we think they deserve all the information they can get.”

Pfui. I reckon that when families have to make that six-figure decision, they deserve better information than this. Here are the top 10 questions I would want answered plus a couple of extras:

Personal Questions
• Does the curriculum match what I need to learn?
• Do the instructors teach in a way that matches my learning style?
• Is the program rigor too much (or too little) for me?
• Does campus life help or hinder my growth?
• Will I find help from other alums in my chosen field?

Statistical Questions
• How much will it actually cost, net?
• What kind of job will I get upon graduation?
• Does my education stick me in a single track or can I branch out into whatever interests me as I grow?
• How much do employers and peers respect my school?
• How many freshmen wash out? How many graduate

Then, much lower on the list, come two questions CCAP asked:
• How many Nobel Prizes and MacArthur Genius Grants has the faculty accrued?
• How many Rhodes and Fulbright scholars come from the undergrad program?

Posted in Teaching, Society, Lists, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 2 Comments »

June 30. 2008 by Dick.

A town without a library is a town without culture.

On July 2, the Monroe County (Florida) Board of Commissioners were to meet to consider the permanent closure of the Marathon, Big Pine, and Islamorada branches of the Monroe County Public Library. This closure would come on the heels of a significant decrease in library hours.

I am pleased to report that Mayor Mario Di Gennaro told us Friday that the library cuts are off the table. I am displeased to report that the cuts were on the table in the first place.

The Commissioners had hoped to save less than $10 per capita.

Once closed, these libraries would never reopen.

Closure is a cultural as well as an economic issue that will affect every business in the Keys. The loss of our library sends this unmistakable message: “The Monroe County Commissioners do not value learning or culture.” Our residents demand the learning and our visitors demand the culture. And, of course, vice versa.

These library branches serve thousands of residents and tourists alike. Over 1,200 children have library cards and use our library to check out books and other materials.

Popular reading materials still make the bulk of the collection; that’s wonderful for everyday readers, but there is so much more. The library provides reading at preschools, home-school support, youth programs, and research help (I have recently used the Marathon branch to learn how to remove a Chrysler Lebaron gas tank and I have researched local history there).

Home-school support has a nice warm-and-fuzzy feel to it but it is a serious economic issue: imagine the budget impact if just 10 home-schooled kids re-entered the traditional school system because the Commisioners closed the library. Or 50 home-schooled kids. At over $10,000 per student per year.

It may be difficult for those of us reading or responding to this blog to believe that some people really do not have computers or Internet access. Many people do not. Libraries fill that void.

The free computer use for Monroe County citizens enables food stamp, social services assistance, and unemployment benefit applications. Users can conduct online job searches. They can prepare taxes and Social Security applications. They have access to Florida State services, statutes, and resources.

And users can read the news.

There is nothing more important to a free society than the free availability of the news.

I’m thinking that in this election year the Commissioners knew we would lose any Commissioners who lose us our libraries.

And that would be news.

Posted in Society, Politics, Big Thoughts, Random Access | No Comments »

June 23. 2008 by Dick.

The End is nigh. The hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen have sounded. I am about to agree with Gary Trudeau. A couple-three years ago, his Doonesbury™ strip introduced Dr. Nathan Null, the Situational Science Adviser™. Here’s an excerpt from that strip:

Young Republican College Kid: “Drat! These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!”
Situational Science Adviser: “Then Challenge them, Stewie!”
—–
SSA: “Situational Science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by the facts!”
—–
SSA: “That’s why I always teach the controversy like the Evolution Controversy or the Global Warming controversy …
—–
YRCC: “You’re right, Situational Scienceman–I’ll never trust science again! “It’s just too controversial!”
SSA: “Stewie gets it now, folks! Do you?”

Trudeau likes to pound the Bush administration (ya think) but there is a similar effort going on the Far Green camps to use science to forestall and obfuscate rather than simply to report.

Once upon a time I thought this wasn’t a wholesale attempt to discredit science, merely a concerted effort to ramp up tiny observations into generalized Truths to serve their agenda. After all, we are told the Far Right agenda tries to use common folk as cannon or environmental fodder so, situationally, the Far Green agenda must try to shut down one business segment after another.

That worries me, but not as much as what I now see as the wholesale drive to gain power over every facet of your life and mine. How? By discrediting science whenever it appears in public. It has been going on for years.

Big Tobacco tried mightily to discredit Dr. Koop as a poopyhead.

Natural Life Magazine tried mightily to discredit childhood vaccinations.

The Far Right tried mightily to discredit Evolution for 80 years.

Trudeau’s Situational Science Adviser pushed the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the Everglades controversy, the acid rain controversy, the mercury controversy, and more.

I know very little about mercury other than its toxicity and ubiquity. And its distance from the Sun. I did read that if you lose a single mercury filling in a ten-acre pond, the EPA would have to ban all fishing, swimming, bathing, and boating in that pond. Makes you wonder why we still have “silver” fillings–or why Al Gore pushes mercury-laden fluorescent light bulbs–innt.

Now, of course, everything from the unnaturally high snowfall in the winter of 2007-08 to the unnatural temperature rise of the Atlantic Ocean is caused by Global Warming, and all a result of Carbon Dioxide.

Heh.

Anybody want to guess the agenda here?

It’s almost the same as mine.

I want you to read this, decide I am brilliant, and do what I tell you is right.

The Far Green wants you decide they are brilliant and do what they tell you is right. But they want more. The Far Green wants to force you and you and you to do what they tell you is right And they are developing the tools to enforce their whims.

One of my correspondents related a story from the historical times after the Tet Offensive when gasoline cost 40 cents per gallon. His friend, a Quaker, had received Conscientious Objector status and was assigned to a group called “Environment!” After working there several months, he said “These guys don’t care a bit about the environment. This is all about power… We, the great and stupid unwashed, needed to be doing what the folks at “Environment!” said we should be doing.”

That was more than 35 years ago.

I think the group Environment! has joined the Extinct Species list but other Far Green groups are growing stronger.

Today their tools include taxes, criminal penalties, and news attacks on science.

Our Quaker friend said then that “if the environmental movement could define Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant, they would have total control.”

OK, everybody inhale … and hold.

Next up will be the ban on that other dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Your Carbon FootprintNASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the earth has entered a natural cooling phase that will last decades.
OTOH, Al and Tipper Gore’s Tennessee home uses about the same amount of electricity as a dozen or more average American homes or at least 156 Swahili villages. The Gore’s Nashville residence is just four times the size of those average American homes and the Gore’s consumption has jumped yet another 10% since their “energy-efficient” home renovations. Do as I say, not as I do, eh Al?

Posted in Society, Newspaper "Science", Science (not-so-real), Politics, Big Thoughts, Media, Random Access | No Comments »