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The end of handwriting

Does handwriting matter?

Says the New York Times, “Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.images

“But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

“Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

“Handwriting is being dropped in public schools — that could be bad for young minds. Google’s new hands-free computer is finding its way into operating rooms. Breast cancer survivors find the start of their new lives in a tattoo artist’s work.
Subscribe to the Podcast » David Corcoran, Kassie Bracken and Jeffery DelViscio
“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.” Continue reading “The end of handwriting”

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Medicare to cover reassignment

imgresA federal board ruled Friday in favor of a 74-year-old veteran seeking to have Medicare cover the costs of her gender reassignment surgery, a landmark decision that recognizes it as a necessary medical procedure.

As time magazine reports, “The decision by the Department of Health and Human Services overturns a longstanding rule preventing the government health insurance program from covering such procedures and opens the doors for other Medicare enrollees to make similar requests. It comes at a time when states are beginning to prohibit insurance companies from including specific exclusions for treatments related to gender transitions. So far, five states—California, Vermont, Oregon, Connecticut and Colorado, as well as Washington, D.C.—have prohibited such exclusions. Organizations like the Oakland, Calif.-based Transgender Law Center are fighting for more states to follow suit.

“Though numbers are far from concrete, studies estimate that that 0.5% of the U.S. population is transgender, meaning that they identify with a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth. Not all of the country’s estimated 1.5 million transgender citizens desire reassignment surgery, a serious procedure that alters a person’s sexual characteristics. That decision may depend on the desire to have children or physical preference, fear of surgery or having other health conditions that would make such surgery risky, as well as the cost of surgery.

“The National Transgender Discrimination Survey, a 2011 report that is the most comprehensive source for data on transgender-related issues, found that the majority of its 6,500 respondents desired surgery of some kind. However, many couldn’t afford to undergo such procedures. Continue reading “Medicare to cover reassignment”

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Academic freedom vs disclosure

Just last month, Virginia’s high court upheld the University of Virginia’s right not to disclose a professor’s emails about his work on climate change to a conservative organization that requested their release under the Freedom of Information Act.images-1
InsideHigher Ed reports that “Now the university is again being asked to disclose a faculty member’s email correspondence and other personal records — this time by a gay rights advocacy group that says it’s concerned that the work of renowned Constitutional law professor Douglas Laycock is being used to support anti-gay and pro-life legislation.
“Although the two Virginia requests came from different sides of the political aisle, experts say they raise similar issues. Namely, experts say, FOIA requests regarding professors’ preliminary scholarship and personal correspondence walk a fine line between ensuring transparency in public institutions and infringing on academic freedom. The newest case is particularly notable due to Laycock’s eminence in the field and the fact that he is married to U.Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan.
“Earlier this month, the university received a FOIA request from two students, in consultation with GetEQUAL, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights advocacy group based in Berkeley, Calif. The request seeks access to emails to and from Laycock’s university account to three conservative political organizations, along with phone records from the professor’s work cell phone from January 2012 to May of this year and expense reports for travel during the same period. The request also seeks access to relevant emails sent to and from the professor’s assistant, and the professor’s employment contract. The request says: “At the heart of this [FOIA] request is a general concern University of Virginia resources may have been used to help finance causes that are perpetuating harm to [LGBT] individuals and the reproductive rights of women across the country, including here on UVA’s campus.” Continue reading “Academic freedom vs disclosure”

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Three-strikes and mental illness

Passed in 1994, California’s “three strikes” law is the nation’s harshest sentencing law.As Mother Jones reports, “Designed to imprison for life anyone who commits three violent crimes, the law has inadvertently resulted in the incarceration of a lot relatively harmless people, for a long time and at great public expense. Crimes that have earned people life sentences:imgres-1 Stealing a dollar in loose change from a car, breaking into a soup kitchen to steal food, stealing a jack from the open window of a tow truck, and even stealing two pairs of children’s shoes from Ross Dress for Less. The law is one reason that California’s prison system is dangerously, and unconstitutionally, overcrowded. More than 4,000 people in the prison system are serving life sentences for non-violent crimes.

“In 2012, with corrections costs consuming ever more of the state budget, the voters in the state had had enough, and they approved a reform measure that would spring many of these low-level offenders from a lifetime of costly confinement. By August of last year, more than 1,000 inmates had their life sentences changed and were released; recidivisim rates for this group has also been extremely low. But further progress in the reform effort is being stymied by one thorny problem: Nearly half of the inmates serving time in California prisons suffer from a serious mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. So far, judges have been reluctant to let these folks out of their life sentences.

“A new report from Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes project notes that the number of mentally ill prisoners denied relief from a life sentence is three times larger than those without a brain disease. The disparity largely stems from the fact that judges and juries tend to give people with brain diseases much harsher sentences to begin with. Continue reading “Three-strikes and mental illness”

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Whither the dean?

An interesting dilemma lies ahead — where will all the academic administrators come from?images

Historically, most administrators in academic affairs, whether they be department chairs, program directors, deans, or provosts, have come out of the ranks of tenured faculty. However with faculty increasingly being contingent and off the tenure track (70 percent), there has not been much consideration of where administrators within academic affairs will come from.

Clearly very different opportunities  and constraints exist at different institutional types,  but the problem will occur across all institutions of higher education to a greater or lesser degree. Fewer tenure-track faculty at research-focused institutions could mean that those who do have tenure will be expected to continue to focus more on grant and research production over leadership.

Teaching-focused institutions, including liberal arts college and community colleges, may be more reluctant to transition faculty from classroom duty to campus leadership. Regardless of institutional mission, it seems as though little action is taken toward leadership succession planning. There are often reports of difficulty filling positions. It’s not unusual to hear of department chairs or deans being chosen because someone was the only individual willing (and able in terms of being tenured, not necessarily commitment or capability) to take the role rather than best suited for it.

An emphasis on related experience, if tenured, has become more relaxed. It is not unusual to hear of an internal dean moving into a provost role, or a chair moving into a dean role after just a year or two, not because the person is an undeniable choice, but because so few other individuals have the experience needed and an external candidate could not be identified. Continue reading “Whither the dean?”

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Marriage equality = religious freedom

A coalition of clergy members is challenging North Carolina’s constitutional ban on gay marriage with an unusual approach: They’re filing a federal lawsuit that contends that the ban violates their First Amendment religious freedom rights.

The clergy members said in the lawsuit filed Monday that they would like to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies in their congregations but can’t because of the “unjust law.”images

The lawsuit is one of dozens that have been filed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Defense of Marriage Act last year. Since then, several states have challenged the legality of their same-sex marriage bans. But this is the first to use the First Amendment protection of freedom of religion as the basis for the challenge.

“North Carolina’s marriage laws are a direct affront to freedom of religion,” said the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, executive minister with the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, which is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We feel that it is important that any person that comes into community life of a United Church of Christ congregation be afforded equal pastoral care and equal opportunity to religious services that clergy provide.”

But in North Carolina, clergy are often faced with a troubling decision — “whether to provide those services or break the law,” Guess said. “That’s something no clergy member should be faced with.”

Along with the United Church of Christ, which has more than 1 million parishioners across the country and over 50,000 in North Carolina, a dozen clergy members and same-sex couples were listed as plaintiffs. The defendants included North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and several county district attorneys as well as five registers of deeds. Continue reading “Marriage equality = religious freedom”

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The new Title IX at women’s colleges

For hundreds of years, universities excluded women. Denied access to these institutions, they created their own. images“Attempt great things,” the founder of Mount Holyoke, Mary Lyon, told her students. “Accomplish great things.” These schools, including the elite Seven Sisters — Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley — were where the nation’s most promising young women went to do just that.

But today, women’s colleges are at a crossroads their founders could never have foreseen, struggling to reconcile their mission with a growing societal shift on how gender itself is defined. A handful of applications from transgender women have rattled school administrators over the past year, giving rise to anxious meetings and campus demonstrations. On April 29, the Department of Education issued new guidance: Transgender students are protected from discrimination under Title IX.

“We are all concerned about Title IX issues,” said Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella in a telephone interview. “At a women’s college, we have to have some criterion for admission,” she said. “In addition to academic excellence, it’s being a woman.”

Administrators fear that admitting students who aren’t “legally female” will cause them to lose Title IX funding. But where the leaders of these schools were once in the vanguard, championing the equal rights of women, they are now in the reactionary position of arguing that biology is destiny. This is a losing battle.

Before the recent Title IX ruling, they were already addressing the issue of transgender students on campus. But the accommodations they have made in housing and bathrooms are for a small but growing number, perhaps a hundred or so, of transgender men — students who enrolled as women and then transitioned in college. This has put the schools in the untenable position of essentially discriminating against women in favor of men. Continue reading “The new Title IX at women’s colleges”

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Mental illness and life expectancy

According to Oxford University researchers, about one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem sometime during the year, while fewer than that smoke cigarettes — around 21 percent of men and 19 precent of women.images

PsychCentral reports that “Many mental disorders have a higher mortality risk than smoking. Yet despite these statistics, say the researchers, mental health still lags behind as a public health priority, especially compared to smoking.

“The study, published in the journal World Psychiatry, was based on the best systematic reviews of clinical studies reporting mortality risk for a whole range of diagnoses: mental health problems, substance and alcohol abuse, dementia, autistic spectrum disorders, learning disability, and childhood behavioral disorders.Twenty review papers were identified, including over 1.7 million individuals and over 250,000 deaths.

“The findings showed that the average reduction in life expectancy inbipolar patients is between nine and 20 years, 10 to 20 years forschizophrenia, between nine and 24 years for drug and alcohol abuse, and around seven to 11 years for recurrent depression. The loss of years among heavy smokers is eight to 10 years.

“People with mental health problems are among the most vulnerable in society. This work emphasizes how crucial it is that they have access to appropriate healthcare and advice, which is not always the case,” said Dr. John Williams, head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust.

“We now have strong evidence that mental illness is just as threatening to life expectancy as other public health threats such as smoking.”

All diagnoses had an increase in early death, though the size of the risk varied greatly. Many had risks equivalent to or higher than heavy smoking. Continue reading “Mental illness and life expectancy”

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More on bias in the lab

Federal health officials are taking steps to correct a longstanding gender imbalance in laboratory research on potential drug treatments.An Editorial in the New York times states that “For the past two decades, federal law has required that women be included in clinical studies funded by the National Institutes of Health in recognition of the fact that drugs often have vastly different effects in men and women. As a result, more than half of the participants in N.I.H.-imgresfunded clinical research are women. But there has been no similar requirement to eliminate the sex bias from more basic laboratory research that can lead up to a clinical trial or doom a drug to the discard pile if it seems not to work.

“That is about to change. Top N.I.H. officials announced in the journal Nature this month that the agency would soon require researchers applying for grants to balance male and female cells and laboratory animals unless there is good reason to include only one sex “based on rigorously defined exceptions.” A laboratory study of ovarian cancer or of prostate cancer could presumably include only animals or cells of the relevant sex, for example. The new rules could have a significant effect on how laboratory research is conducted because the N.I.H. is a major funder of biomedical research around the world.

“The gender imbalance results in part from resistance to any change in ingrained practices, fears that costs may rise, and obsolete views that fluctuations in female hormones would complicate results in female laboratory animals. Yet for some traits and behaviors there is far more variability among males than females. Continue reading “More on bias in the lab”

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Myth of war on religion

Last week, the Public Religion Research Institute published a study showing that Americans want their fellow citizens to think they are more religiously observant than they really areimgres. When asked by a live human being on the telephone how often they attend religious services, respondents were more likely to say they attend frequently. When filling out a self-administered online survey, by contrast, they were more likely to admit that they do not.

Surprising? Not terribly. But this may be: Liberals were more likely to exaggerate their religious attendance than conservatives. Liberals attend services

Why does this matter? Because it’s more evidence that the claim that liberals are waging a “war on religion” is absurd. You can hardly listen to a GOP presidential hopeful or flip on Fox News without hearing the charge. In 2012, Rick Perry promised that if elected he’d “end Obama’s war on religion.” Bobby Jindal recently warned that “the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war” against “a group of like-minded [liberal] elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.” Ann Coulter explains, “Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can’t stand the competition.”

Notice the claim. It’s not merely that liberals are not religious themselves. It’s that they disdain people who are, and this disdain creates a cultural stigma (and a legal barrier) to religious observance. “Bigotry against evangelical Christians is the last acceptable form of bigotry in the country,” Ralph Reed said recently. Continue reading “Myth of war on religion”

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Wikipedia activism

Most of the feminist activism I do—whether it’s writing or teaching or protesting—requires a long view. A really long view. Sometimes I feel as if my feminist colleagues and I are saying and doing the same things over and over again, with little to no results to show for any of our work. And when I see yet another sexist commercial such as DirecTV’s newest that features woman-as-marionette, I want to throw in the towel.

But not on a recent Saturday afternoon that I spent at an Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon. The results there were concrete and immediate. In less than two hours, I created Wikipedia pages for three feminist artists who should have had pages already but who, like so many women, had been overlooked.

It’s no secret that women have been rendered invisible in history, sports, laws, medical care, politics, corporate boardrooms, museums, religion and the military. One of my professors in graduate school, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, used to say that part of what makes patriarchy so powerful is its erasure of feminist history. Without knowing our history, she’d say, without knowing about the work of the women who came before us, we’re left reinventing the wheel.

The Internet is now where histories are stored and accessed, and it’s where subsequent generations will go when they want to know what’s real, what matters.

But guess what percentage of Wikipedia contributors are women? 13 percent.

Yes, you read that right. Continue reading “Wikipedia activism”

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More on the wage gap

When Jill Abramson was fired from her post as executive editor of the New York Times last Wednesday, the world took notice. The New Yorker reported on tensions between Abramson and the paper’s owner, which may have been heightened in part by an argument over her pay relative to that of her male predecessor.images-1

Whether Abramson’s pay did or didn’t have anything to do with her dismissal from the Times, one thing is certain: there is a gender wage gap. Among full-time workers, women earn 77% of what men earn. Even after accounting for the fact that women often work in different occupations and industries than men, as well as differences in work experience, union status, education and race, 41% of that gap is still unexplained. When social scientists control for every employment factor that could possibly explain the disparity, women still earn 91% of what men earn for doing the same job.

Female-dominated occupations tend to pay less, often much less, than male-dominated occupations. Women made great progress in the 1970s and 1980s in moving into careers traditionally dominated by men, but since the mid-1990s that progress has largely stalled. Today women still account for the vast majority of waitresses, retail workers, administrative assistants and nurses, but very few engineers, scientists, managers and technicians. Women also tend to work in service jobs and not-for-profit and public-sector organizations, which aren’t highly valued in a market economy. Moreover, though women lost fewer jobs than men did in therecession, they gained fewer during the recovery. And many of the gains were in sectors facing serious budget cuts, like education and social services.

What’s more, education has not effectively reduced the gender wage gap, even though women are now substantially more educated than men. Women surpassed men in college enrollment in the mid-1990s, and the gap has been growing ever since. Today 45% of young women are enrolled in college, compared with 38% of young men; 36% of young women have a bachelor’s or a graduate degree, compared with 28% of young men. Yet women with graduate degrees earn the same as men with bachelor’s degrees, and women with bachelor’s degrees earn the same as men with associate’s degrees.

What’s behind these differences? Part of the problem lies in what women study, which plays a large role in where they work later on. Women aren’t likely to choose high-paying majors like engineering; instead, they often gravitate to low-paying majors like education, psychology and social work. Women represent 97% of early-childhood-education majors but only 6% of mechanical-engineering majors. Continue reading “More on the wage gap”

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Who graduates and who doesn’t

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there imagesare a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa Brewer, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

The good news for Vanessa is that she had improved her odds by enrolling in a highly selective college. Many low-income students “undermatch,” meaning that they don’t attend — or even apply to — the most selective college that would accept them. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. But even among the highly educated students of U.T., parental income and education play a huge role in determining who will graduate on time. An internal U.T. report published in 2012 showed that only 39 percent of first-generation students (meaning students whose parents weren’t college graduates) graduated in four years, compared with 60 percent whose parents both graduated from college. So Vanessa was caught in something of a paradox. According to her academic record, she had all the ability she needed to succeed at an elite college; according to the demographic statistics, she was at serious risk of failing. Continue reading “Who graduates and who doesn’t”

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The hungry games

For most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When it comes to body weight, this means that calorie intake minus calorie expenditure equals calories stored. Surrounded by tempting foods, we overeat, consuming more calories than we can burn off, and the excess is deposited as fat. The simple solution is to exert willpower and eat less.images

The problem is that this advice doesn’t work, at least not for most people over the long term. In other words, your New Year’s resolution to lose weight probably won’t last through the spring, let alone affect how you look in a swimsuit in July. More of us than ever are obese, despite an incessant focus on calorie balance by the government, nutrition organizations and the food industry.

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat?

The more calories we lock away in fat tissue, the fewer there are circulating in the bloodstream to satisfy the body’s requirements. If we look at it this way, it’s a distribution problem: We have an abundance of calories, but they’re in the wrong place. As a result, the body needs to increase its intake. We get hungrier because we’re getting fatter.

It’s like edema, a common medical condition in which fluid leaks from blood vessels into surrounding tissues. No matter how much water they drink, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst because the fluid doesn’t stay in the blood, where it’s needed. Similarly, when fat cells suck up too much fuel, calories from food promote the growth of fat tissue instead of serving the energy needs of the body, provoking overeating in all but the most disciplined individuals.

We discuss this hypothesis in an article just published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. According to this alternative view, factors in the environment have triggered fat cells in our bodies to take in and store excessive amounts of glucose and other calorie-rich compounds. Since fewer calories are available to fuel metabolism, the brain tells the body to increase calorie intake (we feel hungry) and save energy (our metabolism slows down). Eating more solves this problem temporarily but also accelerates weight gain. Cutting calories reverses the weight gain for a short while, making us think we have control over our body weight, but predictably increases hunger and slows metabolism even more. Continue reading “The hungry games”

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Separate and unequal

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case where a unanimous Supreme Court held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The following year the justices ordered that states end school segregation with “all deliberate speed.”images-1

As reported in Slate magazine, “In the popular narrative, this is the beginning of American integration, a process that goes from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King to the Civil Rights Act and eventually to President Obama.

“But for as much as we share an integrated culture, millions of Americans—and blacks in particular—live in segregated worlds, a fact illustrated by the persistence and retrenchment of school segregation, as detailed in a new report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California–Los Angeles.

“Before considering the report, it’s worth taking a closer look at the process of school desegregation. Almost immediately after Brown, white Southerners met the decision with “massive resistance.” In Virginia, segregationist Democrats pushed sweeping educational changes to combat integration. In 1956, the Commission on Public Education—convened by Gov. Thomas Stanley—asked the General Assembly to repeal compulsory education, empower the governor to close public schools, and provide vouchers to parents to enroll their children in segregated private schools. In the next few years, whites would open “segregation academies” across the state, while closing public schools to block integration.

“Following Stanley’s lead, whites across the South worked to keep blacks out of their schools with rules, legislation, angry mobs, and outright violence. But it failed. Within the decade, new civil rights laws had enhanced federal power. By the end of the 1960s, the federal government was authorized to file suit against segregated school districts and work to dismantle them “root and branch.”

“As Nikole Hannah-Jones details for ProPublica, federal desegregation orders helped “break the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.” She continues, “In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade—fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools.” Continue reading “Separate and unequal”

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College Enrollment bottoming out

imgres-1The decline in overall college enrollment has slowed this spring, according to new data the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released today. And some details are emerging about the groups of students who are less likely to attend college in declining sectors.InsideHigher Ed reports that ‘Overall enrollment this spring is down 0.8 percent compared to a year ago. That slide follows two years of previous declines the clearinghouse identified. The loss of students peaked last spring with a 2.3 percent decrease.

“The clearinghouse data cover 96 percent of all enrollments in the United States. The nonprofit group conducts student verification and research services for colleges, which turn over their data voluntarily. The clearinghouse publishes national enrollment estimates every six months, breaking out numbers by sectors and states, as well as on students’ age groups, gender and part- or full-time status.

“With estimates from the current term, the clearinghouse gives a more timely view of enrollments than the U.S. Department of Education can with its data. However, the clearinghouse does not publicly release figures about individual institutions.
The overall trends in the latest report aren’t surprising. More students attend college during a recession, and an enrollment boom typically tapers off as the economy begins to rebound. Eventually enrollments stabilize and begin to climb again at a steadier rate.
This spring private, nonprofit colleges saw the biggest increase, with a 2 percent gain. At a time when some enrollment-driven private colleges have been struggling and many others fretting, those numbers may come as welcome news. Continue reading “College Enrollment bottoming out”

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Art, money, and labor

There are few modern relationships as fraught as the one between art and money. Are they mortal enemies, secret lovers or perfect soul mates? Is the bond between them a source of pride or shame, a marriage of convenience or something tawdrier?

As the New York Times reports, “The way we habitually think and talk about these matters betrays a deep and venerable ambivalence. On one hand, art is imagined to exist in a realm of value that lies beyond and beneath mere economic considerations. The old phrase “starving artist” gesturesimgres toward an image that is both romantic and pathetic, of a person too pure, and also just too impractical, to make it in the world. When that person ceases to starve, he or she can always be labeled a sellout. You’re not supposed to be in it for the money.

“On the other hand, money is now an important measure — maybe the supreme measure — of artistic accomplishment. Box office grosses have long since become part of the everyday language of cinephilia, as moviegoers absorb the conventional wisdom, once confined mainly to accountants and trade papers, about which movies are breaking out, breaking even or falling short. Multimillion-dollar sales of paintings by hot new or revered old artists are front-page news. To be a mainstream rapper is to have sold a lot of recordings on which you boast about how much money you have made selling your recordings.

“In the popular imagination, artists tend to exist either at the pinnacle of fame and luxury or in the depths of penury and obscurity — rarely in the middle, where most of the rest of us toil and dream. They are subject to admiration, envy, resentment and contempt, but it is odd how seldom their efforts are understood as work. Yes, it’s taken for granted that creating is hard, but also that it’s somehow fundamentally unserious. Schoolchildren may be encouraged (at least rhetorically) to pursue their passions and cultivate their talents, but as they grow up, they are warned away from artistic careers. This attitude, always an annoyance, is becoming a danger to the health of creativity itself. It may seem strange to say so, since we live at a time of cultural abundance and flowering amateurism, when the tools of creativity seem to be available to anyone with a laptop. But the elevation of the amateur over the professional trivializes artistic accomplishment and helps to undermine the already precarious living standards that artists have been able to enjoy. Continue reading “Art, money, and labor”

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Erasing your Google history

he European Union’s high court ruled Tuesday that users should have the opportunity to remove old, irrelevant and even embarrassing links from Google’s search engine.images But while the extent of the new mandate is unclear, it has already spurred questions about whether it might hamper free speech in Europe and abroad.

The European Court of Justice’s decision makes it so that, in some cases, users can request Google to remove particular links, such as newspaper articles or even legal documents, from search results. Rather than permanently erasing content, the webpages will still exist but instead will be much harder to find through Google. The EU’s decision reverses last year’s preliminary court opinion, which sided with Google, saying that the company wouldn’t have to remove links to comply with privacy laws. Other search engines, such as Yahoo, weren’t affected by the court’s decision.

But while Tuesday’s decision ends a years-long tug-of-war between Google and the EU over the Internet giant’s data collection practices, it raises practical and privacy concerns. “One of the unusual things about this case is that the [petitioned article] could stay up, but Google couldn’t link to it. [But] is it OK if Google linked to it from the U.S.? We don’t know yet,” Parker Higgins, an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist and spokesperson, told ThinkProgress. Continue reading “Erasing your Google history”

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Hereditary advantage in school

Americans don’t like cheaters. William C Durden writes in InsideHigher Ed that “When it comes to how we learn and what we’re able to do with our acquired knowledge, a game has been going on. And many will find themselves systematically locked out of opportunity.

This is not about students cheating on tests or principals downplaying ineffective teaching strategies. Nor is it about the latest argument concerning higher education — that college is too expensive and there’s no guarantee of gainful employment. It a national reckoning of how much we’re willing to tolerate regarding class, status and the suppression of economic mobility. This issue demands that we take responsibility for the way that our educational decisions play out in our lives and throughout our communities. Until we take ownership of these things, we will continue to play a fool’s game of winners and losers.

imagesFor the vast majority of Americans — myself included — a college education remains the key to an engaging, financially viable life. Nothing should be done to disrupt this trusted vehicle by zeroing in on the undergraduate degree solely as preparation for a first job whose “of-the-moment” skills and knowledge are likely be eclipsed in short order in a rapidly changing economy.

I am a first-generation college student. My father, while I was growing up ,was an assembly line worker making wooden boxes and a cook at a hospital. My mother did not work outside the home. Continue reading “Hereditary advantage in school”

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Monica who?

imagesEven before the re-emergence of Monica Lewinsky with Thursday’s Vanity Fair article offering her latest take on her affair with Bill Clinton and the ensuing constitutional crisis, stories about the world’s most famous intern had been hovering in the national news for months.

Lewinsky had become a subject of conversation again because of the ongoing debatewithin the Republican Party over how to treat President Clinton’s impeachment if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016. Back in February, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Monicagate was very much a live issue. Sen. Rand Paul, the supposed GOP youth savior in 2016, also views the Lewinsky affair as a rich line of re-inquiry, having called Bill Clinton a “serial philanderer” who displayed “predatory behavior.”

Karl Rove, meanwhile, said talk of anything impeachment-related would only make a potential GOP candidate look petty. Whether or not it’s wise to do so, some Republican operatives see a potential Hillary candidacy as an opportunity to reintroduce a new generation of voters to some of the more salacious aspects of the first Clinton presidency.

“A huge portion of the electorate that’s going to be her target don’t remember the Clinton administration at all,” said Tim Miller, executive director of the early 2016 super PAC America Rising, in a Talking Points Memo article published a day before Vanity Fair announced its Lewinsky story. “A lot of the negative stuff about the Clinton era has congealed into like a joke or a historical blip, but people don’t remember the details.” Miller, whose group had already begun looking for opposition research on Clinton last year, wants to make sure that these young voters don’t have a “a clouded vision, a nostalgic vision of the Clinton era.” (I reached out to Miller for this story, but he declined to comment.)

The idea of the GOP reintroducing Bill Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky to younger voters may seem pointless and potentially self-damaging. When you dig deeper, it becomes even dumber. More than any other emotion, the millennial generation that would be offered this introduction to the high crimes and misdemeanors of President Clinton are either bored by the story, or view it with the sort of nostalgia that Miller described.

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