Over at Inside Higher Ed they’ve got a piece titled “Massachusetts Should Tax Harvard” taking the position that most of the arguments against taxing extremely wealthy institutions of higher education are nonsense. You have to read all the way to the last paragraph to get to the one really interesting suggestion, though: Although I support […]
Category: Economics
Athletics and Alumni
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of the connection between college athletics and alumni giving, with some interesting findings: First, they find that male alumni who played on teams while they were undergraduates are more likely to donate more (to the athletics department and to the university as a whole) when the teams […]
Loan Forgiveness for Public Service
As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School’s loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil […]
Social Class and Educational Access
Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family’s money. Drawing […]
You’ve Got to Have Money to Learn Math
EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined ” Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children“: The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many […]
Dispatches from the Class War
Via Inside Higher Ed, the Boston Globe reports that the Pentagon opposes increasing GI Bill funding. Why? Because if they gave them full tuition, eligible soldiers might not re-enlist: Now, five years into the Iraq conflict, a movement is gathering steam in Washington to boost the payout of the GI Bill, to provide a true […]
Teaching Catch-22
Commenter “Matt” wrote a comment that pissed me off, and while it’s probably futile to take on union-bashing again, it does highlight a couple of the things that make this so frustrating. In response to several people observing that teaching is not the cushy 8-to-3, summers-off job that lots of people claim, he writes: Here […]
Social Class Tourism
Over at the Whatever, Scalzi has some acid comments for Prof. Will Barrat’s Social Class on Campus diagnostic tools, particularly the step forward exercise (I’ve linked the Web version– John refers to the Word file): [F]or the purposes of this exercise — showing indicators of privilege and class — this list is not actually useful, […]
The College Football Bowl Picture
Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad. The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football “championship” is so messed up. It […]
Student Sustainability Video
One of our senior physics majors has made a video promoting sustainability to students, and posted it on YouTube. I need to figure out the best way to link it from the department web page, but it occurs to me that I have this big Internet platform I can use to plug it: It’s a […]