Category: Academia

I can stop blogging about college admisions any time I want. Really. In one of the previous posts, commenter AO noted a New York Review of Books article on class issues in college admissions. here’s the article in question, a review of several recent books about how the current college admissions system favors the wealthy… Continue reading Class Issues in College Admissions

It’s weird how I get into ruts here. I’m not usually obsessed with the subject of college admissions, but it came up recently, and now there’s just one article after another about it (because, of course, it’s college admissions season). I’m getting a little tired of it, but not so tired that I want to… Continue reading College Admissions: Inside the Sausage Factory

Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test: In the 1930’s, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression… Continue reading More Problems with SAT Writing Test

The term is over, and I’ve handed in my grades, about which the less said the better. Which means a minor vacation of sorts, as I clean up a last few things before making a push to get some research lab stuff done during our paltry one-week spring break next week, before the start of… Continue reading I Drank What?

There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those students who meet their academic… Continue reading The College Lottery

One of the top players in college basketball this year was Texas freshman Kevin Durant, whose team lost over the weekend. Durant is 6’10”, and averaged something like 30 points a game from January on, so the automatic assumption is that he’s going to enter the NBA draft, where he would be one of the… Continue reading Leaving Early

Over at Backreaction, Sabine has posted a lengthy essay on the problems of treating scientific research in economic terms: I vividly recall the first thing my supervisor told me when I was an undergrad: “You have to learn how to sell yourself.” Since then I have repeatedly been given well meant career advises how to… Continue reading The “Marketplace of Ideas”?

There have been a few good posts recently on topics that I’ve discussed here a fair bit. I don’t really have anything new to say on either topic, though, nor do I have the energy to repeat myself, so I’ll just post the links: – Gordon Watts on the collapse of corporate research labs, based… Continue reading I Told You So