I'm watching a show from fifteen years ago that touts PDAs and "electronic mail." I feel like it was a bit behind (probably intentionally), but still, that wasn't very long ago.
52 thoughts on “May 16, 2014: It Doesn’t Take Long”
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Tonight I'm planning to play my first ever LIVE game of Werewolf at the Geekway to the West convention down in STL. I've played a handful of Werewolf games in my life, but they've always been in an online capacity. I'm looking forward to seeing how this works in real life.
I'll bring my palm pilot so that I can send electronic mail throughout the convention.
Heh, nice callback.
History shows again and again
How nature points out the folly of men...
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee." ...
not the reply I was looking for, but I'll allow it. I need closure, though
It's been GOOD TO KNOW YAH!!!
???
closure on MY lyrics, please
that works.
I'm thinking that if you want to test your bullet proof vest you should test it while not wearing it. The first time at least. Just to be on the safe side.
Cubs decide to commemorate Lindbergh visiting Comiskey Park in a mural at Wrigley Field.
One other tidbit about Lindbergh:
I kind of like the idea of celebrating great feats this aggressively.
That is something else.
Students who come from more affluent backgrounds aren't just having more success on standardized tests. According to the New York Times Magazine's edition for this weekend, a student's socio-economic background is a major factor in whether they graduate from their four-year institution:
None of this should be particularly surprising. Low-income kids, on average, have a much thinner margin for error, both financially and in terms of general support networks. Poor kids are much more likely to go to large public institutions, particularly less-prestigious, large, public institutions. These schools often lack the support infrastructures that can be found at fancy-pants schools. And fancy-pants schools are invested in getting their kids to graduate (and graduate on time) in ways that public institutions are not.
Case in point: the California State University system has tremendous difficulties in getting its students to graduate on time, and those reasons are often institutional (kids can't gain access to the classes they need to complete their majors) not the fault of the kid, per se. Dragging out the degree-completion process differentially affects poorer students because financial aid does NOT cover the full cost of attending college. You still gotta pay rent and eat and get to class (most of these public institutions lack the dorm space to house even a majority of students).
But notice as well that "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" is waay different from "almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree." That tells me that a lot more is going on here.
[also, something is seriously off about that quote. Look at "The Graduation Gap" figure; for top-income-quartile kids in the highest SAT score range, graduation is only 82 pct. I seriously doubt that you can get to the cited 90 pct degree attainment even if you extend the time frame to age-30 for the quartile, given that only 2/3 of the kids in the 1,000-1,200 SAT score range make it by age-24. But maybe I misunderstand the densities and the odds of completion beyond age-24 for these kids]
I would guess that lower-income students would also skew a bit older in graduation age (also time to degree as taking semesters/years off to work is a common occurrence). I know that at my institution that serves a lot of low-income students, I was about the 4th or 5th oldest person in the sophomore level class I taught this year.
Students from poor and working class backgrounds also make up a higher percentage of transfer students at my institution (and others, I expect).
There certainly is a good deal more going on, but I think the point is largely the same. "Four-year degree" is terribly imprecise language for referring to a bachelor's degree, as time-to-degree is not consistent across all majors (or institutions). I think the average degree program at my institution is something like 4.15 years. "Four-year degree" may be a way of talking about a bachelor's degree obtained within four years, but most people don't make the mental distinction, I think.
Students don't graduate "on time" for all kinds of reasons. I'm somewhat resistant to the expectation that students ought to graduate in exactly four years or eight semesters, since that essentially turns higher education into an experience more centered on acquiring a credential than exploring ideas & the world and making personal growth in academic and non-academic realms of life. But I do recognize that all that exploring and growing comes at an ever-increasing cost, and that our society has essentially structured itself in a way that precludes many (most?) folks who don't hold a four year degree from securing a work that provides them with the means (wage & benefits) to create a decent life for themselves. A higher-ed system that is steadily moving away from conferring bachelor's degrees in four years is a system that is stacking the deck even more against students trying to work their way up from poor and working class backgrounds into the somewhat more secure jobs one can access with a bachelor's degree. Students from more affluent backgrounds have the luxury of the financial security/support that allows them to take that additional semester or two (or three) to complete their degrees.
True, but I think the data also shows that students from more affluent backgrounds complete their degrees more quickly, on average. They (1) are much more likely to attend institutions that make it likely that they can do so; and (2) they are much less likely to take low credit loads or take time off along the way.
It's called a "4-year degree" because the programs are designed to be completed in 4 years by full-time students. Liberal arts schools, as a rule, are pretty adamant about on-time completion (where on-time refers to time-in-residence).
Thanks for the link, CH. It was a really interesting, persuasive piece, despite my complaints about the 90 pct issue.
This may have been the intent at one point, but it seems that this has eroded somewhat in practice. (That is, the degree program may be designed to be completed in four years, but the design may be impractical in the real world.) Looking at my institution's data on time-to-degree, I'm seeing all kinds of programs – liberal arts, hard sciences, engineering – exceeding that four year threshold by a substantial margin. Simply put, it's not just theater, gender & women's studies, and music education programs that are taking students longer than four years to complete, but also most of the engineering programs, botany, agronomy, forest science...
There are other factors that can influence these – for example, studying abroad seems to be more common than it once was (another "normal" college experience out of reach of many poor & working class students). But I think the degree plans themselves are becoming harder for students to navigate as programs build in more flexibility and opportunity for customization (something the market has been demanding).
Having only attended a big public institution, I have little perspective on how liberal arts schools like Carleton & Colorado College are addressing the four-year degree/on-time completion thing. They may be more successful, but they're also likely much less representative of the typical American student's higher ed experience.
Dr. Chop's institution, a private liberal arts college, is having tremendous trouble graduating students 'on time'. Part of the problem is that they've tacked on an additional ~24* credits if the student chooses biology or chemistry as a degree path. The level of personal attention, and direct contact with professors, students receive in these programs has led to a very high rate of acceptance to medical and pharmacy schools. The problem being that students are all but required to take summer classes in order to graduate on time. The other issue is that the administration is sharpening the knife to cut out large portions of the core in order to increase on time graduation. So much for the liberal or the arts portion of the education.
*i can't remember if the actual number of additional credits is 24 or 27.
they've tacked on an additional ~24* credits if the student chooses biology or chemistry as a degree path.
Yuck. I was involved this year in the chemistry program cutting its "long major" by 12 credits (our choice, it needed to be done, I don't think anything removed will be missed). Even with that, a chem major who comes into college with no credits and doesn't test out of our proficiency requirements would have 117 of their 120 credits filled by required courses.
There is, I think, a significant divide between "selective" privates (and certain, selective publics) on the one hand, and everyone else, related to endowments and per-pupil support budgets.
If you don't have the staff and physical plant to offer slots to all of your freshman students for freshman-level courses, all of your sophomore students for sophomore-level courses, etc., you are going to have a cascading effect on graduation rates. A friend of mine, who is a dean at Sac State, has lamented these facts to me about their campus. But the issues are admittedly complex: recessions tend to slow down time-to-degree for obvious reasons of employability; the state has constrained the CSU budget in ways that have made it more difficult for students to gain slots in classrooms, financial aid, college readiness, etc.
Sac State has reported a 10 pct 4-year graduation rate and a 41 pct 6-year graduation rate. These are not good numbers.
btw, the National Center for Education Statistics' most recent data shows
I've actually spent the last 2 days coming up with 4-year plans for the various chem degrees we offer here that the department will share with the advising staff. For a lot of science majors it takes serious planning and lots of early success to accomplish what you need to in four years. For that reason and others, at my institution (which is far from the norm and serves a very different demographic than most universities) the "4-year degree" is mostly a pipe dream (at last count, our 4-year graduation rate was 3%, a number the president termed "a concern").
I finished in 3.5 years, but that's with 1 year of PSEO credit. So I actually went one semester longer than I had intended, and I couldn't have finished any sooner unless I had been willing to do 20 credits one semester.
Heh. I did something like 18 quarter-hours one quarter at Spamtown CC (including two lab courses). I would not recommend that kind of load to anyone.
My last year of college I had to carry 20 credits one quarter to fit in required courses. It was a lot of work, but it was all mass comm and English courses so not that hard.
In my case, I was digging out of an academic hole from my freshman year at the Alma Mater. So I was (re-)taking the calculus sequence, along side the chemistry sequence and the physics sequence, plus (re-)taking German, along with some other stuff, and participating on the basketball team (notice: I did not say "playing basketball" 😉
I spent a lot of time studying that year....
Graduating in 3.5 years should be a bigger deal than it is. My wife and I both managed it, and it was huge for us since it gave us a jump on finding jobs and becoming "productive" citizens.
My freshman year I took 16 credits each semester. I was bored, and it showed- I skipped a ton of classes and had a sub-3.0 GPA.
So the next year, I changed my major from Wildlife and Fisheries to Biology and took 19 credits the first semester. That worked so well that I took 24 credits the second semester (after my adviser signed off on it-evidently anything over 20 needs adviser approval to make sure the student isn't getting over-extended). Granted, lots of biology and chemistry courses with the extra credit tacked on for the lab sessions, but still, it was a lot. I toned it down to 21 and 20 for my junior year, then took 22 credits for the first semester of senior year so I could graduate that December.
Well, I did it in 10 semesters (plus a summer course) over six years! I ended up with way more credits than necessary, though I think I only had two superfluous classes.
Getting done early does definitely depend on your degree and class availablility- at SDSU, the engineers and computer science students couldn't always get into the classes they needed since those were two of the more popular majors. I was lucky enough to get into all the courses I needed, though it did take some extra planning and an understanding adviser.
One of my son's friends went to UCLA planning to major in biochem or some such. She could not gain entry into certain intro-level courses (Because Impactment) as a freshman, which threw her entire schedule off for the major. I think she's now majoring in a social science because of it.
Philosofette is pursuing a masters in education + teaching license right now. She had to force her way into a class last semester, or else her 2 year program designed for people returning to school would have stretched to 4 years. Part of the problem is the limits on class size and frequency of offerings (this one was offered once per year, to twenty students max, and is required for undergrad and masters programs for humanities teaching programs). The other part is the unwillingness of the school to look critically at their requirements. There is no reason some who took a theater course should need a performance of literature class. Plus public speaking and another speech class. I don't know if that's a universal problem, but it clearly is at Mankato.
Dr. Chop disagrees, especially if the person is intending on teaching literature. Readers theater is significantly different than performance, and an exceptionally valuable practical teaching tool in the classroom.
I don't suggest that they're the same (or that it won't be a valuable tool), but to require both is, I think, illustrative of the problem, wherein requirements are added to cirriculum because two related topics are slightly different, and students are left holding the bag. Infinitely parsing new specialties and categories and such is something academia does well. Figuring out how to weight those things? My experience says "not so much." Even if it will be a valuable tool in the future, requiring a four-credit performance of lit class is not reasonable when the students also take drama. There are any number of ways to divide the topics and cover both. Full course requirements are not the best way to do that.
I guess you and I disagree on how different those courses are. I think lumping drama into lit or vice versa short changes one for the other. I'll further add that creating hybrid courses is an ideal way for an administration to reduce staff. I get that your beef is with the sequencing of requirements, and the scheduling of courses once a year, but that is much more about the funding priorities of the university and the curriculum development committee.
Of course the university would counter that if the courses were more popular they would offer them more often. Such is life in the modern consumer driven corporate university system.
I guess we do disagree - or at least on the weight that should be given. I'd argue that there are probably more differences between Professor A's British Literature before 1800 and Professor B's British Literature before 1800 then there are between Drama and Performance of Lit.
Students have a limited amount of time and resources. Opportunity costs are steep in course selection. Requiring both Drama and Performance of Lit necessitates shortchanging something else. I don't see the differences between the two classes as weighty enough to deny a student a different course selection.
That makes me wonder how much lifetime income potential she could be losing because she couldn't get the major she wanted.
Probably a lot, but conditioned on her ability to perform well in that preferred major, I suppose. So, probabilistically a lot. 😉
basically, by overly limiting resources in these public schools, we as a society are picking economic winners and losers among students.
Well, at least we're picking winners and losers based on the most important criterion -- $$$!!!
Calterra just ruined my day. What's the point of anything?
We. Are. Doomed.
Milkomeda? Old news. And worrying about that is like the Cleveland Spiders worrying about how to handle the DH.
I don't know about you, but I planned on living forever. Now that is ruined.
Could hang out above the galactic disc for a few eons for the collision to subside.
I read that book. what was the title??? hmmm
If you planned on living forever, save your worrying for cosmic entropy.
Moar science. Kind of.