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Category Archives: Education

Nation’s Top Colleges are Turning Our Kids into Zombies

31 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Politics, Social

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William Deresiewicz, … whose résumé includes two degrees from Columbia University and ten years of teaching at Yale, published an essay last week in The New Republic called “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Subtitle: “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.” Read more: http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/07/new-privilege-loudly-denouncing-privilege.html

“Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. Read more: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

See also:
~ An Incubator for An American Ruling Elite
~ Universities Ranked By Billionaire Alumni
~ Harvard Billionaire Machine

Student Loan Debt: Scale of Problem and its Main Sources

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Justice, Politics, Science, Social, Tech

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Members of Occupy Wall Street stage a pr

Economic Scale of the U.S. Student Loan Debt Problem
types of debt

Sources of Student Loan Debt:

costvstuitionv2

cost_of_education_1960-2015

text-book_prices_1970-2014

Social_sciences_main_source

Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. By Catherine Hill, Ph.D. Christianne Corbett Andresse St. Rose, Ed.D. “Just not interested”. Many girls and women report that they are not interested in science and engineering. In a 2009 poll of young people ages 8–17 by the American Society for Quality, 24 percent of boys but only 5 percent of girls said they were interested in an engineering career. Another recent poll found that 74 percent of college-bound boys ages 13–17 said that computer science or computing would be a good college major for them compared with 32 percent of their female peers (WGBH Education Foundation & Association for Computing Machinery, 2009). From early adolescence, girls express less interest in math or science careers than boys do (Lapan et al., 2000; Turner et al., 2008). Even girls and women who excel in mathematics often do not pursue STEM fields. In studies of high mathematics achievers, for example, women are more likely to secure degrees in the humanities, life sciences, and social sciences than in math, computer science, engineering, or the physical sciences; the reverse is true for men (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006)… Among first-year college students, women are much less likely than men to say that they intend to major in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). By graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field, and in some, such as physics, engineering, and computer science, the difference is dramatic, with women earning only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Women’s representation in science and engineering declines further.

File Apr 06, 1 19 54 AM

Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015 Population Characteristics By Camille L. Ryan and Kurt Bauman Current Population Reports. P20-578 March 2016:

File Apr 06, 1 18 31 AM

See also: College Majors Ranked by Lifetime Earnings

An Incubator for An American Ruling Elite

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Politics, Science, Social

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US_rukking_elite_edu_2

Source: “Investigating The World’s Rich And Powerful” by Jonathan Wai. Duke University

Gregory Douthat’s memoir of his four years in college, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, clarifies the above data in some more details: “I thought at the time, and still think now, that Harvard is … an incubator for an American ruling class that is smug, stratified, self-congratulatory, and intellectually adrift.”

See also:

  • The Harvard Billionaire Machine … billionaires attended an elite school because their parents were billionaires who “gave the school large gifts” or top level politicians (“political connections“)
  • Universities Ranked By Billionaire Alumni
  • Universities Ranked By Billionaire Alumni

    19 Monday May 2014

    Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Politics, Science, Social

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    Billionaire Rank University Billionaire Alumni Population Total Wealth of Billionaire Alumni ( $US billion)
    1 Harvard University 52 205
    2 University of Pennsylvania 28 112
    3 Stanford University 27 76
    4 New York University 17 68
    5 Columbia University 15 96
    6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 15 114
    7 Cornell University 14 35
    8 University of Southern California 14 32
    9 Yale University 13 77
    10 University of Cambridge 11 48
    Source: Wealth-X
    See also:  The Harvard Billionaire Machine

    The Harvard Billionaire Machine

    18 Sunday May 2014

    Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Politics, Science, Social

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    Jonathan Wai, a research scientist at Duke University and part of the school’s Talent Identification Program, looked at the world’s billionaires and global elite… The global elite—defined by media lists and culled from the attendees of the annual World Economic Forum gathering at Davos, Switzerland—are also highly educated. More than half of Davos attendees went to elite colleges… Harvard, the study suggested, is the top billionaire-making machine. Among U.S. billionaires, more than 1 in 10 went to the school, and globally about 1 in 20 billionaires went there.  As Wai told … : “I was surprised by the extent to which elite schools within each country tend to serve as influential filters for who ends up as a member of these groups of the global elite, specifically the overrepresentation of people who had attended Harvard University” … But wealthy children can also get into top universities in part because their parents attended or gave the school large gifts. Wai acknowledged that “some students attend an elite school with lower-than-typical test scores due to athletics, legacy status or political connections.
    ~ Billionaires are smarter, study says by Robert Frank.

    PS. Unfortunately, the above quoted article did not reveal what part of the billionaires attended an elite school because their parents were billionaires who “gave the school large gifts” or top level politicians (“political connections“). The below Jonathan Wai’s  data provide a clue about it:

    US_elite_education

     

     

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