April 28, 2015

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Kate Bachelder, writing in the WSJ, interviews Mitch Daniels who says where kids go to college is not an important as many believe. Daniels also has ideas about how colleges could do a better job of serving their customers.

With acceptance letters in hand, millions of high-schools seniors ruminating over where to attend college—and their parents who are panicked that their kid might pick the place with the best climbing wall—should all take a breath: It doesn’t much matter where you go to college.

What matters is “how you go,” says Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana. He then lays out the results of the Gallup-Purdue Index, a national survey of 30,000 college graduates that was first released last year. The survey attempts to quantify not only what graduates earn but also how well they are navigating adult life.

A mere 39% of college graduates report feeling engaged with their work, and in that group as many hail from top-100 schools as don’t. The three most important contributions that college makes to a sense of workplace thriving after graduation: Having one professor who made you excited about learning, feeling as though teachers cared about you, and working with a mentor. Graduates who checked those boxes were more than twice as likely to sense they are flourishing at work.

But only 14% of those surveyed said they had hit that trifecta in college. Other positive factors from undergraduate experience: working on a long-term project, having an internship and participating in extracurricular activities. Where graduates went to college barely registered as a predictor of job satisfaction. …

… soon after Mr. Daniels arrived at Purdue. His first order of business: freeze tuition.

“I had a sense, first of all, it seemed like the right thing to do. Not to skip over that. But secondly that we probably could do it without great difficulty,” he says. For decades college tuition has outpaced inflation, forcing students to increase their borrowing, but next year’s Purdue seniors will have never seen a tuition increase.

“I thought this whole process—it’s sort of like a bubble, and people are using that term—just couldn’t go on much further, and so why not get off the escalator before it broke,” he says.

Not many colleges have followed, and Mr. Daniels has a few theories about why. “Corporate boards 15 years ago or so were roundly and rightly criticized for being too compliant with the desires of management. If this was true of corporate boards, I think it’s really been true of a lot of college boards and trustees,” he says. “They have such an affection for dear old alma mater, love those 50-yard-line seats, ‘Whatever you want to do, Mr. President.’ And so it’s been observed a long time that colleges will spend everything they can get their hands on, in the absence of either market pressure or stewardship by a strong-minded board.” …

 

 

WSJ Editors write on the colleges that were ruined by the governments of California and the US.

It’s good that Education Department regulators don’t oversee drone strikes. Behold how DoE’s blunderbuss assault on the for-profit Corinthian Colleges has harmed thousands of students and employees.

On Monday the Santa Ana-based for-profit shut down its remaining 28 schools, which no buyer would purchase amid the government’s regulatory ambush. The closure displaces 16,000 or so students—many mere months away from graduation—and 2,500 workers.

Last summer the Education Department began to drive Corinthian out of business by choking off federal student aid for supposedly stonewalling exhaustive document requests. The Department claimed to be investigating whether Corinthian misrepresented job placement rates as California Attorney General Kamala Harris alleged in a lawsuit.

Note that the federal government doesn’t specify how for-profits calculate their job placement rates. States and accrediting agencies have disparate and often vague rules, which notably don’t apply to nonprofit and public colleges.  …

 

 

Jesse Cole asks what a college degree might be worth today if English majors have no requirement to study Shakespeare.

‘There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America, recalling his travels across the country in the early 19th century and suggesting the scope of the Bard’s influence. From the log cabins of our young republic to the classrooms of contemporary China, where he is known as Shashibiya, Shakespeare has been arguably the most read writer in the English language. He is also certainly the most translated. His work has been rendered in Zulu, Mandarin, even Klingon.

Why, then, is he vanishing from the curricula of America’s colleges?

A new study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveals, depressingly, that only four of the nation’s top colleges and universities require a Shakespeare course, even for English majors. ACTA, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C., that encourages college trustees to act on behalf of academic freedom and excellence, surveyed U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 national universities and top 25 liberal-arts colleges. Of the former, only Harvard (the lone Ivy League institution to make the cut) and the University of California–Los Angeles require English majors to study Shakespeare. Of the latter, only WellesleyCollege and the United StatesNavalAcademy do. …

 

 

And Kevin Williamson writes on campus swastikas.

When tyranny arrives on these shores, it isn’t going to start off looking like something out of George Orwell — it’s going to look a lot like college, which is why the sort of people who twice made Barack Obama president of these United States will welcome it.

GeorgeWashingtonUniversity (“the Harvard of safety schools,” as alumnus Dan Foster calls it) has a swastika problem. This goes back a ways. In 2007, a Jewish student, Sarah Marshak, reported that her dorm-room door had been defaced with swastikas, and she complained that the university was doing too little to investigate. But the university was in fact investigating thoroughly — it had, ridiculously enough, gone as far as consulting the FBI — and its sneakily hidden surveillance cameras recorded the vandal in action.

No points for guessing that the malefactor was Sarah Marshak.

Recently, somebody drew swastikas on the wall of a GWU dormitory. Whether that is the work of another hoax artist or a genuine free-range national-socialist graffitist is unknown, but the school’s students have an unproud history of faking hate crimes. A group of left-wing students some years back drew up a phony anti-Muslim flier that was falsely attributed to a conservative group, the Young America’s Foundation, in an attempt to smear the organization as racist. …

 

 

Washington Post reports on how barbers are helping prevent colon cancer.

There are  26 barbers and stylists at The Shop in Hyattsville, Md. Between them, they cut the hair of more than 100 people each day. That’s around 600 people each week, 31,000 heads each year.

Over the last two years, 29 of  those customers received a colonoscopy as a direct result of conversations they had with their barbers at The Shop.  One of those people, says owner Fredie Spry, was already showing symptoms of colon cancer and is now getting treated.  Many more of Spry’s African-American clients  learned that the cancer is one of the few that are preventable and — given blacks’ higher-than-average risk for the disease– they should consider getting a first colonoscopy at 45.

“It makes me feel like I’m giving back to the community,” said Spry, who opened The Shop in 2001. “In life, you’re either helping or hurting. You’re part of the problem or the solution.”

The Shop was the first establishment to implement University of Maryland’s Health In-Reach and Research Initiative (HAIR)—a one-of-a-kind outreach program that trains barbers to teach their clients about colorectal cancer and measures, like a colonoscopy, that can prevent it. …