It's never too late

More than 70 years after a girl and a job got in the way of Dillard Griffin's degree, the Durham County man will take part in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's commencement this weekend.

Griffin, 92, enrolled at UNC in 1934 and was on track to graduate four years later. Fate then intervened and led him in another direction.

[...]

Griffin never told his children that he hadn't graduated, even as he put them through college. When his daughter learned his secret last year, she enrolled him in a correspondence course.

Because he's legally blind, he had his coursework projected onto a screen to make it large enough for him to read. He said he got three A's and two B's on his assignments.

When he picks up his business degree on Sunday, he plans to wear a T-shirt under his cap and gown declaring him 1938 class president of the UNC Procrastinators' Club.

Rougemont man to get UNC degree 75 years after enrolling (WRAL.com)

We never did this in my Civics class... too bad.

Seventh graders from the Ron Clark Academy perform "You Can Vote However You Like," a parody [of] TI's "Whatever You Like," at the Coca-Cola Leadership Summit in Atlanta, Georgia.

Seventh Graders Debate Obama vs McCain (YouTube)

Related:

• Ron Clark Academy
• "Whatever You Like" (TI)
  

So you showed up for four years and your tuition checks didn't bounce... okay...

Charles Murray:

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time (Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal op/ed)

Murray's proposed solution? Certification exams in various competencies, modeled on the CPA exam and similar professional licensure schemes, which wouldn't require a degree (or even a traditional college education) to sit for. You want to prep by taking online classes or just sitting in a public library and reading books? Fine!

I think the man has a good point here.

Scientific American: The secret to raising smart kids

Emphasize and praise effort and persistence, not ability:

• Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
• Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
• Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

Scientific American Mind: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids (December 2007)

Speech codes on campus

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) just introduced a novel way to publicize the restrictions on free speech and free thought that many schools impose on students.

You may already be familiar with the concept of speech codes, but you may not know about FIRE’s system for classifying the severity of those speech codes. Schools receive a “red light” rating if they have regulations that “substantially restrict” speech. Yellow light schools have regulations on the books that could be abused by administrators to restrict speech. And schools that do not restrict speech at all get “green light” ratings.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs in academia that fewer than 10% of all schools surveyed by FIRE have green light ratings. This means that over 90% of those schools have some administrative mechanism for restricting speech.

Brain Terminal: FIRE’s Web Widgets Highlight Students’ Limited Rights

Related: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

Dad's math book makes the grade

Some parents pitch in with homework when kids get bad grades in math. Nicholas Aggor literally wrote the book.

The Riverview engineer was so distressed when sons Samuel, 14, and Joshua, 13, brought home bad marks, he took it upon himself to rewrite their textbooks chapter by chapter.

Four years later, they are in advanced classes and the Ghana native's pet project has become a passion that's produced a math curriculum for grades kindergarten to nine -- 14 books in all. And soon, it may not be just his kids whose grades are improving.

Dad's math book makes the grade (The Detroit News, 20 July 2007)

Hat tip: deVille

Colby Nolan, MBA, CAT

In 2004, a housecat named Colby Nolan was awarded an "Executive MBA" by Texas-based Trinity Southern University. The cat belonged to a deputy attorney general looking into allegations of fraud by the school. The cat's application was originally for a Bachelor of Business Administration, but due to the cat's "qualifications" (including work experience in fast-food and as a paperboy) the school offered to upgrade the degree to an Executive MBA for an additional $100. As a result of this incident, the Pennsylvania attorney general has filed suit against the school.

Diploma Mills (Wikipedia article)

Little Asia On The Hill

"Affirmative action," in the university setting, has traditionally meant making places in incoming freshman classes for disadvantaged minorities who might not have the same GPAs or test scores as other applicants, the argument being that this is necessary to level the playing field, create balance, and ensure diversity in university admissions after years of de facto and de jure racism.

Now, circumstances are forcing educators to ask some uncomfortable questions, one of which is, in the name of affirmative action, is it now necessary to actually hold some overachieving minorities back?

Check out the stats from the University of California system:

The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.

The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.

But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.

In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).

Of course, no college admissions process is a pure meritocracy. If you're a good enough athlete applying to a school with a major sports program, basic literacy may not even be required of you, NCAA regulations notwithstanding; if you're a "legacy" (Mummy and/or Daddy went there before you), the university is more likely to admit you, with an eye on the family checkbook and the U's fundraising plans.

But the numbers in California (and elsewhere) speak for themselves; if you make college admissions meritocratic, then Asians will be admitted to the elite schools in disproportionate numbers, at the expense not only of minority groups traditionally viewed as being disadvantaged, but the presumably (by law) "advantaged" majority group as well:

Across the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges: in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.

And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.

Complex questions rarely have simple answers, but in this case, I think that the answer is actually pretty clear: admissions policies should be about ability and a track record of achievement and hard work, not your ethnic background; make college admissions completely race-neutral, and let the chips fall where they may.

And if that means that elite colleges have incoming classes that are 50% Asian (or even higher), that's fine: perhaps stripping away the "man behind the curtain" admissions manipulation will force us, as a culture, to confront some uncomfortable questions ourselves.

Stanford University psychology professor Hazel Markus thinks the reasons for Asian success are blindingly obvious:

As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”

And if you work hard and do well, you should get what's coming to you.

There are plenty of colleges and universities in this country (the vast majority of them, in fact) where second- or third-rate students can get themselves an education; no one has a right to a brand-name degree.

Times article referenced above: Little Asia On The Hill (New York Times, January 8, 2007)

MIT4free

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.

The cost? It's all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.

Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy," OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the universities aren't discouraging students from enrolling as students. Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for more.

How to go to MIT for free (Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 2007, via Yahoo! News)

Related: OpenCourseWare@MIT

Brown eyes good, blue eyes bad

Retired teacher Jane Elliott recalls a teaching experiment she ran with a third-grade class in an all-white school in rural Iowa, in 1968. The occasion was the assassination of Martin Luther King, and she was trying to answer her students' questions about racism.

Since I'm blue-eyed and most of the kids were blue-eyed, I first put blue-eyed people at the bottom of the hierarchy, giving them armbands and setting them apart from the brown-eyed and green-eyed kids. I told them the brown-eyed are the better people, cleaner and smarter. I wrote "melanin" on the blackboard and said it was what caused intelligence. The more you had, and the dark-eyed people had more, the smarter you were.

I told them blue-eyed people were stupid, that they sat around doing nothing, and if you gave them nice things, they wrecked them. I could feel gaps opening up in the classroom. I even said blue-eyed people had to drink from paper cups if they used the water fountain - and asked the kids why. One answered that the brown-eyed children might catch something from the blue-eyed.

Then one kid asked me: "How come you're the teacher then if you've got blue eyes?" Another piped up: "If she had brown eyes, she'd be principal or superintendent because they've both got brown eyes."...

...Years later, the now grown-up children tell me they never forgot the exercise.

But there's more. The first time I did the exercise there were seven dyslexic boys in the class, and four of them were brown-eyed. On the day the brown-eyed children were on top, they read words I knew they couldn't read and spelled words I knew they couldn't spell. I also watched the Lutheran minister's brilliant daughter fall to pieces because she just could not succeed on the day she had the wrong colour eyes. I watched the kids finding out that teachers lied to them about their abilities - and saw them decide that they were never going to live down to teachers' lies again. What stereotyping does to learning has already been studied elsewhere, but when it comes to race we don't apply it.

An unforgettable lesson, New Scientist, December 9, 2006 (subscription required)