Links for 12/20/10

Bob Samuels

failure to grasp basic math and accounting…

the university simply refuses to admit that undergraduates are now subsidizing everything else in the UC system, and the only solution the university finds to any problem is to increase student tuition and to cheapen the quality of undergraduate education by turning to online classes, reduced requirements, summer courses, and fast degrees…

the regents will not be able to maintain the fiscal health and educational quality of the university if they cannot do simple math, and if they spend the majority of the time blaming the state for all of the UC’s problems, nothing will ever change…

Mark J. Perry

Living the Good Life Working A 9-Month "Year": 14,000 Illinois High School Teachers Make +$100k

Kent Jenkins

The value of the education provided by private-sector colleges such as Corinthian cannot, and should not, be determined solely on the basis of loan-repayment data…

The value of the education obtained in a career college should rightfully be assessed based on job placement in the field for which the student was trained…

repayment and default rates are not closely related to the type of school a student attends, but rather to certain socioeconomic factors…

Steve Kolowich

Bollen is principal investigator for MESUR (Metrics for Scholarly Usage of Resources), a project founded in 2006 on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that is trying to shift how scholarly impact is measured away from citations — which he describes as inherently “backwards-looking … kind of like astronomers looking at a galaxy whose light reaches us 50 million years after the events that cause that light to happen” — and toward the sort of real-time usage metrics that Web-based consumption enables…

the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village…

Eigenfactor, a project based at the University of Washington, measures the influence of scholarly journals using the old-fashioned method of counting citations, but adds an algorithmic wrinkle… takes into account how many times that journal is cited by other journals that are themselves frequently cited…