Links for 2/16/11

Doug Lederman

the administration had to make "tough choices" to sustain the maximum grant at $5,550, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a call with reporters Monday.

The department's 2012 budget calls for ending a three-year experiment that allows students to qualify for two Pell Grants in a calendar year, to allow them to attend college year-round, and for eliminating the subsidy in which the government pays the interest on student loans for graduate students while they are in school. (The subsidy for undergraduate students would remain in place.)...

Jonathan Zimmerman

The cat is finally out of the bag about what our students are learning, and it isn't pretty…

But shame can be good, if it gets us to do the right thing. And in this case, I think it can…

More than half of the students in Arum and Roksa's sample had not taken a single class in the semester before they were surveyed that required a total of 20 pages of writing. That's not a misprint; it's a scandal…

So how can we change any of that?...
a peer—ideally, a colleague in the same department or division—would take each of those professors out for coffee, inform them about the below-average scores, and offer to help.
Before you start scoffing, you should know that the "cup-of-coffee method" has already been tried with physicians, and it works…

Chad Aldeman

Tenure was granted by the HR Department as breezily as sick days were accumulated or paychecks were mailed out...

Russell K. Nieli

Many of us are conflicted on the legacy issue. The case against legacy preferences presented by people like Kahlenberg, Golden, and Peter Sacks tugs at our meritocratic heart strings, but our pragmatic sense pulls in a different direction. There is something unseemly about lowering admissions standards to a highly competitive college because one's parents attended the college or because you have a billionaire father likely to make a seven-figure donation if you are admitted. In much of the rest of the world the American practice of granting preferences to the children of alumni is seen as indistinguishable from bribery.

But in those same places, colleges and universities are usually state-funded and don't have to go hat in hand looking for private money. Corrupt as the practice of legacy and wealthy donor preference clearly is, it may be one of those defensible corruptions that should be retained primarily because much good comes out of it and the alternatives, perhaps involving more state funding, are probably worse…

Megan McArdle

So my post on the liberal slant in academia has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments…