Category: Education

Chinese College Graduates Are Underemployed “Ant Tribe” in Big Cities

(p. A1) BEIJING — Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.

Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.
Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced (p. A12) 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.
It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.
“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”
. . .
Chinese sociologists have come up with a new term for educated young people who move in search of work like Ms. Liu: the ant tribe. It is a reference to their immense numbers — at least 100,000 in Beijing alone — and to the fact that they often settle into crowded neighborhoods, toiling for wages that would give even low-paid factory workers pause.
“Like ants, they gather in colonies, sometimes underground in basements, and work long and hard,” said Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
. . .
A fellow Datong University graduate, Yuan Lei, threw the first wet blanket over the exuberance of Ms. Liu, Mr. Li and three friends not long after their July arrival in Beijing. Mr. Yuan had arrived several months earlier for an internship but was still jobless.
“If you’re not the son of an official or you don’t come from money, life is going to be bitter,” he told them over bowls of 90-cent noodles, their first meal in the capital.
. . .
In the end, Mr. Li and his friends settled for sales jobs with an instant noodle company. The starting salary, a low $180 a month, turned out to be partly contingent on meeting ambitious sales figures. Wearing purple golf shirts with the words “Lao Yun Pickled Vegetable Beef Noodles,” they worked 12-hour days, returning home after dark to a meal of instant noodles.
. . .
Mr. Li worried aloud whether he would be able to marry his high school sweetheart, who had accompanied him here, if he could not earn enough money to buy a home. Such concerns are rampant among young Chinese men, who have been squeezed by skyrocketing real estate prices and a culture that demands that a groom provide an apartment for his bride. “I’m giving myself two years,” he said, his voice trailing off.
By November, the pressure had taken its toll on two of the others, including the irrepressible Liu Yang. After quitting the noodle company and finding no other job, she gave up and returned home.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “China’s Army of Graduates Is Struggling.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., December 12, 2010): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 11, 2010 and has the title “China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs.”)

Some New York Public School Teachers Still Well Paid to Do Busy Work

(p. A1) For her first assignment of the school year, Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special education teacher whom the city is trying to fire, sat around education offices in Lower Manhattan for two weeks, waiting to be told what to do.

For her second assignment, she was sent to a district office in the Bronx and told to hand out language exams to anyone who came to pick them up. Few did.

Now, Ms. Gill reports to a cubicle in Downtown Brooklyn with a broken computer and waits for it to be fixed. Periodically, her supervisor comes by to tell her she is still working on the problem. It has been this way since Oct. 8.

“I have no projects to do, so I sit there until 2:50 p.m. — that’s six hours and 50 minutes,” the official length of the teacher workday, she said. “And then I swipe out.”

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg closed the notorious reassignment centers known as rubber rooms this year, he and the city’s teachers’ union announced triumphantly that one of the most obvious sources of (p. A3) waste in the school system — $30 million a year in salaries being paid to educators caught up in the glacial legal process required to fire them — was no more.

No longer would hundreds of teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, like Ms. Gill, clock in and out of trailers or windowless rooms for years, doing nothing more than snoozing or reading newspapers, griping or teaching one another tai chi. Instead, their cases would be sped up, and in the meantime they would be put to work.

While hundreds of teachers have had their cases resolved, for many of those still waiting, the definition of “work” has turned out to be a loose one. Some are now doing basic tasks, like light filing, paper-clipping, tracking down student information on a computer or using 25-foot tape measures to determine the dimensions of entire school buildings. Others sit without work in unadorned cubicles or at out-of-the-way conference tables.

For the full story, see:
SHARON OTTERMAN. “For New York, Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.” The New York Times (Weds., December 8, 2010): A1 & A3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 7, 2010 and has the title “New York Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.”)

Study Hard to Study Well

(p. D6) In a recent study published in the journal Cognition, psychologists at Princeton and Indiana University had 28 men and women read about three species of aliens, each of which had seven characteristics, like “has blue eyes,” and “eats flower petals and pollen.” Half the participants studied the text in 16-point Arial font, and the other half in 12-point Comic Sans MS or 12-point Bodoni MT, both of which are relatively unfamiliar and harder for the brain to process.
After a short break, the participants took an exam, and those who had studied in the harder-to-read fonts outperformed the others on the test, 85.5 percent to 72.8 percent, on average.
To test the approach in the classroom, the researchers conducted a large experiment involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes — particularly in physics.
“The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”
Then again, so will raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.

For the full story, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “MIND; Come On, I Thought I Knew That!” The New York Times (Tues., April 19, 2011): D5-D6.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated April 18, 2011.)

The forthcoming article that is discussed in the quotes above, is:
Diemand-Yauman, Connor, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka B. Vaughan. “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes.” Cognition (2010).

To Burst Higher Ed Bubble, Peter Thiel Pays Students to Drop Out

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“Peter Thiel.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B4) Parents, do you hope that your children have the chance to become like Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor and hedge fund manager? If so, Mr. Thiel suggests that you encourage them to drop out of school. In fact, he will help by paying them to do it.

On Wednesday, the Thiel Foundation, funded by Mr. Thiel, announced the first group of Thiel Fellows, 24 people under 20 who have agreed to drop out of school in exchange for a $100,000 grant and mentorship to start a tech company.
More than 400 people applied. The winners include Laura Deming, 17, who is developing antiaging therapies; Faheem Zaman, 18, who is building mobile payment systems for developing countries; and John Burnham, 18, who is working on extracting minerals from asteroids and comets.
. . .
Mr. Thiel, a contrarian investor and libertarian known for his controversial views, knows that suggesting that education is not always worth it strikes at the core of many Americans’ beliefs. But that is exactly why is he doing it.
“We’re not saying that everybody should drop out of college,” he said. The fellows agree to stop getting a formal education for two years but can always go back to school. The problem, he said, is that “in our society the default assumption is that everybody has to go to college.”
“I believe you have a bubble whenever you have something that’s overvalued and intensely believed,” Mr. Thiel said. “In education, you have this clear price escalation without incredible improvement in the product. At the same time you have this incredible intensity of belief that this is what people have to do. In that way it seems very similar in some ways to the housing bubble and the tech bubble.”
. . .
“What I really liked about this program is it’s giving a lot of people who maybe wouldn’t get into Harvard an opportunity to participate in something just as selective and just as valuable and just as educational,” Mr. Burnham said. “It’s giving them that opportunity even though their personalities and characters don’t quite fit the academic mold.”
His father, Stephen Burnham, said the decision for his son to skip college, at least for now, was uncontroversial.
“There’s a lot of other stuff that you get in college and I would say that would be useful for John,” he said. “But I would say in four years there’s a big opportunity cost there if you could be out starting your career doing something that could change the world.”

For the full story, see:
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER. “Changing the World by Dropping Out.” The New York Times (Mon., May 30, 2011): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 25 (sic), 2011, has the title “Want Success in Silicon Valley? Drop Out of School,” and is longer than the published version. Most of what is quoted above appears in both the published and online versions, but some (most notably the paragraph on the education bubble and the quotes from Stephen Burnham) appear only in the online verison.)

To Teach the Truth, the Best Teachers Must Become “Canny Outlaws”

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Source of book image: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Images/news/practical_wisdom.jpg

(p. 170) Walking into Mr. Drew’s economics class, researchers might have interrupted a board meeting of the student-run start-up company that was at the heart of his course. Drawing on his own experience in industry, Mr. Drew taught students economic principles in a way that made sense to them because they were researching
potential products they would actually sell (a mug with the school logo; a T-shirt designed by a student graphics team). They were conducting market surveys, accumulating capital, making decisions about the scale of investment, the risk, the profits.
. . .
In Houston. the magnet schools were forced to reorganize to prepare for the coming White-Perot reforms. McNeil changed her study. The new question was: How would these teachers cope with a curriculum that was test-driven?
. . .
Mr. Drew’s economics class did not conform to the proficiency sequence and he had to drop the course, except as an elective.
. . .
The paperwork required by such new requirements–to assure the bureaucracy that teachers were teaching by the rules–discouraged individualized time spent with students and robbed time previously devoted to planning and assessing lessons. The requirements created the same kind of time bind Wong observed when such requirements were imposed on military trainers. (p. 171) And, as in the case of the new military training model, the new requirements discouraged flexibility, adaptability, and creativity.
McNeil found that many of the experienced teachers fought back. They became canny outlaws, or creative saboteurs, dodging the “law,” finding ways to cover the “proficiencies” with great efficiency and squirreling away time to sneak real education back in at the margins of the standardized system, sometimes even conspiring with their students or teaching them how to “game” the system. Mr. Drew taught his students that economic cycles vary in length and intensity, but in the test prep period, he told them to forget this because the official answer was that each cycle lasts eighteen months. There was a danger that students who learned to look beyond the obvious, to ask “what if,” to look for the exceptions to the rules, would do badly on the tests.
. . .
The ability of wise teachers to operate as canny outlaws is most seriously constrained when a highly scripted curriculum comes riding into town on the heels of high-stakes standardized tests. By prescribing, step by step, what to say and do each day to prepare students for these tests, such lockstep curricula pose a serious challenge to professional discretion. Yet even under these adverse conditions, in many schools there are canny
outlaws who find ways to avoid being channeled.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The McNeil book mentioned above is:
Linda, McNeil. Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing, Critical Social Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000.

The Wong report mentioned above is:
Wong, Leonard. “Stifled Innovation? Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Today.” Strategic Studies Institute Monograph, April 1, 2002.

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Source of book image: http://i43.tower.com/images/mm101682007/contradictions-school-reform-educational-costs-standardized-testing-linda-m-mcneil-paperback-cover-art.jpg

College Does Not Improve Thinking or Writing for 36% of Graduates

(p. 10) In a typical semester, . . . , 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.
. . .
Too many institutions, . . . , rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk.

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD ARUM and JOSIPA ROKSA. “Your So-Called Education.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., May 15, 2011): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 14, 2011.)

Arum and Roska’s book is:
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

“A Dart-Throwing Chimpanzee” Predicts as Well as “Experts”

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The image is of the Canadian edition, which has a different subtitle than the American edition cited below. Source of book image: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qGSiMLu6NXM/TTWIQkcllmI/AAAAAAAADEI/qD2yo1rxnL0/s1600/Future%2BBabble.jpg

(p. C6) How bad are expert predictions? Almost predictably bad. In 2005, Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published the results of a magisterial 20-year analysis of 27,450 judgments about the future from 284 experts. He discovered that the experts, in aggregate, did little better, and sometimes considerably worse, than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

While Mr. Tetlock guaranteed anonymity to get his experts to reveal how useless they were, Mr. Gardner names names. In the late 1960s, he notes, the political scientist Andrew Hacker predicted that race relations in America would soon get so bad that they would lead to the “dynamiting of bridges and water mains” and the “assassinating of public officials and private luminaries.” In the early 1970s, Richard Falk, at Princeton, imagined that by the 1990s we would be living in a world dominated by “the politics of catastrophe.” In the mid-1970s, Daniel Bell and other analysts assumed that high levels of inflation were, as Mr. Gardner puts it, “here to stay.” (In fact, inflation cooled off in the early 1980s and has stayed low for decades.) In the early 1990s, Lester Thurow, the MIT economist, was one of the experts who predicted that Japan would dominate the 21st century, though he noted that Europe had a chance, too.
The high priest of erroneous prediction is, of course, Paul Ehrlich, who, though a respected entomologist, turned into an end-of-the-worlder with “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The End of Affluence” (1974). In the latter book he wrote: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Now 77, Mr. Ehrlich is “a gregarious and delightful man, a natural performer,” Mr. Gardner reports, thereby tapping into the sources of his success in the face of repeated failure: Never admit mistakes, never sound doubtful. As Mr. Gardner shows in his survey of expert prediction-making, the more you sound like you know what you are talking about, the more people will believe you.

For the full review, see:
TREVOR BUTTERWORTH. “Prophets of Error.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., APRIL 30, 2011): C6.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated APRIL 30, 2011.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Gardner, Dan. Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. New York: Dutton Adult, 2011.

The important Tetlock book mentioned, is:
Tetlock, Philip E. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Nearly Half of College Students Learn Nothing in First Two Years

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Source of book image: http://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/academically-adrift.jpg

(p. D9) Andrew Carnegie didn’t think much of college. More than a century ago, he looked around at the men commanding the industries of the day and found that few had wasted their time lollygagging on a campus quad. “The almost total absence of the graduate from high positions in the business world,” he wrote in “The Empire of Business,” “seems to justify the conclusion that college education, as it exists, is fatal to success in that domain.”

. . .
. . . , as the reward for the collegiate credential has been going up, what goes into getting that degree has been going down. So find sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book “Academically Adrift” (University of Chicago Press). Institutions of higher learning are “focused more on social than academic experiences,” they write. “Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing.” More than a third of students do less than five hours of studying a week–and these shirkers end up, on average, earning B’s.
Ms. Roksa, who teaches at University of Virginia, and Mr. Arum, a professor at New York University, mined data from thousands of sophomores who retook a learning assessment test they had first been given when they arrived at college. Nearly half the students showed no sign of intellectual progress after two years of undergraduate endeavor.
. . .
What would Mr. Carnegie have thought of it? “While the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far-distant past,” he wrote, “or trying to master languages which are dead…the future captain of industry is hotly engaged in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge required for his future triumphs.” Mr. Carnegie may have thought the knowledge gained at college was “adapted for life upon another planet,” but he did expect that the students were gathering some sort of knowledge. Shouldn’t parents footing the massive tab for tuition be able to expect the same?

For the full commentary, see:
ERIC FELTEN. “POSTMODERN TIMES; Now College is the Break.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., FEBRUARY 11, 2011): D9.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under discussion is:
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Bank Clerks, Cops and Nurses’ Aides Do Not Need a College Degree to Do Their Jobs Well

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review cited, but not quoted, far below.

Reviewer P. Chrzanowski on Amazon says that Professor X uses the phrase “creeping credentialism.” That sounds like a useful phrase, and an unfortunate phenomenon.

(p. C3) He is a bit wicked, this Professor X. His book-length expansion of the article, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” is rippled with mellow sarcasm. Reading one student’s terrible paper about Sylvia Plath, he says: “I pictured her writing it in a bar, or while driving to class or skydiving. Maybe she composed it as one long text message to herself.”
. . .
The tone of his essay, and of this impertinent book, however, is as plaintive as it is lemony. The author is delivering unhappy news, and he knows it. It’s as if he’s proposing to paste an asterisk on the American dream. “Telling someone that college is not right for him seems harsh and classist, vaguely Dickensian,” Professor X writes, “as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines.”
Yet why is it so important to Barack Obama (a champion of community colleges) and those doing America’s hiring, he asks, that “our bank tellers be college educated, and our medical billing techs, our county tax clerks”? College — even community college — drives many young people into debt. Many others lack rudimentary study skills or any scholarly inclination. They want to get on with their lives, not be forced to analyze the meter in “King Lear” in night school in order to become a cop or a nurse’s aide.
“No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality,” Professor X says, “of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; An Academic Hit Man Brings More Bad News.” The New York Times (Weds., April 6, 2011): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated April 5, 2011.)

For a somewhat less friendly review, see:
ERIC FELTEN. “BOOKSHELF; A Little Learning; Do you have to read ‘King Lear’ to write a speeding ticket?.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., MARCH 30, 2011): A17.

Book under review:
X, Professor. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic. New York: Viking, 2011.