Blogs

Some thoughts about Fidelis, an education startup that -- unlike a lot of the other ones that seem to be getting all the buzz -- isn't focused on the content of college, but on the community.

An announcement was made few days ago that my University has increased its allocation for the Doctoral Studies Fund. Said Fund provides full support to faculty members getting into Ph.D. programs in the Philippines and abroad. No surprise that the announcement was met with lukewarm response by my younger colleagues. At the recent review of our 5-year faculty development plan, those who were supposed to go have all decided not to.

The increasing intensity of the competition on the college entrance examination is a reflection of mass higher education. Since 1999, China’s higher education system has experienced rapid expansion. With more than 2500 institutions of higher education and more than 30 million tertiary-level students, China is the largest higher education system in the world in its scale. In June 2012, 9.15 million students took the gaokao, the college entrance examination.

The June unemployment rate staying at 8.2% is really not a surprise. The economy is lackluster and the 80,000 jobs added, a number well below what would be necessary to reduce the unemployment rate, is all the economy is capable of generating. Of greater concern and regardless of the November presidential /congressional election results, the economy will not quickly spring to life with a major decline in the unemployment rate.

This morning (Tuesday), I tweeted The New Yorker article that is making the rounds about how American kids are spoiled. Compared to kids raised in tribes in the Amazon, our kids are positively useless (and we as parents are positively failing them). We tie their shoes for them and don’t let them cut the grass with machetes.

I have wanted to write about the "having it all" media flapdoodle, but the published responses have gone off in so many different directions I have had trouble keeping up. So I am grateful to Libby for her elegant distillation.

As I write this, I am having a rare off-the-grid moment, looking over my laptop at a view that reminds me of the coast of Maine except that it doesn’t smell like the sea and there are no tidal pools full of sea urchins and starfish. But the North Shore of Lake Superior is, like Maine, a country of pointed firs, and interlaced among the conifers are the white trunks of birch trees. The hillside bristles with them rather starkly, because many of them have lost their crown of whispering leaves.

BREAKING: Community colleges are useful, and The New York Times is ON IT! It reduces them to vocational training centers, but it’s a start.