Category Archives: School / Education

In his review of new pop economics books, Brad DeLong, a professor at Berkeley, says:

We here at Berkeley charge one-third the tuition of Stanford. Our students like a place where their peers don’t regard themselves as rich. We lose students who believe that the extra $80,000 is well worth paying to get Stanford’s smaller class sizes and better physical plant.

It’s a point I’ve thought about when I meet students at Claremont who, thanks to the $46,000 annual tuition, are taking on student loans which they’ll be paying off for years after graduation.

Sure, the small, private college atmosphere offers unparalleled facilities, access to top faculty, and overall very high quality of life. But is it really worth the extraordinary financial cost, particularly if it’s one you’ll be shouldering (and thus constrained by) several years after graduation?

I have my doubts. So I have enormous respect for those who choose a slightly less prestigious school for one which offers more financial aid, or those who go to public institutions to save money and keep their options open in the years after school.

Especially since it doesn’t matter a whole lot where you went to undergrad, I’m puzzled at those familes who bankrupt themselves in order to send Johnny to the most elite school he can get into.

James Flynn writes an essay about education and intelligence, which I will read later, but Arnold Kling pulls out this paragraph:

The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are possessions easier to access than even the local gym.

An interesting thought, to which Arnold responds:

Fine.  But take something you are not good at.  Imagine someone giving me one of these lectures:

Arnold, the best chance of enjoying enhanced fishing skills is to fall in love with fishing, or casting, or filleting, or being in a rowboat on some smelly river at 5 o’clock in the morning.

Arnold, the best chance to enjoy penmanship is to fall in love with neat handwriting, or nicely-formed letters, or taking forever to express written thoughts.

Thanks very much–enjoyed hearing your advice. Now, if you’ll just excuse me, I’m going to do something useful with the rest of my day. The Reading Instruction gurus argue that competence comes first, enjoyment second.  That feels more right to me.

Feels more right to me, too.

The mainstream media obsesses about American colleges and the college experience. One of its points of interest is the so-called “hook-up culture” among college youth, a phrase notoriously hard to pin down but that basically refers to indiscriminate, casual sexual activity instead of long-term dating with a single partner.

The stories about the rise in hook-ups are almost always breathless and unbelievable. College parties are depicted as Girls Gone Wild retreats. Romantic pick-up lines are out, efficient phrases like “wanna fuck?” are in. Dinner and a movie are out, dark corners at parties in the basement are in.

I’ve never been sure whether the coverage of hook-up culture is extensive because it actually exists or if it’s more a reflection of: a) a journalist’s own voyeuristic desires, b) a journalist’s interest in portraying my generation as hedonistic and materialistic, c) a journalist’s interest in feeding us villains/victims/heroes stories, with teen girls being the victims, or d) shoddy research due to a journalist’s laziness (this includes not being more skeptical of teens’ claims about their social life – they/we tend to overstate sexual activity and drinking/drug use according to studies).

Now that I’m in college, my perspective is that hook-up culture is indeed exaggerated in the popular press, though I’m still unclear as to exactly why. Granted, I go to an academic liberal arts college which probably has less “Girls Gone Wild” flavor than a state school. And my sole perspective shouldn’t, in theory, be as credible as the commentator who checks out many campuses and gathers anecdotes. Still, in talking with people and in my own experience so far, large amounts of sex, drugs, and alcohol happen on my campus and others, but it’s far from the free-for-all that you read about in the papers.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had an article ($) which epitomized the media’s overreach on this topic. Jeff Zaslow wrote about hook-up culture in the villains/victims vein. It contained one of those classic anecdotes designed to shock:

Obviously, boys no longer have to call girls on Wednesday for a Saturday date. Now, college boys seeking weekend hookups send girls “U busy?” text messages at 2 or 3 a.m., and girls routinely rouse themselves and go, according to Ms. Stepp’s research. Many girls spend the next day clutching their cellphones, waiting in vain for the boy to call.

Yeah, right. Look, there’s no doubt that hook-up culture is alive and well on college campuses, but exaggerating the case does nobody any good.

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Here’s my review of Female Chauvinist Pigs in which author Ariel Levy says girls need to step up and stop perpetuating raunch culture. Here’s my post on “life, sex, and relationships” orientation in college.

This may be the single best thing college does in preparing you for the real world: it aggregates (in a constrained physical environment) thousands of people who are similar to you in age but not necessarily in interests or background, giving you tons of practice interacting with all sorts of people in all sorts of settings.

The social life part of the college experience is discussed mainly in the context of having fun. But the more time I spend in college the more I realize that the social interactions — the sheer practice that comes from the 24/7 pressure-cooker of living, sleeping, working, drinking, thinking with tons of other people — it’s these interactions which are probably more valuable than the academics. Since most professions demand people skills more than anything else, the socialization process in college does a nice job at letting you discover and develop your people skills in a range of diverse environments.

And the people who you practice socializing with usually go on to be friends, or at least weak ties, many years after college, providing the base for a professional network.

How much does college prepare you for the real world? That’s a question I’ll be thinking about in the coming months and years.

One big difference between college and the real world is that college is an information-rich environment which makes it very easy to track your progress (and be motivated) day-by-day.

In college you constantly receive reports on your progress. You turn in assignments, you receive grades. Rarely does a week go by without some affirmation or refutation of effort from an all-knowing expert (professor, advisor, whoever).

In the real world, best I can tell, the information you receive from your “market” (customers, boss, whoever) is far more ambiguous. Anyone who’s built a company knows that months can go by without clear feedback about whether you’re on the right track. Indeed, sometimes it takes months of unyielding effort with your head down before you figure out whether you’re creating something of value.

The most successful people I’ve met in the real world have a tolerance for ambiguity and are self-motivated enough to take care of business even if there aren’t routine, external validations or challenges.

So do college students get spoiled by the constant information delivery and assessments that’s part of structured education? Is there a risk that such an explicit reward system will retard a student’s ability to be intrinsically motivated? Will a student, upon graduation, be able to apply consistent effort without receiving a decisive “A” or “B” for each of his tasks?

(thanks to my friend Cal Newport for sparking this idea)