HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Sen. Grassley criticizes universities for “hoarding assets.”

A few years ago, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) caused consternation among the nation’s wealthiest colleges by scrutinizing their endowments, saying that universities needed to spend more of the tax-exempt funds they were accruing. He also requested a variety of data on tuition prices, financial aid and endowment management. While only a small share of colleges have mega-endowments, the focus on those with billions frustrated many institutions without much money — while causing public relations headaches for those who have plenty.

Then the stock market crashed, the average value of endowments dropped by almost 21 percent, and the issue briefly became moot.

Now, as endowments have rebounded, Grassley is revisiting the issue. In a press release Thursday on a Treasury Department study on donor-advised funds, he blasted colleges for “hoarding assets at taxpayer expense.” (The study did not focus on college endowments, but did note that colleges are frequent users of tax exemption provisions.)

“It’s important to understand whether these tax benefits are fueling the tuition increases by subsidizing high salaries for college leaders and rock-climbing walls and other non-educational amenities to try to attract students,” said Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. He pointed to tax-exempt bonds and charitable contributions, as well as the income-tax exempt endowments, as examples of preferential tax provisions that universities frequently use.

He linked the issue to the Obama administration’s new focus on college costs, which has emerged in recent days as a key issue.

Interesting angle.

Libertarians might object to a politician looking into a "private" college, but since the college takes tax exempt money, it is obligated to submit to the scrutiny. After all, it is the politician's job to represent, or fight for the interests of, the people. Hillsdale College refuses to accept taxpayer money, and so it is free to be free.

The point of all this ramble is that from my experience it’s always a very good idea to structure a school system on the theory that this isn’t Lake Wobegon. Half the children will be below average, and of those above average a lot of them will neither want nor need a college prep education. Some will do well with what they called a technical school education, and a great number of them will do well with a general high school education that includes home economics, hygiene, enough math to do your income tax, and practice in reading and writing. Those who want more can try for more. There are junior colleges – that’s what we used to call “Community Colleges” for those who want skills. The University and College system is for those trying to enter the professions.

An interesting take on education from Chaos Manor.

Since beginning work on A Novel of America, my vision of the project has gone beyond the idea of simply writing a manuscript online. Words are the core, of course, but I believe web-based storytelling must employ all available facets: video, sound, images, interactive media.

Here are three excellent examples of “novel” innovations on the web:

Inanimate Alice

Hotel St. George
Blake Walks

The Kindle edition of my book, Brazil, has an Illustrated Guide linked to each chapter and to my travel journals that reflects the kind of cross-platform on which A Novel of America should evolve when time permits a return to the work. In the future, too, I will seek to make this a collaborative effort with other creative talents well-versed in the artistry of the web.

A Digital Novel

Set in the early years of the 21st century and told through text, sound, images, music and games, Inanimate Alice is the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad.

Read more...

No time to explore this just now, but intriguing.

None of this unfairness, as in the case of Sarah Palin, is to suggest that Cain is ready to be president. He may well not be, or should not be, electable. But over the next year, who knows what will have happened? Americans are so sick of the status quo and its technocracy that anything that suggests authenticity, even eccentricity, apparently is preferable to long political résumés. In short, in this present climate — in which the corrective for borrowing $4 trillion under Bush in eight years was to borrow even more under Obama in three — the unimaginable might become the inevitable.

We have already seen Cain derided nonstop as a puppet dancing from his white conservative masters’ strings. He refutes the notions that the Tea Party is racist, that race is essential rather than incidental to one’s character, and that a sizable percentage of African Americans must by supported by a government umbilical cord attached by liberal community organizers and technocrats.

Again, the comparison with Obama is volatile: Cain is authentically African-American and of an age to remember the Jim Crow South; Obama, the son of an elite Kenyan and a white graduate student, came of age as a Hawaiian prep-schooler, whose civil-rights credentials are academic. Cain’s lack of experience and seemingly embarrassing ignorance about the right of return or nuclear China are amplified by his unaffected style, whereas Obama’s similar gaffes (57 states) and buffoonery (inflating tires to preclude drilling for oil) are mitigated by metrosexual cool. After all, we live in an age when Herman Cain, with his black hat, his deep Southern cadences, and his ease among tea-party crowds, is suspect, whereas Barack Obama booms on about “millionaires and billionaires” while golfing, jetting to Martha’s Vineyard, and shaking down demonized corporate-jet owners at $35,000 a pop.

In short, Cain’s ascendance — and ongoing descent — are as fascinating to watch as they will soon be tragic in their denouement.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

This is the ending of VDH's ruminations about Herman Cain's current quandary. Unlike Obama, Cain is an authentic child of the South and not a product of elite Hawaiian boarding schools and colleges.

MICKEY KAUS: “I tend to think conventional New Deal style collective bargaining is doomed by large historic forces, whatever the outcome on Tuesday. If Wagner Act unions effectively vanish in the economy’s competitive private sector, how long will voters support them in the public sector, where they are less defensible?”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds  

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Focus on standardized tests may be pushing some teachers to cheat: The number of California teachers who have been accused of cheating, lesser misconduct or mistakes on standardized achievement tests has raised alarms about the pressure to improve scores.

Posted at 5:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds  

Does Glenn see a connection here?

Learning Styles

Concepts and Evidence

1. Harold Pashler1,
2. Mark McDaniel2,
3. Doug Rohrer3 and
4. Robert Bjork4

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹University of California, San Diego
2. ²Washington University in St. Louis
3. ³University of South Florida
4. ⁴University of California, Los Angeles

1. Department of Psychology 0109, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093; e-mail: hpashler@ucsd.edu.

Abstract

The term “learning styles” refers to the concept that individuals differ in regard to what mode of instruction or study is most effective for them. Proponents of learning-style assessment contend that optimal instruction requires diagnosing individuals' learning style and tailoring instruction accordingly. Assessments of learning style typically ask people to evaluate what sort of information presentation they prefer (e.g., words versus pictures versus speech) and/or what kind of mental activity they find most engaging or congenial (e.g., analysis versus listening), although assessment instruments are extremely diverse. The most common—but not the only—hypothesis about the instructional relevance of learning styles is the meshing hypothesis, according to which instruction is best provided in a format that matches the preferences of the learner (e.g., for a “visual learner,” emphasizing visual presentation of information).

The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field, and is frequently encountered at levels ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. There is a thriving industry devoted to publishing learning-styles tests and guidebooks for teachers, and many organizations offer professional development workshops for teachers and educators built around the concept of learning styles.

The authors of the present review were charged with determining whether these practices are supported by scientific evidence. We concluded that any credible validation of learning-styles-based instruction requires robust documentation of a very particular type of experimental finding with several necessary criteria. First, students must be divided into groups on the basis of their learning styles, and then students from each group must be randomly assigned to receive one of multiple instructional methods. Next, students must then sit for a final test that is the same for all students. Finally, in order to demonstrate that optimal learning requires that students receive instruction tailored to their putative learning style, the experiment must reveal a specific type of interaction between learning style and instructional method: Students with one learning style achieve the best educational outcome when given an instructional method that differs from the instructional method producing the best outcome for students with a different learning style. In other words, the instructional method that proves most effective for students with one learning style is not the most effective method for students with a different learning style.

Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Charles Cooke: Why Should Your Degree Guarantee You A Cushy Job?

In the West, we are hard at work establishing a culture that fetishizes education, and instills the belief that college — regardless of its content or application — will, and should, inexorably lead to a better job, or a better life, or even a better America. Worse, that one has a right to these things. In doing so, we have created a Potemkin aristocracy, one based upon the erroneous and tragic conceit that having letters after one’s name intrinsically confers excellence. We are happily encouraging our children to join its ranks, regardless of whether there is any evidence that to do so will be in their interest. This is supremely ironic, given that so many of America’s billionaires — i.e. those who pay for more educations and create more jobs than anyone else — are college dropouts. Indeed, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates failed to finish college. Can we say with a straight face that this has adversely affected them, or America at large?

On Thursday, I met a guy down in Zuccotti Park. He speaks six languages, but he has nothing useful to say in any of them. He is the movement’s perfect spokesman.

If an education doesn’t add value — that is if it doesn’t let you do something useful that you couldn’t do before — then it’s not valuable in terms of employment. Why should it be?

Posted at 6:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds  

This is a serious problem. A nation with many highly indebted graduates who feel entitled and are frustrated is a nation with a serious problem.