American University in Delhi?
India might open to foreign universities. That could be a game-changer: And India’s higher education system badly needs shaking up. Setting aside issues of quality (as if those can be set aside), India does not come close to providing sufficient seats to those aspiring to higher education — a glaring shortcoming as India’s burgeoning middle … Continue reading American University in Delhi?
The Aristocracy of Talent—A Review
A review of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge. Allen Lane, 464 pages (June 2021)
Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the most important literary figures of the ancient world, and today the study of Latin is divided between those who favor Cicero&
The Insight show notes: episode 30, Genetics and educational attainment
This week Razib and Spencer discussed the relationship between educational attainment and genetics on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) with James Lee, lead author of Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide assoc…
The genetics of education
Yale UniversityIn the modern world, obtaining an education is a rite of passage. Not only does education provide one with skills useful for the modern economy, but it also helps to form one’s values and socializes one with peers who go through the same…
Drawing on the slate of human nature
Some of you have been reading me since 2002. Therefore, you’ve seen a lot of changes in my interests (and to a lesser extent, my life…no more cat pictures because my cats died). Whereas today I incessantly flog Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human […]
The “Asian quota” and implicit cultural knowledge
A recent conversation I had with a friend whose parents are immigrants from Germany made me reconsider and reflect on the power of implicit information in shaping one’s life; that information being culturally mediated. Though my friend was raised in the United States, because of her parents’ immersion in the German expatriate community her upbringing […]
The power of home environment
Before a Test, a Poverty of Words:
Things are very different elsewhere on the class spectrum. Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked hi…
Why the kids don’t know no algebra
A few days ago I stumbled upon a really interesting post. And I’m wondering if my readers are at all familiar with the phenomenon outlined here (it was a total surprise to me), The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”:
Stage One: I will d…
The law school scam as a cognitive bias
I’ve been aware of the whole “law school scam” genre for years. The basic issue is pretty straightforward: all the problems of higher education with easy loans and inflated tuition for credentialing are manifest writ large in law scho…
Do consumatory scholars need tenure?
John Hawks pointed me to this really strange article, Just Because We’re Not Publishing Doesn’t Mean We’re Not Working:
We have no concise term to describe what we spend much of our time doing. Our colleges are focused on scholarly pr…
One test to rule them all
Educational Realist elaborates on some of the concerns I have had with Chris Hayes’ ballyhooed piece on the failure of elites:
Hayes is correct about one thing, though: the elites are locking out the hoi polloi from highest-level institutions. Bu…
The invisible academic Asian
In Chris Hayes’ piece in The Nation, Why Elites Fail, there is a particular lacunae which I noted: he does not make it clear to a non-New York audience which is well known to any New York based reader: elite public schools in the city are dominat…
Physical education teachers are not smart
So there is a website out there, Educational Realist (via Steve Sailer), which made me aware of some statistics from ETS on the intellectual aptitudes of those who passed a teaching certification. This is relevant because those who major in education at university are notoriously rather weak students. The implication here is that teachers are […]
Parents don’t matter that much
Update: Stephen Dubner emailed me, and pointed me to this much longer segment which has a lot of Bryan Caplan. So it seems like the omission that I perceived was more of an issue with the production and editing process and constraints of the Marketplac…
Which state has the most PhDs in the legislature?
Josh Rosenau points me to a new infographic from The Chronicle of Higher Education. A lot of the stuff isn’t too interesting or surprising. Are you surprised that 25% of the state legislators in Arkansas don’t have a college degree, the hig…
The “law school scam” media bubble
If you’re like me you have friends and acquaintances who want to go to law school. I often respond sarcastically that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” There have long been “law school scam” blogs, but it seems that r…
Why educated women are having children
Matt Yglesias has posted some charts showing that
1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common
2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing
Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon:
I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the […]