In my post http://www.inside-higher-ed.com/how-does-your-course-compare/, there is a link to MIT’s OpenCouresWare. These are MIT courses that the university has put online for their students – or for anyone who wants to use the materials. Furthermore, if you go to https://www.edx.org/university_profile/MITx you will find a site that explains how MIT and Harvard are jointly offering to not just put […]
Archives for January 2013
Even More On AP Courses – From the New York Times
January 18, 2013 by
Today (January 18th) Tamar Lewin reported in the NY Times that Dartmouth will stop giving AP Credit. What is more important is what Dartmouth found when they looked into how well students with a 5 on the AP had actually learned. You can read that here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/education/dartmouth-stops-credits-for-excelling-on-ap-test.html?_r=0 The article goes on to report that “…The […]
More on AP Courses
January 14, 2013 by
Here is a quote from CalTech’s description of its Freshman math course: “…The typical high school courses, and the AP tests themselves, are woefully inadequate in explaning, or testing, why things work and how to justify one’s propositions…” The link to the where I got this quote is: http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2011-12/1term/ma001a/#des This is, of course, CalTech, but […]
Are Trustees Too Focused On Investments to the Detriment of the Educational Mission?
January 10, 2013 by
Here is a link to an article about university endowments, followed by my comments and some interesting links. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/dartmouth-controversy-reflects-quandary-for-endowments/ What worries me the most about the size of university investment funds and its effects on Board members is not just that there may be conflicts of interest, but that some university endowments have become so huge that […]
Links to Salary Surveys at Universities
January 4, 2013 by
(More will be added) (more added at bottom, 1/24/2013) Georgia Tech http://www.adors.gatech.edu/commencement/salary_report_result.cfm?college=TOTAL&level=1&surveyid=62&Submit=Submit Carnegie Mellon http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/index.html (This is an example of what you get when you click on one of Carnegie’s links: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2012-survey/pdfs-one-pagers/2012_SCS.pdf ) Washington University in St. Louis http://careercenter.wustl.edu/about/Documents/annualreport11-12.print.pdf MIT http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html General Links NerdScholar http://www.nerdwallet.com/nerdscholar/ (Go to “compare schools” and pick schools to see salaries. Payscale http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value […]
Good Graph on Textbook Costs and some advice
January 4, 2013 by
There is a brief article on textbook costs online in the Atlantic. Here is the link http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/why-are-college-textbooks-so-absurdly-expensive/266801/ With respect to textbooks, their size and their cost, here is an interesting situation that I observed when I taught a course in multivariable calculus. Many of the students had taken calculus in high school and only needed […]
Student Debt
Yesterday’s Financial Times had an article today on student debt: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/74773c6e-5a49-11e2-a02e-00144feab49a.html#axzz2IuFScTqr The article notes that, in the past decade, student debt has risen over 40% – to more than a trillion dollars. I’m worried that there is a bubble – at the very least, a large misallocation of resources. We have an unfortunate combination of content deflation and tuition inflation. […]