VEGETARIANS HAVE BETTER SEX.  Buzz Feed has a PETA video that may or may not become a Super Bowl commercial.  Probably best to view it at home.

TWITTER DID NOT CAUSE STUDENT DISENGAGEMENT.  Reaction to Academically Adrift and related topics continues to come in.  Minding the Campus runs an essay by J. M. Anderson, listed as Dean of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences at Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby (in the same legislative district as Northern Illinois University.)  There's something unusual here, as the division lists a Michael Pecherek as interim dean, since last summer.  Put that aside:  the column calls nonsense on the we-can't-push-[insert protected class]-students-too-hard approach to higher education.

The recent study conducted by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College shows that only 26 percent of undergraduates at small institutions, and only 18 percent at larger institutions, felt strongly that their professors had high expectations and challenged them academically. At a state university where I taught, seniors who took my 100-level survey course told me that it was the hardest and most intellectually demanding class they had taken in four years at college. Many were actually grateful for having taken my course and felt cheated by their other professors---although others weren't as grateful and eventually dropped the course or wrote negative comments on Ratemyprofessor.com. In an age when higher education exists for credentialing, and anyone can "get a degree," they wanted an easy professor and a blow-off class. I refused to accommodate them.

The problem is not a rigorous curriculum or high academic standards. As a freshman I was neither ready nor prepared for college. I grew up on the South side of Chicago in a working-class family. My mother, a single-parent, raised my three sisters and me. No one in my immediate or extended family (except for one cousin) went to college, let alone to graduate school. College wasn't even an option, and I probably wouldn't have considered it if my high school director hadn't asked me at the beginning of my senior year where I planned to apply. After serving in the army, I attended a liberal arts college where I came under the spell of two fascinating teachers whose ability to stimulate students seemed unparalleled. They didn't dismiss me or write me off or let me slide by because I wasn't college material. Rather, they made me read difficult and challenging books; they took the time to teach me to write; and they showed me by their example how a mature, learned, and disciplined mind approaches various intellectual questions. Above all else, they imbued me with the appropriate habits of thought and mind that defines the liberally educated person. If I had been tested, as a senior, on what I learned in biology my freshman year, or in economics my sophomore year, I probably would have failed; but if one compared my disposition, mindset, and intellectual outlook, as a senior, to what they were as a freshman, one would have seen an entirely different person.

That's where colleges and universities are failing today. They are not turning students into mature, thinking beings with appropriate dispositions. One reason is that modern educators share no common goals about the ends of higher education and are inconsistent with their expectations from students in their courses; another reason is lack of discipline in the classroom, instruction without authority. Professors mustn't dictate what is good for students or what they must know; subjecting students to rigorous academic standards and intellectual discipline is tantamount to punishing them; reason and argument are coercive.

Like many professors, I have dealt with students who thought they deserved good grades simply because they were enrolled in my class and showed up most of the time. When a former student who received a bad grade on a paper complained because I didn't allow him to express his "opinion," I said that first he had requirements to fulfill and to demonstrate his understanding of the particulars of our subject before he could offer an "opinion" on the issue he was writing about. He didn't like my answer. He had been encouraged to express himself throughout grade school and high school and held the assumption that every interpretation is valid and should be given equal weight. He ignored that I was hired and paid for my knowledge, which gave me the authority to instruct him and to evaluate his performance.

This rarely (if ever) happens in the sciences. Budding biologists and fledgling physicists follow a strict curriculum and willingly submit to it, or else they get "weeded out," and then take up a soft subject in the humanities. Nor does it happen in college sports. Watch any college football or basketball game and you'll see coaches often chastising players, who readily submit themselves to their criticisms and demands, but almost never complain that coaches are intimidating or too strict. Why? Because it is understood that coaches know what is best for student-athletes and are pushing them to improve their skills and performance. Only in the sciences and college sports---apparently what really matter---is the demand for excellence taken seriously.

I hope his candor didn't get him bounced from Illinois Valley.  Institutional research at Northern Illinois suggests that community college transfers do at least as well as juniors and seniors as students that begin here.  He intends to read Academically Adrift, but he's not in any great hurry.

A Newark Star-Ledger investigation of the parlous success rates at New Jersey's public colleges and universities rounds up the usual suspects.

College officials say the answer is complex. Some students drop out. Some transfer to other schools. Some work part time or deliberately don’t take a full load of classes so they have easier semesters.

Many also change majors, take remedial classes or find that overcrowding and budget cuts mean they can’t get into the courses they need to graduate on time.

Most colleges are reluctant to reveal their degree completion numbers. The data is rarely highlighted in college marketing materials or mentioned on campus tours.

Read on, though, and another possibility appears.

There are, however, plenty of exceptions. Ed Kwiatkowski graduated from Monmouth University earlier this month in 3½ years with a double major in accounting and management.

Kwiatkowski, 22, earned his degree by taking 18 credits a semester while working full time at night doing heavy lifting in a warehouse. He also served as guardian for his teenage sister after his mother’s death.

At Monmouth, where 37 percent of freshmen graduate in four years, Kwiatkowski said he knows several classmates who are taking extra time to get their degree.

“I really don’t know what’s taking them so long,” said Kwiatkowski, of Long Branch.

The article doesn't mention how one observation turns into plenty of exceptions.  It's encouraging to see evidence, even anecdotal, of people working their way through university.

A Northern Star columnist also weighs in.

While I do think that everyone deserves the chance to go to college, I do not necessarily think that means that everyone is actually meant for higher education. Those who may not be cut out for college usually find out quite early on in their academic careers and rarely make it to graduation.

Thus, I think that the aforementioned statistic may be skewed by the fact that part of those 45 percent who are not learning at an acceptable rate should not have been accepted to the universities in the first place and do not reflect the learning of the undergraduates who actually go on to earn degrees.


While it may not be financially beneficial to universities, I think that increasing the standards for admission would be the first step in curbing this trend.


Another part of the problem is that professors are not pushing students hard enough.


According to the study, half of the students who were tested "did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week."


The truth is that with all of the advantages afforded to the modern student by the Internet, expectations should rise in accordance. Between Microsoft Word's "auto-correct" features, websites like SparkNotes.com and access to an abundance of digital libraries, there is no real reason why a student should be failing or even struggling.


If anything, these resources have made it too easy for students to coast through classes without actually challenging themselves.


I am not sure of what college was like before the Internet, but if course loads have not increased dramatically in the last 15 years, then the second step toward improving our educational system would be for professors to demand a little bit more from their students.


Finally, the third component in addressing this problem is obviously the students. I know that my suggestions so far may not please everyone as they basically amount to making things harder, but think about what you are paying for.


Sure, we ultimately are trying to get degrees that lead to careers, but what is the value of our education if we are not being pushed to grow intellectually?


While I don't think that today's college students are the stereotypes that eat pizza for breakfast and drink until they pass out every night, I do hear too much complaining about assignments and grades.

We pay thousands of dollars a year to get smarter, not to have someone confirm how smart we think we are.

I don't get much of that "I'm-paying-for-a-credential" stuff; my reaction is "would you blame the fitness trainer if you stayed fat because you never exercised or switched from beer to water?"  The financial benefit of enrollment for its own sake is slim in any event, once the cost-benefit ratio of the support services is taken into account.

EXPLAINING THE PRODUCTIVITY SLOWDOWN?  The storm system that's providing an opportunity to catch up on some gruntwork also cooled things off in Dallas.

The Dallas Cowboys don't have an indoor practice facility.  Forrest Gregg's Southern Methodist University doesn't have an indoor practice facility.  Highland Park High School has an indoor practice facility, which for this week has become the southern extension of the Don Hutson Center.

Originally, [Green Bay] was supposed to use SMU’s field in Highland Park, just north of Dallas. However, the field has no roof and is now covered in snow and ice. Now the Packers will use Highland Park High School’s indoor practice facility. When Green Bay linebacker A.J. Hawk was asked about the facility, he didn’t hide his fondness. “I’m from Ohio and high school football is pretty big; at least we think it is,” Hawk said. “Texas football is amazing. Everything in Texas is great.” The Packers will face the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV on Sunday.

Great for football (In communities with insufficient young men to fill eleven positions, Texas high schools have a seven-player version), but -- research question alert -- might No Child Left Behind have appeared to work in Texas because the resources go to the football programs, rather than the chemistry labs, and no way is the quarterback going to be left behind in geometry?

SNOW DAY. The view to the south at 8.15 this morning, before the street was plowed.

I saw neither my shadow, nor any woodchucks popping out of their burrows.

DICING FOR THE REDEEMER'S ROBES.

That's a hyperbolic way to introduce Book Review N^o. 6; on the other hand one keeps waiting for Paul Clemens to work a "forgive them for they know not what they do" into Punching Out:  One Year in a Closing Auto Plant.

As a work of business reporting with an emphasis on Who's interesting?, What's compelling?, Why isn't that really odd?, Punching Out is fine.  Think Richard Preston's American Steel, but instead of the protagonists beating back the imports and the legacy steel companies, the protagonists are plucking the Arsenal of Democracy for the Harpies of Outsourcing.  The people who disassemble precision industrial equipment, in the instant book the stamping presses of Budd's Detroit works, are at least as colorful as the people who build a steel works and bring a thin slab caster on stream.

COMMUTERS DON'T CHECK BAGGAGE.

Metra and the operators of the Ogilvie Transportation Center decided that unused space previously devoted to storage or left idle in the old North Western Terminal complex could be put to commercial use. Thus, a baggage handling area north of the commuter concourse became a French market. (Yes, Philadelphia's Reading Terminal had a produce market under that train shed years ago. It's a good idea all the same, and the commuter concourse is open again on Saturday, at least during market hours.)

The computer-controlled annunciator boards replaced some truly marvellous train indicators that for many years were re-set by hand after each train, with the hands of a clock spun to the departure time, and strips of wood with the station stops slid into slots underneath.

There's not a lot of seating, and the few tables set about the edge of the room are perilously close to the hustle of commuters rushing to their trains. On a Saturday morning, it's pretty quiet.

Because it's a Saturday morning, the stalls of the market proper get started slowly. There was coffee and French pastry to be had, if you knew where to look.

HEIRS TO THE BLUE COLLAR ARISTOCRATS.  Milwaukee's public schools used to prepare them, and the skilled trades require creative people.  Shepherd Express reports that the tradition and the potential are still present.

Milwaukee is known for our beer, our manufacturing might, our motorcycles and, most recently, for our water industry.

But a theme running through those industries is our creativity, built on generations of skilled, hardworking artisans and craftsmen and -women.

That creative thread is being highlighted by the Cultural Alliance of Greater Milwaukee, which released a study last week on southeastern Wisconsin’s surprising jobs potential in the creative industries.
Not only does the region’s creativity reflect our past, but it also could lead to greater global competitiveness in the future.

The study, which was commissioned by the Cultural Alliance and the Greater Milwaukee Committee, was conducted by Mt. Auburn Associates, which has analyzed the economic impact of the creative industry around the world.

When the study was released with much fanfare last week, Mt. Auburn researcher Michael Kane called the region’s creative depth and breadth “absolutely remarkable” and encouraged policy-makers to think of our creative industries as “one element in a diversified portfolio” that can be marketed to other regions and countries to bring revenue to the area.

“Southeast Wisconsin’s economy and prosperity will depend less on how much it produces and more on what it produces, less on its cost of living and more on quality of living, less on its workers’ skills and more on its people’s talents, less on corporate identities and more on entrepreneurial energies,” the report concluded. “Thus, prosperity will result from creativity that, directly and indirectly, produces employment, makes other sectors more competitive, contributes to making the region more desirable, makes people more innovative, and recognizes and rewards the talent that may lie outside the mainstream career pathways.”

It's still about creating the things that enable other, less clever people, to be more productive, whether they're in Detroit or Datong.

“We’re a maker economy,” said Christine Harris, head of the Cultural Alliance.

Product design is an integral part of our area’s most iconic products and images. Think of the "rolling sculpture" of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the distinctive shape and color of your average beer bottle, the functionality of GE Healthcare’s medical devices, Faythe Levine’s do-it-yourself “Handmade Nation,” and the elegance of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava addition, which quickly became the symbol of the city.

Milwaukee was even home to one of the nation’s first industrial designers, Brooks Stevens, whose designs range from the model for Harley-Davidson motorcycles to Miller Brewing’s logo to engines for Briggs & Stratton and Outboard Marine.

Ironically, the importance of product design is relatively unappreciated by the area’s manufacturers, Mt. Auburn’s researchers found. They urged the region's manufacturers to look toward product design—and not lower cost—to increase their global competitiveness.

“[Manufacturers’] best chance for its employers to withstand the global cost-based competition will be to be more creative, to use design in ways that distinguish and differentiate its products, and to make them more desirable because they appeal to customers in ways that mass-produced products cannot—something the region’s most successful companies have been doing for decades.”

Whether the city's schools have squandered that cultural capital, or whether do-it-yourself design on a computer is within the reach of any thirteen year old with enough Snickers bars in the freezer remains to be seen.

LAST PICKED, BUT STILL AN ALL-STAR.  The National Hockey League tries something new in the All-Star game: rather than assign players by conference, the team captains take turns picking the teams.  That introduces strategic considerations.

Martin St. Louis of Team Lidstrom and Eric Staal of Team Staal have made mention to the fact that they would like to select their teammates for the upcoming All-Star game. Team Staal's selection committee consists of captain Eric Staal (Carolina Hurricanes) and alternate captains Ryan Kesler (Vancouver Canucks) and Mike Green (Washington Capitals). Under this notion Team Staal would be looking to select Jeff Skinner (Carolina Hurricanes), Henrik and Daniel Sedin (Vancouver Canucks), and Alexander Ovechkin (Washington Capitals). Team Lidstrom's selection camp consists of captain Nicklas Lidstrom (Detroit Red Wings), and alternate captains Martin St. Louis (Tampa Bay Lightning) and Patrick Kane (Chicago Blackhawks). They would be looking to select Steven Stamkos (Tampa Bay Lightning), Jonathan Toews (Chicago Blackhawks) and Patrick Sharp, also of Chicago. At the same time, the opposition may be looking to select teammates of the opposing selection committee just to throw off their draft plans.

The rules require all goaltenders to be taken by the tenth round, and all defenders by the fifteenth.  Thus, a forward has to be picked last.

After 34 players came off the board, it came down to Toronto's Phil Kessel and Paul Stastny of the Colorado Avalanche to determine who would be All-Star hockey's first "Mr. Irrelevant." Kessel earned the dubious distinction of being the last pick when Stastny was chosen by Team Staal.

"I'm just happy to be here," said Kessel, who acknowledged that the wait was nerve-racking.

He didn't leave empty-handed, however. He was awarded with a new car, and a donation will also be made to a charity of Kessel's choice.

The forwards had the last laugh, with Lindstrom defeating Staal, 11-10.  Who's the sieve?

PILING ON.

I've been looking for a copy of Academically Adrift.  The commentary from people who have obtained a copy and been able to read it is compelling.  Jason Fertig posts a paragraph excerpt at Phi Beta Cons.

Only the most cynical policy analyst could advocate “college for all” without simultaneously demanding that once admitted into college, students would be compelled to demonstrate significant academic growth. Otherwise, “college for all” becomes little more than a policy designed for warehousing students during the years when they would otherwise face an elevated risk of unemployment and criminal behavior.

"Students pay some hefty storage charges at these warehouses," he quips.

Mark Bauerlein's Minding the Campus post frets about the tradeoff higher education faces.

But colleges are in a bind either way. They are under pressure to open access and keep retention rates high. But the obvious solution to the low-learning problem---raise standards, assign more reading and writing, increase rigor---might improve test scores, but the other rates will fall. That is, if homework goes up and assignments get more rigorous, dropouts and flunk-outs will rise as well. At the very least, grades will plummet. Reaction will follow. Colleges are under intense pressure to get kids in the door and keep them there. If the retention rate falls, they have a lot of explaining to do in public.

So keep that dilemma in mind. The more you make students work, the fewer students will cross the finish line.

In the midst of a recession, might the colleges be able to explain that the completion problem often begins with high schools, let alone elementary schools, that have failed to carry out their part of the social contract.

THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU. President Ford's Whip Inflation Now campaign came complete with government-issue WIN buttons.

Our President has not yet authorized the issue of buttons for his Winning The Future campaign.

American Glob is producing the buttons.

RECLAIMING HIGHER EDUCATION.  What Profscam failed to do, because higher education could treat it as the rants of an outsider, and what How the University Works failed to do, for lack of a coherent narrative, Academically Adrift appears to be doing.  Kevin Carey of Education Sector recognizes that higher education should be higher.

The good news is that Academically Adrift offers a way forward along with its dire diagnosis. When colleges set high expectations for students, assign them a lot of books to read, and give them a lot of papers to write, students respond. This is true across a range of liberal arts and science majors. Whether students prefer a traditional curriculum focused on the classics or want to explore the outer reaches of new thinking is less the issue -- the most important thing is that they have the chance to attend a college staffed with well-trained teachers who are committed to helping their students work, engage, struggle, and improve.

Carnegie-Mellon's Stephen Brockmann, president of the German Studies Association, isn't reacting to Academically Adrift, but he acknowledges the possibility that casting loose from the Canon and the Core sets learners, well, adrift.

We humanists inherited a tradition more or less intact, with all its strengths and weaknesses, but it appears highly likely that we will not be able or willing to pass it on to them. That is a signal failure, and it is one for which we will pay dearly. No doubt there is lots of blame to go around, but instead of looking around for people to blame, it would be more constructive to save what we can and pass it along to the next generation. They are waiting, and we have a responsibility.

During an era of budgetary stringency accompanied by increased doubt about the utility of degrees, a restoration of the essentials might be the only cost-effective response available.

During our beginning-of-semester faculty assembly, the president of the university announced [a call for serious retrenchment]. The chair of the math department then asked, "Why don't we cut the bottom students?" The president didn't know what to say.

As the math chair said to me later, "We get over 200 students taking remedial math every semester. They're costly. Why don't we just raise admissions standards, and not take them?" If anyone objects that it isn't fair, is it as unfair as penalizing the student who can do math at college level?

That last question refers to cutting expenses by eliminating sections in calculus, statistics, or analysis, otherwise known as college-level mathematics, rather than by eliminating sections in Junior High Arithmetic for Young Adults.  There's an extension: what right do the innumerates have to drag down the curriculum for everybody else?

THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.  The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates his son discovering sports, and perhaps Guyland.

For all the gender theory I waded through -- and yes, dear readers, I did -- the on-the-ground version of masculinity that I keep coming back to as a regulative ideal is something like a gentleman. Not a Sensitive New Age Guy, since that always struck me as creepily passive-aggressive, and certainly not a frat guy. Something more like a self-possessed, confident man who thinks enough of himself to treat others with respect. Not a saint or a martyr, but a decent man who understands, even if imperfectly, that his actions affect other people. My grandfather was like that, even if he would never use terms like these.

Between Grandpa and his son, however, the gods placed the Consciousness Revolution, an era in which the humorless harridans with institutional haircuts hectored anyone so retrograde as to hold a door open.

SO BUY A SHARE OF THE CALGARY STAMPEDERS.  A University of Connecticut donor retracts his contribution after the athletic department does not consult with him on the hiring of a new football coach.  I mean, we're talking about ZooConn football, for crying out loud, not Notre Dame or Texas or Ohio State here, and for the kind of money the donor is carping about, he could become owner of a Canadian Football League team and fire coaches in the best Jerry Jones manner, without losing to the Packers first.  The good news is that this donor hasn't expressed his displeasure with Geno Auriemma.  (Via Inside Higher Education.)

WHITE HOUSE ON THREE. Our President's policy hopes face a strong reality check.

Gateway Pundit image via Betsy's Page.

His football prognostication also faces a reality check.  (Via Charlie Sykes).

President Obama probably did not help his reelection campaign much in Wisconsin when he predicted a Chicago Bears win over the Green and Gold in the NFC championship game and announced he would attend the Super Bowl to watch his home team compete for the Lombardi trophy in person.

After a White House press pool spray with President Hu Jintao in the Oval Office last week, a cameraman asked President Obama "If the Bears win, are you going to the Super Bowl?"

"Oh we're going," President Obama replied. "No doubt."

Those comments stung like frostbite in the bitter cold of the frozen tundra. Even players on the Packers took notice of the president's bold prophecy, and while the president's future schedule no longer includes the prospect of a trip to Dallas to attend Super Bowl XLV, the NFL's 2009 Defensive Player of the Year Charles Woodson told the rest of his Packers teammates to make their own plans to see the president at the White House.

"The president don't wanna come watch us [go] to the Super Bowl?" Woodson asked his teammates in the locker room during a huddle following Green Bay's 21-14 victory on Sunday. "Guess what? Guess what? We'll go see him!"

Our President also endorsed the Jets in a rally at Albany last week, thereby endearing himself to Franco's Italian Army, or whatever name the Steeler faithful go by these days.

The two largest followings away from the home state constitute Pittsburgh's fans and Packer Nation.  In Wisconsin, Republicans took advantage of a number of follies by the Democratic governor and legislature to take control of the state house, and there were some changes in Harrisburg last November.  How is that hopey-changey stuff working out?

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.  More reaction to Academically Adrift, this from the U.S. News education weblog.

In one of the book's few bright spots, students who majored in one of the liberal arts, such as philosophy, economics, chemistry, biology, and languages, did experience "significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study."

Those are disciplines in which there are meaningful performance tests, as well as the opportunity to test the ideas one plays with against observational or experimental data.

Why are so many students seemingly sleepwalking through school? Because they can. The authors argued that among the culprits is an educational system that doesn't expect much from its undergraduates. Many students can graduate from college without spending much time reading or writing. According to the researchers, 37 percent of students reported spending fewer than five hours a week on homework!

The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a book excerpt, which for the present is in front of the subscription wall.  A Chronicle news analysis appears to endorse the proposition that higher education should be higher.

In the statistical analysis that sums up their book, they identify two significant college-level variables. First, all else equal, students' CLA scores are more likely to improve if they report that faculty members at their college have high expectations. Second, students' scores are more likely to improve if they say they have taken at least one writing-intensive course and at least one reading-intensive course in the previous semester.

It might sound trite, [coauthor Richard] Arum says, but those observations boil down to the lesson that colleges must find ways to build cultures of academic rigor. He says that task is something that each campus will need to do for itself. It would be a huge mistake, he believes, for the government to impose a new learning-accountability regime from outside.

Donna Heiland, vice president of the Teagle Foundation, which also supported the study, agrees. "Even though this is a book with a lot of sobering news," she said, "I think it also contains some things to be encouraged by. First of all, it's encouraging to see new evidence that college does have an effect"—that is, that writing-intensive and reading-intensive courses actually do improve the CLA scores of students across the ability spectrum.

"It would be depressing to think that students just sorted themselves into colleges based on their SAT scores and life histories, and then essentially marched in place," Ms. Heiland said.

What is depressing is that graduates are not equipped to reconstruct their civilization from scratch, should that be required, let alone to take an interest in its construction or deconstruction.

Among the most troubling findings from the postgraduate survey, Mr. Arum says, is that 30 percent of the recent graduates said that they read a newspaper "monthly or never," even online.

"How do you sustain a democratic society," Mr. Arum said, "when large numbers of the most educationally elite sector of your population are not seeing it as a normal part of their everyday experience to keep up with the world around them? We need higher education to take the institutional responsibility for educating people broadly to see this as a basic part of civic life."

The Chronicle's Kevin Carey summarizes: 'Trust Us' Won't Cut It Anymore.

Critics like Charles Murray will probably say those students should not have gone to college in the first place. But that would amount to condemning them for the failures of their institutions, because the study found that how much students learn has a lot do with how much colleges ask them to work. After controlling for demographics, parental education, SAT scores, and myriad other factors, students who were assigned more books to read and more papers to write learned more. Students who spent more hours studying alone learned more. Students taught by approachable faculty who enforced high expectations learned more. "What students do in higher education matters," the authors note. "But what faculty members do matters too."

Charles Murray's position appears to be that real higher education is hard work, and College Lite is a fraud on everybody, a position that the higher education lobby might be pushed to accept, preferably out of pride, but out of necessity if recognize the breach of trust they must.

Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

Financial aid also matters. The study found that students whose financial aid came primarily in the form of grants learned more than those who were paying mostly with loans. Debt burdens can be psychological and temporal as well as financial, with students substituting work for education in order to manage their future obligations. Learning was also negatively correlated with­—surprise—time spent in fraternities and sororities.

Or pursuing the supposedly lucrative but genuinely soul-deadening degrees in the expectation of being able to pay off those loans?  Apparently working one's way through university is no longer an option.

The study makes clear that there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with hard work. They learn some things worth knowing. The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning. Others don't get even that.

Consider too that the study measured the growth of only those students who were still in college two and four years later. The all-too-common dropouts weren't included. It's a fair bet their results were even worse.

Who is hurt the most by all this? Students saddled with thousands of dollars in debt and no valuable skills, certainly. Even worse, workers who never went to college in the first place, languishing in their careers for lack of a college credential. To them, the higher-education system must seem like a gigantic confidence game, with students and colleges conspiring to produce hollow degrees that nonetheless define the boundaries of opportunity.

Who else is hurt?  The students with a decent high school education, solid work habits, and ambition but without the money or connections or extracurriculars or spectacular talents to get into the most selective universities, who might find themselves bored or overwhelmed at the sub-prime party schools?  As long as there are more people capable of doing the top-tier work than there are spaces in top tier entering classes, there are opportunities for other universities (are you listening?  Northern Illinois?  Wayne State?  Whitewater?) to restore that trust and do their students a service.  The professors who pursued an academic vocation, only to be steered into a simulacrum of scholarship to keep up appearances and to be pressed to go easy on the clientele, in order for the retention and completion rates to look good?  The employers who end up having to provide the training in fundamentals the universities, heck, the high schools failed to do?

Fortunately, the way forward is clear. The students who learned the most in the study came from all manner of academic backgrounds. Nobody is doomed to failure.

Colleges can start by renewing their commitment to the liberal arts. Let's be honest—a lot of students are majoring in business simply because they plan to get jobs in businesses and need a degree of some kind to do it. Making college less vocational will actually help more students learn the skills they need to succeed in their careers.

The study suggests that we have overcomplicated the practice of higher education. It comes down to what it always has—deep engagement with complex ideas and texts, difficult and often solitary study, the discipline to write, revise, and write again. What students need most aren't additional social opportunities and elaborate services. They need professors who assign a lot of reading and writing. Professors, in turn, need a structure of compensation and prestige that rewards a commitment to teaching. Some object that today's hedonist undergraduates won't do the work. But the research suggests otherwise. Colleges are responsible for taking the first step toward reaching a newer, higher equilibrium of mutual expectations.

Let the thing be pressed.

Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.

There are market tests, and those market tests are undermining the value of credentials faster than any curricular reform will.

A RATE YOUR STUDENTS MOMENT. Stoner cap: check. Disengaged expression: check. Earbuds: check. Slouch: check.

Chicago Sun-Times photo by John J. Kim.

The Bears' medical staff removed Mr Cutler from Sunday's Packer victory for a medial collateral ligament tear.  He took some stick from callers to Chicago and Milwaukee radio stations for not showing more interest in the proceedings on the field.

Those callers might be our current students' future senior job-mates, shift supervisors, office managers, directors of personnel, or executive vice-presidents.

Be guided accordingly.

RECLAIMING HIGHER EDUCATION.  Yesterday, we noted anthropologist Lionel Tiger questioning the verities of his discipline.  Last October, we surveyed introspection in sociology.

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed notes a vision for the future worked out at a conference of faculty unions.

Participants reviewed and many expressed support for a set of organizing principles contained in a draft document called "Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century" that was prepared by the California Faculty Association. It advocates for more scrupulous analysis of calls to reform higher education. "Wholesale embrace of change without careful thought and deliberation can take us in the wrong direction," the document states, "not toward reforming higher education but, in fact, toward deforming precisely those aspects of American higher education that have made it the envy of the world."

Yes, changing the formula for Coca-Cola, or letting Brett Favre retire and unretire, will have deleterious effects.  Picking the wrong elements of current practice ditto.

The document stakes out seven broad principles: increased inclusivity and access for students; a broad, diverse, liberal arts curriculum; less reliance on contingent as opposed to tenure-track faculty; incorporating technology with an eye toward maintaining educational quality; more judicious balancing of short-term cuts with long-term costs; better state support; and the adoption of evaluation metrics that go beyond graduation rates.

Those proposals do not address the problems of inefficiently many students in college, coreless curricula that deteriorate into gen-eds to get out of the way, the latest computer fads, regressive transfers, or degree programs that fail market tests.

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.  Kay Hymowitz of City Journal recalls the litigious impulse of activists, back in the days of the sheltered industrial economy the U.S. inherited after World War II.

The second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s who revived the moribund suffragette movement came of age during and after World War II, a time when confidence in Washington was high. Modeling their aspirations on the civil rights movement, they saw government as the vehicle they would ride to their liberation. America’s powerful strain of don’t-tread-on-me libertarianism was largely quiescent, and Great Society liberalism was the default mode for the young and educated. Bringing legal complaints before judges and lobbying legislators, bureaucrats, and civil servants to take action on a multitude of “women’s issues”—that is, barriers standing in the way of female advancement—seemed the only way to go.

Technocracy, expertise, Presidential Power.  Ms Hymowitz argues the formula didn't work for everybody, particularly for all ambitious women.

Tech geeks, businesswomen, and ranchers: not Lesley Stahl feminism, that’s for sure.

Further unsettling the feminist framework was the vigorous maternalism of the newcomers. Many heartland women had seen in feminism’s enthusiastic careerism, as well as its resentment of men and domesticity, an implicit criticism of their own lives. Hence their rejection of the feminist label even as they joined the workforce and lived lives that looked, in many respects, consistent with the movement’s principles.

Vanguardism is like that.  The corrective is coming a little late for me, but come it will.

FOUR MORE QUARTERS TO PLAY. Summon the echoes: Halas. Lombardi. Arctic temperatures.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photo by Benny Sieu.

The Packers have one more game. The Steel Curtain. The tradition of the Sixties. The tradition of the Seventies. On the Cowboys' field in two weeks.

HIGHER EDUCATION SELF-DESTRUCTS.  Lionel Tiger doesn't call it the chickification of the university, but you get the idea.

This is clearly a reason for the growing disenchantment and ineffectiveness of male students which has led to a disproportionate ratio of female to male graduates is at least 40% male to 60% female. From their first day of school, males are less successful than females. Even in nursery school, four of five students expelled are boys (how does anyone get expelled from nursery school?) and the overwhelming number of victims of Ritalin are boys.

This largely reflects the ability of women to succeed in the system and the plight of men to flounder. However it becomes necessary to question the system itself, if only because it is largely publicly supported and such a discordant result of taxpayer money is in itself volatile. The system has often very mushily configured sex-gender,-males- females, as post-modern derivatives of cultural norms rather than focusing on the nature of sex itself. In this formulation, there is no essential sexual reality, only its description, evaluation, and codification as if life were a series of competing magazine articles.

Perhaps he protests too much, but he is correct to fear that his discipline has lost the good of the intellect.

This sort of folderol recently prompted the American Anthropological Association to question the use of the term "science" in its description of its work. Surely everyone knows everything is relative, science is just a style, a chimpanzee is just a congeries of attitudes to chimpanzees, post-modern argumentativeness renders discrete realities into conceptual hash. There also rests here an approach to males which demeans and discourages them such as the rape seminars which are common as first day programs in countless colleges such as my own Rutgers.

Meanwhile, the job markets for engineers, computer programmers, accountants, and (dare I say it) investment managers remains stronger than those for cultural studies majors.