The Definition of Insanity and Writing Into a Vacuum; Time for a Reboot

Psychologists say the definition of insanity is to attempt to do the same thing over and over again, but expect different results. I like to think I am not insane.

Friends said one cannot start in 2015 a general news and opinion blog based on rationality and hope to find an audience. I thought I could prove them wrong by attempting to write fairly high-quality pieces that I hoped would find readers and followers. Well, I was wrong and they were right. The numbers I am generating for this site is pitiful. General news and opinion (though with binary biases and slant) can be found on myriad other websites that readers already regularly peruse or subscribe. Niche is really the only way to go. With that in mind, I will be starting this blog and website over from scratch with a narrow theme that will focus like a laser beam. This niche topic is derived from the posts that have received the most views and likes, so it makes sense to serve this audience that is evidently not finding this content elsewhere.

See you here again in a couple weeks with the niche reboot. Thanks.

Raising a University’s Ranking: Hike Tuition and Build Out

A great New York Times article from a couple months ago highlights part of the problem of enormous waste at American universities:

How to Raise a University’s Profile: Pricing and Packaging

The article profiles George Washington University in DC that used to be a safety school for children of wealthy families who could not get into Georgetown or University of Virginia (interestingly New York University is also mentioned, which used to be considered a safety school as well). By gaming the statistics of the US News and World Report rankings, GWU has now risen to number 54 in the rankings. Of course, these rankings are mostly meaningless and measure statistics blindly without analyzing the reasons behind a lower or higher stat. For example, the rate at which students graduate within four years of initial matriculation is weighed heavily as an indication of an excellent program that streamlines systemic processes with superb advising so students graduate “on time.” Institutions with lower four-year graduation rates are punished in the rankings, even though the lower rate could be an indicator of a rigorous academic program that holds students to high standards (i.e. they sometimes fail and need another year to graduate). Any institution can ensure a high four-year graduation rate by enabling students to pass all their classes and requiring they take 15 credits every semester. A diploma mill would rank extremely high in this US News & World Report category, which obviously makes no sense. Using statistics without analyzing the roots and meanings behind them is foolishness.

GWU raised its reputation by hiking tuition to one of the highest levels in the country. It’s the “Gucci” syndrome of where a product is judged superior because it has the highest price tag. And building extravagant buildings and recreation centers created an “institution on the move” facade. It worked for Gucci, and for George Washington University and New York University. They were middling safety schools in the 1980s that are now considered beacons of learning and academic prestige. This is not to say that both schools have some excellent professors and resources (as Gucci uses high quality fabrics and leather), in addition to great locations, but a good chunk of a student’s tuition goes to unnecessary pomp and circumstance. This is an irony that shouldn’t be lost on graduating students as they hear that marching tune at their graduation ceremony… your tuition also went to fund a dean of graduation and possibly a whole office dedicated to that one day.

Revenge Embedded in Culture and Media, Banned by Law

Revenge is popular at the movies. Liam Neeson has practically banked his career on revenge flicks after starting out as a “serious” actor in Schindler’s List, Michael Collins and other Oscar-worthy films. More actors have jumped on the revenge bandwagon such as Sean Penn and others:

Revenge Movies Offer Mythic Middle-Aged Protectors

Revenge is one of the oldest human emotions and drives stories even from ancient times. It is a primal urge to right a wrong and see a villain get his/her comeuppance. In olden days, taking the “law” into one’s hands was the only way to get justice as there was no law nearby or available. But with the advent of the industrial age and the rise of crowded urban areas, governments asserted their power and frowned on revenge as it was extra-legal and out of the control of elites and the powerful. The function of modern law is not necessarily to achieve justice or enforce ethics and morality, but rather to keep a lid on things on society. Keeping the peace and harmony of society is the paramount value, as how else can business and capitalism function? But by removing revenge as a tool of getting justice, many people feel powerless and project onto the film screen to live vicariously through the vengeance-taker.

Revenge can be seen as a moral imperative; that is we must get justice on a wrong-doer otherwise that person will commit wrongs upon others. The psychopath must be taken down a notch to know they cannot get away with their damaging actions with impunity. There are many things that are perfectly legal, but are not ethical, and therefore there is no legal recourse against someone who knows how to skirt those lines (and it’s not hard either). Twitter and other social media can ban revenge porn postings:

Twitter Takes Steps To Combat Stolen Nudes And Revenge Porn

But it’s not going to stop it. Wronged people will find a way to get revenge, and if it’s not through posting nudes of someone on Twitter then they will find other sites or other methods. With no legal outlet for getting justice, don’t be surprised when people become outlaws to get the satisfaction of a balanced and just order. In the meantime, they will continue to flock to revenge movies to satisfy their primal desire vicariously and then manifest motivation to get revenge in their real life.

Fake Schools, Real Babies and the American Dream

The Feds busted a few “schools” that enrolled students, mostly from Asia, giving them I-20 student visas, but didn’t require the students to attend classes. In essence, the students were paying tuition for a visa to visit and then live in the US:

Feds: 3 collected millions in fraudulent school scheme

The silliest part of the article is when the Feds accuse the schools of being a national security threat because terrorists could be using these student visas as cover. Puhleazee. First, the students were mostly from China and Korea, which are hardly terrorist hotbeds. Second, any student issued an I-20 student visa has already gone through a vetting process by the US government and its law enforcement apparatus. If there were any suspected terrorists among the “student” applicants, then they would have been flagged and denied well before entry. This accusation is just another federal government smokescreen to make this fraud into something it’s not really about, and play security theater (which they love).

So what is it really about? It’s about money and people from overcrowded countries wanting to come chase this thing called the American Dream. These people feel it’s a human right to live where they want to live. For most of human history, people picked up and went wherever they wanted to start new lives. It’s only in the past century that nation-states have established strict rules and regulations at the borders to keep people out. And it doesn’t work very well still. Why? Because people don’t want to live on top of each other in super crowded conditions. South Korea is an advanced country with modern amenities, but it’s also really packed with people. And that includes even the countryside (I’ve been there). Koreans come to the US not because they’re fleeing any terrible conditions in Korea, except the lack of breathing room (physically and socially). This is even doubly so for Chinese, who live in a packed country where most people live on the eastern seaboard. Even though China has made great economic strides, many Chinese want to come to the US for the space, and the opportunity to one day own a house that is not physically attached to anyone else. That’s the real American Dream in 2015: some breathing room, as economically China and South Korea are on parity with the US these days.

Some Chinese are so driven to realize this dream that pregnant mothers arrange to come to the US to give birth so the child gets US citizenship. Recently some entrepreneurs offered services that arranged for a fee to bring Chinese women to the US to give birth but they were busted by the Feds who claimed this was fraud. How is it fraud? As far as I can see, the women and the entrepreneurs played by the rules. They came to the US and gave birth, and by US law, the baby gets citizenship. That’s the rules of the game, and they played it fair and square. If the Feds don’t like it, then change the law so not all babies born in the US are citizens, instead tie citizenship to the birth of the mother as many countries do. The companies offering these services should not be shut down and arrested, the fault is not in their business plan, the fault is in the structure of citizenship law itself. Change the law and don’t punish the entrepreneurs.

Studying Chinese (or pretty much any language) Will Not Get You a Job

If English is your native (or near native) language, then studying another language will not do anything to help you get a job. Unfortunately many students believed the mirage of learning a language as a false gateway to riches in a distant land, and thought spending a year or two (which is really isn’t enough to learn Chinese or most languages anyway) upping their language skills would make them more marketable. In fact, it doesn’t.

U.S. students losing interest in China as dream jobs prove elusive

You will spend a year learning basic Chinese and then realize there are quite literally millions of Chinese people who not only are native speakers of Chinese, but also know English way better than your Chinese will ever hope to be (remember most of them have been studying English diligently since kindergarten). The logic of most corporations is to hire locals in China and other countries, and not import American or British expatriates who will cost more anyway. In addition, local employees in China and other countries count as diversity hires, which ticks off another box on the corporate social responsibility factoid sheets.

Don’t study a foreign language because you think it will get you a job. In fact, it won’t help you at all. And I can attest to that from personal experience as well. If you want to study a foreign language because you dream of reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian or understand Latin American cinema without subtitles, then that’s wonderful for your personal intellectualism. But don’t study a language under the delusion that it will help you get a leg up in the job market as you’ll only be disappointed.

Are We Near The End of Today’s College and University System?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Long story short, there are powerful, entrenched interests committed to maintaining the currently profitable structure of colleges and universities. Change will not happen until students (and parents) en masse demand accountability and results, and then stop enrolling. Joe Nocera in the New York Times makes some good points about the current problems of American (we can include global, since other countries mimic the American system to a large degree) higher education:

Joe Nocera: College for a New Age

As stated on this site previously, there are only three things that a college/university needs: great teachers, great students and great resources (labs, digital library, art supplies, etc.). The rest is superfluous, yet students pay a fortune for the tremendous waste of administrators and staff assigned to athletics, curriculum assessment, marketing, public relations, diversity, etc. Many of these separate offices and administrative functions could be greatly streamlined and reduced to a faculty service role, saving a ton of money in student tuition. Faculty governance is supposed to be the bedrock of American higher education anyway, so let’s do away with the administrators and stick them back in the classrooms (if they can teach well).

Nocera hits at the usual suspects:
1) Bloated and wasteful athletic programs that have nothing to do with the educational mission of a college/university. Replace them with intramural athletic programs that are great for students, faculty and staff to interact and exercise. There is no reason to maintain the myriad number of teams, coaches, staff, travel expenses, scholarships and facilities required for NCAA sports. Athletics is the single biggest waste of money on campus, and should be cut down to intramural programs that benefit the entire community socially and physically.
2) Universities (and colleges to a lesser degree) emphasize research over teaching, but what students really want is great teachers that inspire, educate and mentor them. Most students care little (if at all) if their professor publishes in a first-rate journal; they just want a great communicator who cares about their learning, and knows how to teach. Yet teaching is devalued by the university, and professors who concentrate on teaching are looked upon with suspicion as intellectual dilettantes who only want to be popular with students.

Where Nocera misses the plot is believing online classes and degrees will replace “real life” classes and institutions. A big part of the college experience is the social community that is formed with fellow students, and sometimes professors. It’s just not the same sitting at home behind a computer to get this invaluable experience and contacts. Steve Ballmer became President of Microsoft by hanging out with Bill Gates at Harvard playing poker late at night. Unless telepresence makes huge technological breakthroughs in the near future, these kinds of friendships and networks just won’t form in online classes. Colleges and universities are about more than hitting the books. Friendships, experiences and interests are made that can last a lifetime. Learning face-to-face with peers and professors is a more effective learning environment than posting comments in a discussion board and reading assigned texts alone. The virtual cannot replace the real in education.

As for those powerful, entrenched interests preventing any meaningful change in higher education, that will be the subject of another post…

Daylight Saving Times Should End (and the problem of political inertia)

Daylight saving time arrived this past weekend and 70 countries around the world sprang one hour forward for spring. John Oliver on Last Week Tonight did a nice, short piece on the history of daylight savings time and why it should “no longer be a thing”:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Daylight Saving Time – How Is This Still A Thing? (HBO)

Besides debunking the myth of it starting to benefit farmers, the piece also illustrates why a social policy put into place 100 years ago is oftentimes not relevant today due to tectonic technological and societal change. Yet, it’s still with us due to political inertia. Once a law or policy is put on the books, it is very difficult for politicians to muster any will to remove these laws when they are no longer necessary or wanted. The Republicans talk the talk about freedom, but they use their power only to deregulate for corporations and businesses. Some of that is necessary (particularly for small businesses), but why don’t they deregulate the policies that restrict individuals? Instead they go along with more laws regulating individuals, taking away the freedom to make choices, face consequences, and solve one’s own problems/issues (for example, Republicans have been major proponents for so-called “revenge porn” laws).

As for daylight savings time, why not just spring forward forever? Does anyone really enjoy sudden early darkness when we fall backward? Reset the time zones so sunrise is 6:30 or 7:00 AM, and let darkness fall later in the day. It’s self-evident that this change should be made, but political inertia won’t allow it. Every time a law gets passed, it’s hard to get rid of, so lawmakers should think hard before doing anything, and perhaps  spend their time undoing the damage to individual freedom that previous lawmakers have done. That would be progress, but instead we stand still in time’s past.

Do Not Dilute Standards for “Diversity” at New York City High Schools

The best public high schools in New York City (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech) have one of the most most egalitarian and meritocratic admissions systems in the United States. There is a test for admission, and only the students with the highest scores are admitted. Nothing else matters. This is how it is done in many of the world’s schools, particularly in Asia, but, unfortunately, not in the US, where diversity seen by some as a great value even though one is born into a “diversity class” and cannot achieve or change this status. Every year when the statistics come out for next year’s freshman classes at these high schools, it shows little, if any, increase in the number of students who self-identify as Hispanic and African-American:

Lack of Diversity Persists in Admissions to New York City’s Elite High Schools

In the article, at least, no one is saying the test is biased against certain socially constructed backgrounds. The test itself is the same stringency for all its takers. The only advantage examinees can acquire is to take (and take to heart through hard study) prep classes geared to doing well on the exam. If you don’t study hard, then you don’t do well on the exam. Nothing else is taken into consideration, including legacy admissions that unfairly favor the children of alumni. It is very rare in the US for an institution to maintain such high standards without eventually submitting to political pressure to lower standards to achieve a socially desirable end. It is hoped that the New York State legislature does not water down the exam or entry standards for these meritocratic and superb high schools. This is one time when the dysfunctional nature of Albany legislative politics bodes well for nothing being done, which is the best possible outcome.

Most Private Colleges and Universities Not Worth the Cost

Another private college closing soon in the US:

Sweet Briar College to Close

With tuition approaching $35,000 plus another $12,000 for room and board, the cost versus benefits of a private college/university (that is not an Ivy) is just not worth it. Yes, many of these private institutions offer 50% “scholarships” to almost every student in a somewhat dishonest marketing ploy to attract students who feel proud to receive a “scholarship,” but even that is no longer enough to attract potential students in such a tough job market. In other words, $17,000 tuition plus $12,000 for room and board is still a lot of money. That’s about $30,000 per year (not including all the other ancillary expenses of life) over four (maybe five) years to get “credentialed” in a starting job that pays on average $40,000 per year with long hours and little job security. And, of course, many graduates cannot find any salaried jobs at all, and taking hourly wage work that they didn’t really need a higher education degree for in the first place. It’s finally coming to the point that young people and their parents are asking the question: “Is the high expense worth the cost?” Short answer: In most cases, it’s not.

Unless you’re going to an Ivy League or a Stanford, MIT, Chicago, and perhaps a few other truly elite private institutions, the so-called prestige of a private university degree is just not worth it. Small liberal arts colleges like Oberlin, Swarthmore, Williams, etc. are indeed excellent higher education institutions that are committed to teaching (which is what most undergraduates care about most: great teachers) but most employers and the general public have little clue about these schools. They might as well be Sweet Briar College or some other small failing institution in the minds of most people, and they have little prestige outside the rarefied air of people who read the New Yorker and Atlantic magazines. Yes, you do receive a great education there, but don’t kid yourself that the “prestige” of the name is going to be some magic ticket to a great job after you graduate. It’s not.

Receiving a great education can’t be said for the myriad other small colleges that dot the country with little to justify their high price tag. In the New York City area, there are around a dozen small Catholic affiliated colleges that charge high tuition but have no prestige (ignore the phony public relations spiel they print in glossy brochures and websites) and nothing to differentiate themselves to justify the cost. Students of middling means would be better offer in almost every case going to City University of New York or State University of New York, and actually get a better education (the public institutions attract much better faculty with higher pay, excellent benefits and pensions) while saving a ton of money. It is completely irrational to go to these small colleges when there is a clearly superior, inexpensive alternative available, unless one has wealthy parents footing the bill or you don’t mind taking out huge loans (just don’t complain later when you have to pay them back). Don’t get lured into the false prestige game as aprivate college degree is not going to give you a leg up in the job hunt when compared to your public college competition.

Remember that a great school requires three things: great teachers, great students and great educational resources (labs, art materials, library, etc.). That’s what you should look for when choosing a school. The rest of it is fluff, but you pay a high price for the fluff and that will be the topic of a future post.

Getting (and Keeping) a “Good” Job in 2015 No Easy Task

While the US government and news organizations report better employment statistics month-by-month and quarter-by-quarter, the anecdotal evidence does not paint as optimistic a picture. Of classmates from high school, undergraduate and graduate schools I attended, the only ones who enjoy secure positions with good salaries work for the government: whether that be universities, schools, law enforcement (local and federal), fire departments, career officers in the military, or part of the professional bureaucracy (positions that do not change after elections). Those who went to work in the private sector made some good money for a while, but eventually lost their position due to a number of factors:

1) Company implosion – working at Lehman Bros was high-flying for a while, and then nothing afterward (Lehman is a CV stigma). Another was a VP at Nokia in the early 2000s, and then the marketplace shifted and Nokia pretty much collapsed along with its jobs.

2) Job sector implosion – almost everyone working in journalism got hit badly.

3) STEM age ceiling – hired straight out of university but by the time you reach 40, you’re old and overpaid, so you get dumped for a new college graduate. This is particularly true for computer science majors, who also have to compete (on a not level playing field) with STEM (H1-B1) visa immigrants.

For those who suffered one of those three fates, it has been hard to find new positions not just akin to their old ones, but anywhere even near it. Most have tried starting their own businesses, and I think that’s the new wave for the future. If you work in the private sector, don’t expect to stay there for very long, and you’re especially vulnerable once you get to the 40s and 50s age range. Most young people would be wise to get a job in the public sector for stability and security, very good benefits, and even a pension. Though I have a multi-year contract at my current fine job, who knows what could happen after that? More thoughts on jobs in upcoming posts, including an experiment I have been conducting since last fall.