Even the dark cloud of the current recession has some silver linings. One of them seems to be an unexpected up-tick in the number of college students majoring in engineering, an academic field that actually leads to production of useful things, such as bridges and medical devices, in contrast to, say, women’s studies, which produces […]
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Who are the smartest graduate students? You’ve probably already guessed that one: physicists. Second down in the brains ranking are mathematicians, then computer scientists, then economists and practically any sort of engineer. Such are the results of an analysis made in 2004 by Christian Roessler, a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland, in […]
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A recently released report that claims to poke holes in the idea of Asian-American students as the “model minority” – excelling academically and outperforming white students in mathematics, engineering, and the sciences – looks more like the latest phase of a long-running effort by Asian-American activists to persuade college administrators to establish admissions quotas and […]
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The May 30th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education ponders the state of Americans’ knowledge about science (quite low) and what to do about it. The Chronicle reports that one-third of Adults do not know that the earth revolves around the sun, and only three-fifth agreed with the statement “Astrology is not at all […]
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Some important articles lose audience because of faulty please-don’t-read-me headlines. Christina Hoff Sommers’s article in The American, “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like a Man?,” featured today on Minding the Campus, is surely one of these. Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, argues that the “title-nining” of science education now looms as a serious […]
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The following is a call for papers to be delivered at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meeting next May aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us, so as we struggle to understand, we ask you readers for help. This passage, we can all […]
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Peter Berkowitz appears today in the Wall Street Journal writing on “Our Compassless Colleges.” At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support – “liberal” education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to […]
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