Higher Education
It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant…
If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even elite publics like Berkeley or Madison.
40% of those in higher education attend community colleges. Two out of every three community college students experiences food insecurity; about half of community college students are housing insecure. About a quarter of all college students in the US are 25 or older. About the same percentage are single parents. 40% of undergraduate students work 30 hours a week or more. Almost three-quarters graduate with student loan debt – debt that they may well carry into retirement.
The idea that college students are sheltered and pampered isn’t just wrong; it’s insulting.
But that’s the story that’s gets told. Again and again and again.
Excerpt by Tracy Chou via Quartz
In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace delivered a now-famous commencement address. It starts with the story of the fish in water, who spend their lives not even knowing what water is. They are naively unaware of the ocean that permits their existence, and the currents that carry them.
The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He talks about finding appreciation for the richness of humanity and society. But it is the core concept of meta-cognition, of examining and editing what it is that we choose to contemplate, that has fixated me as someone who works in the tech industry.
As much as code and computation and data can feel as if they are mechanistically neutral, they are not. Technology products and services are built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those products and services—which in turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes to a frightening degree…
But it is never too late to be curious. Each of us can choose to learn, to read, to talk to people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and ethically. I hope that we all do so—so that we can come to acknowledge the full complexity and wonder of the world we live in, and be thoughtful in designing the future of it.
From
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014
The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking.
Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path….
[In Germany,] both employers and employees want more from an apprenticeship than short-term training… “In the future, there will be robots to turn the screws,” one educator told us. “We don’t need workers for that. What we need are people who can solve problems”—skilled, thoughtful, self-reliant employees who understand the company’s goals and methods and can improvise when things go wrong or when they see an opportunity to make something work better…
What makes dual training work, every manager told us, are the standardized occupational profiles, or curricula, developed by the federal government in collaboration with employers, educators, and union representatives…
It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued.
Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow 18.8% between now and 2024, according to the BLS, while computer systems analyst jobs will increase 20.9% by 2024. Market research analyst and marketing specialist jobs, which also require those analytical skills, will increase 18.6%…
Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about.
In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the most valuable resources – a small list of top resources and starting points. This will be most valuable to any data practitioner who has very little free time.
Source: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science, Machine Learning
Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016
“If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
“Our society is evolving much more rapidly than any institution of higher education,” Crow said, pointing out that the current production of college degrees in the U.S. is woefully behind population growth. To achieve its goals in graduation rates, higher education needs a new wave of innovation, he said, citing his own university’s efforts to create a new model of education where “full immersion and digital immersion are possible, costs are constrained and the scale is all scales, from individual learner to massive groups of learners, all operating at the same time.”
Crow outlined a framework for innovation wherein knowledge is emphatically at the center of every educational enterprise, “like a black hole of unbelievable intense energy.” Built around that, he said, are immersive, technology-enhanced learning (both on-campus and online), massive-scale learning, and the concept of education through exploration. “Now there are no more teachers, no more professors at the front of the stage — they are engaged in the creation of learning environments that allow people to learn at scales and in ways that have previously been not possible.”…
“At the start of the 21st century, humankind finds itself on a non-sustainable course – a course that, unless it is changed, will lead to catastrophes of awesome consequences. At the same time, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities that could lead to much more exciting lives and glorious civilizations.
“This could be humanity’s last century, or it could be the century in which civilization sets sail towards a far more spectacular future. Decisions that will lead to these wildly different conclusions have to be made soon. They depend upon our being able to understand the options of the 21st century, think logically about our future, and collectively take rational action.
“We live on a small, beautiful and totally isolated planet, but its population is becoming too large, and growing rapidly in its desire to consume products that need resources beyond what the earth can provide. Technology is becoming powerful enough to wreck the planet. We are traveling at breakneck speed into an age of extremes – extremes in wealth and poverty, extremes in technology and the experiments that scientists want to perform, extreme forces of globalism, weapons of mass destruction and terrorists acting in the name of religion. If we are to survive decently, we have to learn how to manage this situation.
“The message of this book is vitally important. We have reached a situation where grand-scale decisions have to be made”
- Excerpts from James Martin’s 2007 book and documentary (preview). Martin is founder of the Oxford Martin School (previously the 21st Century School).
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever, and leading more miserable lives. …
What country has the highest exports in the world today? It’s the country with the highest wage rates and union restrictions. Germany has become more of a power, not less of a power as the world has become more global…
In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare…
[What are we missing when we measure the GDP?] You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I’d rather go to school at Humboldt…
- Excerpts from Salon.com