Tag Archives: college

I wish I had all my notes from col­lege in plain­text Markdown-formatted files. As I get back in to read­ing more dif­fi­cult texts I’m writ­ing up chap­ter notes in nvALT.

The more I do this, the more I find myself going back to them and search­ing for pre­vi­ously noted phrases, def­i­n­i­tions, or quotes. My rem­i­nis­cent wish is for nvALT to be a sin­gle data store for all my read­ing anno­ta­tions. The prob­lem is I have all these NeoOffice and Pages files from college.

Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken:

In the acad­emy, we’re fine with any­thing that low­ers the cost of edu­ca­tion. We love those kinds of changes. But when some­one threat­ens to lower the price, well, then we start behav­ing like Teamsters in tweed.

Fantastic piece from Clay Shirky about why some of the biggest threats to col­lege come from within the system.

A moment of dream­ing about higher edu­ca­tion:

As uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion becomes a more highly val­ued commodity-as you pay four­teen thou­sand a year for a UC edu­ca­tion, instead of nothing-the uni­ver­sity expe­ri­ence has, indeed, become more a plea­sur­able self-cultivation, since uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tors pre­fer cus­tomers to work­ers. This is why uni­ver­si­ties spend more and more money on new dorms, new cam­pus pro­grams, and new ways of mak­ing their cam­pus expe­ri­ence an attrac­tive prospect for incom­ing fresh­men: as uni­ver­si­ties tran­si­tion towards a customer-payment model, they mov­ing out of edu­ca­tion busi­ness into the pro­duc­tion of edu­ca­tion prod­ucts. They spend less and less money on class­rooms and teach­ers, the spaces where stu­dent work hap­pens, because they are, quite lit­er­ally, not inter­ested in stu­dent work. Their finan­cial inter­est is in student-customers, and it shows.

Really inter­est­ing essay.

College was my biggest mis­take:

$44,000 might as well have been a mil­lion dol­lars, because in my mind they were equally unfath­omable– with only $300 in my check­ing account, I had to make a deci­sion whether or not to bor­row $176,000. Makes sense.

I remem­ber fac­ing a sim­i­lar deci­sion at 18. I with­drew the $6,000 from my sav­ings account and wrote a $5,000 check to Whitman.

The other grand bought me a MacBook. On that MacBook I taught myself basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered WordPress.

I wouldn’t say my time at col­lege was a mis­take. Too much good came out of it to say that. But, I do know what the more pro­duc­tive use of my time and money was.

Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses. Particularly this quote:

The col­lege has also charged 27 other mem­bers of SAE, stem­ming from events in the 2011 pledge term. While the other stu­dents all cat­e­gor­i­cally deny doing any­thing ille­gal, the infor­ma­tion that Lohse pro­vided to Dartmouth offi­cials may directly impli­cate him in haz­ing. As a result, Lohse – the only stu­dent to come for­ward vol­un­tar­ily – may be the only stu­dent who is ulti­mately punished.

Also, see “Allegations of haz­ing lev­eled against TKE ini­ti­a­tion prac­tices” and Daniel’s post. I have an idea for an enter­pris­ing reporter: take a deep look at fra­ter­nity abuse reports like this and answer:

  • What per­cent­age are fol­lowed up on by news orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­larly col­lege news­pa­pers, after the ini­tial report?
  • What per­cent­age result in con­crete action under­taken by col­lege administrations?
  • In how many cases is the stu­dent who reported the offense the one who takes the brunt of post-publication attacks?
  • How fre­quently are reports the sec­ond, third, etc. time alle­ga­tions have been made against a spe­cific fraternity?

There are more ques­tions that would be inter­est­ing but the above would be a start.