But the group bringing the lawsuit, Students for Fair Admissions, won a powerful PR ally this week: Vijay Chokal-Ingam, an Indian American who happens to be the brother of Fox comedy star Mindy Kaling, revealed that he won acceptance to medical school by claiming to be black. Frustrated at being rejected by medical schools in part because of mediocre test scores and a 3.1 grade point average...
Reviews matter: fascinating data from Tripadvisor
Those reviews carry demonstrable weight. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research found that for every percentage point a hotel improves its online reputation, its “RevPAR” (revenue per available room) goes up by 1.4 percent; for every point its reputation improves on a five-point scale, a hotel can raise prices by 11 percent without seeing bookings fall off. […] The...
W.H. Auden’s syllabus: read 6,000 pages in one semester
Do we really need education for economic growth?
A heinous question, I know. We must not question the education-industrial complex! From Tyler Cowen’s blog: Advancement in China’s school system was highly competitive, and the odds of reaching the top of the educational ladder were very steep. Of the 32.9 million children who entered primary school in 1965, only 9 percent could expect to enter junior high school. Only 15 percent of...
Laughing at the brownshirts
You know you’re in trouble when people begin to openly mock you. Some commentary on the ridiculous idea of a “safe space” on campus: The problem arises when the idea of “a right to be safe” is extended to “a right to be comfortable” — and demanded. I found an example of this overreach in an online piece from Bluestockings Magazine entitled “Geographies of Safety: Mapping Safe...
U Albany prez: Declining enrollment a major financial threat
The number of students at the University at Albany has dropped by 1,000 over the last eight years, making declining enrollment the college’s most “significant financial threat,” President Robert J. Jones said Wednesday in his spring address.
Solution? They’re going to expand into STEM.
Evidence of p-hacking in ed policy research and the What Works Clearinghouse
I am really looking forward to this paper: This article presents a pre-analysis plan for analyzing the evidential value in a selection of policy research taken from scholarly journals and two research clearinghouses run by the federal government. The analysis will collect p-values from selected studies and estimate the evidential value that they represent using the newly introduced p-curve. This...
Brownshirts at Buffalo State defeated
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of...
Publisher retracts papers due to fabricated peer reviews
I’m not sure why I keep posting about these episodes, as they have become depressingly familiar. A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. [,…] Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the co-editors of Retraction Watch, a blog that...
Brownshirts at NC State
What an idiot: A North Carolina State University administrator is encouraging student leaders to censor speech they don’t like in a tunnel dedicated to free speech on campus. In an email sent to all student group leaders Friday evening that was obtained by Campus Reform,Eileen M. Coombes, Director of Student Involvement, encouraged students to be creative while fighting against “social injustices...