Education Blog
James Franco: Hyper-Educated Renaissance Man
April 26, 2011 by Joel Milani
I’ve said it before, grad school sucks. And if that’s even remotely true, James Franco is a glutton for punishment.
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Category: Higher Education
Making Pell Grants Better (and Leaner)
April 25, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
Federal Pell Grants have previously been singled out for accounting for too much of the for-profit education sector’s revenue (PDF), an average of 77% at the top 5 schools. The schools as a whole accounted for roughly 10% of all higher-education enrollments, but got almost 25% of the Pell grants in 2009.
For the last year, as the heat has been turned up on the sector’s leaders, conventional wisdom dictated that the Pell grant spigot will probably be tightened.
As for-profit colleges cry about the funding restrictions and consequently increase tuition, Andrew Gillen, the CCAP research director, came up with an ingenious way to tighten Pell grants today that might even improve the career education industry’s outcomes. For him, it all comes down to incentives for both colleges and students:
Read more
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Category: Financial Aid, Grants, Higher Education
Mad Skills Watch: Beyond the Fundamentals Edition
April 22, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
” … see in basic skills instruction the rich possibility for developing literacy and numeracy … [that] goes beyond the acquisition of fundamental skills and routine toward an understanding of their meaning and application, the principles underlying them, and the broader habits of mind that incorporate them,” (emphasis added) author Mike Rose writes yesterday in an Inside Higher Ed commentary entitled “Remediation at a Crossroads.”
As his title suggests, he pokes holes in remedial instruction (specifically English) as it’s typically presented in colleges across the country. In fact, he rips existing higher-education policy research pretty thoroughly, noting “intellectual isolation” in academic journals.
He then goes on to talk about failure being an “entry point” to this kind of instruction, a not-unsurprising idea given the current “failure” buzz in the academic and business worlds. In other words, it’s educators’ obligation to find out exactly where and why somebody needs remedial education based on what the individual already knows (the “cognitive history”), not just some outdated standards of what we think they should be doing to catch up.
Read his full piece (linked above) for an impassioned and at times idealistic look at educational philosophy. I tend to agree that the more we can help all levels of our society learn not just simple fundamental skills, but their theoretical foundations and cross-disciplinary significance, the more prosperous we will be.
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Category: Higher Education, Job Skills
Obama Speaks at Facebook HQ, Supports Tech Education
April 21, 2011 by Joel Milani
President Obama recently stopped by Silicon Valley to talk innovation. The message centered on a subject he’s championed in the past, namely, the support of education programs focused on science and math:
I always hear stories about how we can’t find engineers, and that’s why we’re emphasizing Math and Science … We want to start making Science cool. I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk.
We’re big proponents of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education here at the blog. Large swaths of the job market are shifting to an online model, but education in corresponding areas hasn’t quite caught up.
Check out our previous posts on technical education by browsing the STEM and Robots categories, and check out the full report of Obama’s talk at techcrunch.com.
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Failing in Vogue
April 20, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
Maybe it’s post-recession blues. Maybe it’s never-ending political budget crises. Maybe it’s the Fukushima disaster. Even I caught the fever in the last week, writing about emergent strategy and a theoretical physicist’s argument for the scientific importance of failure. This was before I even saw that there is a whole special issue of the Harvard Business Review (subscription required) this month dedicated to the very subject. Entrepreneurs, MBA students, and other future business professionals, take note: whatever the cause, the business case for failure seems to be in vogue.
As Adrian Wooldridge, author of the Economist’s Schumpeter column, also points out, failure is all the rage these days, at least in business literature circles. One of his best observations, as relayed in the April 18 “Money Talks” podcast (iTunes link):
I think some of the biggest disasters in corporate history have come from groupthink, from yes-men, from people being unwilling to raise their hand and say, ‘Actually, things are going badly here.’
Indeed. Here’s to critical thinking: not just nice to get you through some school exercises, but a vital, coveted business skill.
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Category: Job Skills, MBA
How to Travel on a Student Budget
April 19, 2011 by Joel Milani
Going to school out-of-state can be a great experience—it’s the first taste of freedom for many students, and a chance to explore a new part of the country first-hand. But living out-of-state can also place a financial strain on students who constantly travel back and forth.
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Category: Required Reading
Why Students Need To Fail More Effectively
April 18, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
According to Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, students don’t know how to fail. Fail well, that is.
What does that mean? Citing feedback from physics graduates who became businesspeople, he says that science teachers at all levels need to teach students how to handle failure–in other words, handle the ambiguities of the real business world. As he says,
“In the real world, most problems are not solvable exactly, and there are many competing demands. And you have to often change course in the middle …”
It was pretty striking to hear this physics professor talk about exactly the same philosophy that an international business school professor espoused to MBA students less than a month ago. Only one day previous to discovering Krauss’ thoughts on the scientific importance of failure had I written the above-linked blog post about business theory’s parallel emergent strategy.
By the way, I first came across this information through the excellent “60-Second Science” podcast from Scientific American (iTunes link provided for subscription ease). It’s a fast, free way to get daily audio updates on all sorts of interesting new scientific findings.
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Related reading: This is not the first time I’ve blogged about the importance of failure. See a post from one year ago on a Harvard Business Review article that showed how earthquake recovery shines a light on the usefulness of failure in business.
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Photo courtesy of Chris Griffith via Flickr.
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Category: Career, Higher Education, Job Skills, STEM
Advice on Business Strategy for MBA Students and Everyone Else
April 15, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
Two big-time B-school academics (Micheal Porter, Henry Mintzberg). Two conflicting strategies in the world of business.
One McGill professor, Karl Moore, breaks down the implications of each strategy in a recent Forbes.com “Rethinking Leadership” column.
Deliberate vs. emergent strategy
Essentially, use the past to predict the future (deliberate), or learn from a constantly changing present as it changes (emergent). Moore argues strongly for the latter’s greater relevance, explaining that organizations in today’s world need to learn “what works in practice” over time. In other words, figure out the best ways to adjust to an ever-changing reality as it changes. In a globalized information economy where industrial boundaries blur increasingly every day, being in tune to emergent strategy makes sense:
“It is precisely because we cannot, try as we may, control the variables that factor into business decisions that Mintzberg’s emergent strategy is so useful.”
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Category: MBA
Classic Blog Posts, Revisited: How to Graduate College Early
April 14, 2011 by Joel Milani
Last year, we looked at a few ways to get through college more quickly than usual:
“The typical bachelor’s degree program takes four years to complete, but there are ways to speed up the process. No tricks or shortcuts here though—graduating early means working a little harder than everyone else, and occasionally passing up the odd party to stay home and study. But your extra efforts can mean saving thousands of dollars in tuition, and getting a head start on a career.”
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Category: Campus life
New Data on Employer Checkups of Job-seekers’ Online Profiles
April 13, 2011 by Paul Richlovsky
Have you Googled yourself lately? You should. Not because you’re an egomaniac, but because you care about your next job. Whether you’re currently unemployed or thinking about leaving your current job someday (or simply not losing it), you now have more reasons to pay attention to your online profile.
Exhibit A (courtesy of The Careers Blog/Guardian)
77% of recruiters use search engines to investigate job candidates, and 35% claim to have eliminated a candidate “because of what they found online” (ExecuNet).
What’s really funny is that the same firm also found that a vast majority of candidates rightly expect recruiters to Google them (82%), but relatively few reported Googling themselves for potentially job-threatening information (33%). Are people really that carefree in job hunts, or are they just embarrassed to report that they’ve Googled themselves for fear that they’d appear self-absorbed or arrogant? Whatever the reason, you’ve got to Google yourself if you expect to gain new employment anytime soon.
Exhibit B
Last summer, the Wall Street Journal published a virtually identical number from Microsoft about the rate of recruiters who use search engines to scope out potential employees: 78%.
What search engine is most popular? Google. Which results commonly show up in Google for people’s names? Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, MySpace pages … you get the idea.
Clean it up
How to clean up that search for your name or make it shiny from the start? See my resource-packed post on preserving your online reputation for employers. To see more about exactly what employers want—e.g. “written material should be positive and error-free”—check out the link to The Careers Blog above.
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Category: Career
