Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
It’s back to school time, and today is triple maths. Dana Mackenzie, author of The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations shares his knowledge of maths and the history of maths in three little podcasts by RTE Lyric FM Culture File.
FACT: “China has pushed to increase both the quantity of students and the quality of its universities. The total number of undergraduate and graduate degrees quadrupled from 1999 to 2005, while the government spent more than 30 billion yuan
($4.4 billion at 2009 conversion rates) on a group of forty leading universities in an effort to vault them into the top tier worldwide.”
The Great Brain Race:
How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World
by Ben Wildavsky
With a new preface by the author
In The Great Brain Race, former U.S. News & World Report education editor Ben Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education—and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Every year, nearly three million international students study outside of their home countries, a 40 percent increase since 1999. Newly created or expanded universities in China, India, and Saudi Arabia are competing with the likes of Harvard and Oxford for faculty, students, and research preeminence. Satellite campuses of Western universities are springing up from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to South Africa. Wildavsky shows that as international universities strive to become world-class, the new global education marketplace is providing more opportunities to more people than ever before.
Drawing on extensive reporting in China, India, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Wildavsky chronicles the unprecedented international mobility of students and faculty, the rapid spread of branch campuses, the growth of for-profit universities, and the remarkable international expansion of college rankings. Some university and government officials see the rise of worldwide academic competition as a threat, going so far as to limit student mobility or thwart cross-border university expansion. But Wildavsky argues that this scholarly marketplace is creating a new global meritocracy, one in which the spread of knowledge benefits everyone—both educationally and economically. In a new preface, Wildavsky discusses some of the notable developments in global higher education since the book was first published.
We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9694.pdf
If you’ve ever wondered if the way you’re thinking about things is holding you back, The Five Elements of Effective Thinking is a must-read. Written by the acclaimed teacher and mathematician Edward Burger—a man whose electrifying teaching style has won him countless awards—the book teaches strategic goals for using our minds to realize goals effectively, creatively, and more successfully. Today Burger takes a specific look at how we’re thinking about voting, offering an alternative to heading to the polls armed with sound bites, our preconceptions, and little else (or, as Jason Brennan would call it, being a bad voter.) Check out Burger’s post here:
This fall, the US will once again decide its fate by selecting its next batch of national, state, and local government leaders. In 2008, the previous presidential election year, voter turnout was a whopping 57% of the voting-age population. Using modern political math, that works out to nearly 8 out of every 10 man, woman, and child. If you happen to be one of those patriotic citizens who plans on doing his or her civic duty on November 6 by pulling a lever, “X”-ing a box, or punching a chad, then the 64,000-dollar question (or with the help of today’s Super PACs, the 3.2 billion-dollar question) is: For whom will you vote?
Very recently I co-authored, with Michael Starbird, a tiny but practical guide to better thinking entitled, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking. It offers everyone—students, teachers, parents, professionals, and life-long learners—the opportunity to “make up” their own minds and better tap their creativity and imagination through stories and examples as well as concrete action-items that can be directly applied to any circumstance and that can become useful habits to provoke thought. Here I briefly apply some of the lessons we developed to offer a straightforward way of determining your ideal candidate.
Identify and understand the issues that matter. The cost of a candidate’s haircut or a particularly fetching outfit’s designer might not be on the top of your list of issues that truly matter. Despite the topics on which the media or even the candidates themselves decide to focus, you need to determine which issues are important to you—whether they be social, national security, or financial issues, or issues that directly impact your community or family. Don’t let the media dictate what’s important to you. Work hard to deeply understand those issues you identified as well as why you’ve embraced the views you have. Invest the time to prioritize those issues so you know what matters most to you. Focus on the essentials.
Observe how well the candidates fail. Anyone who strives to be imaginative, creative, or bold will eventually make a misstep. If your candidate has never failed, ask yourself, what—if anything—has that person been doing? If your candidate has failed, determine what lessons that person has learned from that experience. Study how the candidates evolved and moved, and decide if you agree with those corrected paths. Failing—unintentionally or deliberately—presents one with a great gift: the opportunity to learn, grow, and innovate. Discover exactly what the candidates have done in the past when they’ve stumbled upon or purposely solicited such a “gift.” If failing did not provoke a new insight or change in thinking, then you might want to keep shopping for candidates. Failure is a fantastic tool for moving forward.
Ask the right questions. Many questions will be hurled at the candidates and it’s often entertaining to watch politicians uncomfortably squirm or use the Teflon-approach and dodge those speeding queries faster than the man of steal. But by watching that drama unfold on-line or on TV, you are merely a passive listener. Instead, become an active listener: Create your own questions as you listen to the candidates or as you read their platforms and proposals. Even if you’re not one of the lucky few who actually get to directly question those politicians, you should still deliberately raise those questions in your mind. Then discover who addresses those issues and assess their stands. By doing so, you are custom-tailoring the campaigns to your interests, concerns, and values. Become an active listener: Hear what is said, and often more importantly, take note of what is missing.
Determine where we’ve been and where you think we should go. One of the quotes that inevitably surfaces during a presidential campaign is: “This is the most important election in this country’s history.” Unless our voting district is Lake Woebegone, every presidential election cannot be the most important ever. A more accurate and less melodramatic statement might be, “This is an extremely important election in this country’s future.” It is not wise to view an event or issue as sitting alone in a vacuum of a single moment in history (even if it’s touted as, “the most important”). You need to examine everything within context: From where we are emerging, to where we are today and where we need to go. With presidential politics, it’s essential to look back (both long-term and short-term) and articulate the gains we’ve made as well as the losses we’ve incurred. Then you can thoughtfully assess our current state, define local and global directions in which to move forward, and find the candidate that shares that similar vision. Always focus on the flow—what’s past, what’s the here and now, and what’s next.
Decide how you want to change. By following the four previous modes of thinking, you will be transformed—you will realize new insights, identify other points of view, uncover unintended consequences, and even generate original thoughts. Through this process, you will not only quietly and clearly discover to your ideal candidate, but you will also discover your ideal self.
Focusing solely on sound bites, political pundits, and commercials is tantamount to flipping a coin in the voting booth or even worse, mindlessly handing your vote over to the loudest voice. Instead, cast your vote effectively and intelligently. As Mike Starbird and I wrote in the last chapter of our book:
When the American Founding Fathers imagined a democracy that would reflect the will of the people, the people they envisioned were thoughtful, independent-thinking citizens who would understand the issues of their day and would turn their own clear wisdom to making sound decisions for the benefit of society. Surely more than ever, the world needs thoughtful voices—voices that can ignore the bombast and heat of shallow excitement and focus instead on thinking calmly and sensibly about long-term goals and consequences. These elements of effective thinking will help you to become a quintessential citizen of the world—contributing personally and professionally, locally and globally.
Edward Burger can be reached at eburger@williams.edu and followed (on Twitter) @ebb663. For more information about The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, visit www.elementsofthinking.com or follow @5thinking. Burger is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, an educational and business consultant, and most recently served as Vice Provost for Strategic Educational Initiatives at Baylor University. He is the author of over 60 research articles, books, and video series (starring in over 3,000 on-line videos). Among his many awards and honors, the Huffington Post named him one of their 2010 Game Changers; “HuffPost’s Game Changers salutes 100 innovators, visionaries, mavericks, and leaders who are reshaping their fields and changing the world.” In 2012, Microsoft Worldwide Education selected him as one of their “Heroes in Education”.
In Princeton University Press’s first EBook original, Brink Lindsey demands an investment in “human capital” to stop the growing divide between the haves and have-nots
What explains the growing divide between the wealthy and everybody else? Politicians, pundits, scholars, journalists, economists and many others have tried to solve this critical question that would create a more equal society. In Princeton University Press’s first Ebook original HUMAN CAPITALISM: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter—and More Unequal (Publication Date: August 8, 2012; Ebook $4.99), author and Kauffman Foundation scholar Brink Lindsey argues that the gap between elites and the rest of us can best be explained by the ever-growing complexity of modern economies and the barriers to the acquisition of the skills—“Human Capital”— necessary to not only survive but thrive in a new economic landscape.
The complexity of today’s economy is not only making these elites richer—it is also making them smarter. As the economy makes ever-greater demands on their minds, the successful are making ever-greater investments in education and other ways of increasing their children’s human capital, expanding their cognitive skills and leading them to still higher levels of success. But unfortunately, even as the rich are securely riding this virtuous cycle, the poor are trapped in a vicious one, as a pattern of family breakdown, unemployment, and dysfunction, leads to a further erosion of knowledge and skills.
Lindsey shows how high skill level jobs are rewarded, while mid-level jobs are outsourced, further widening the gap. Simply retraining workers or teaching skills isn’t working because it’s not removing the cultural divisions and polarization that permeates the economy; those cultural factors are impeding the success of targeted programs that he espouses. Fueling the
polarization is the resentment of those on the lower end who don’t want to hear that the world has changed and that they need better jobs.
Lindsey’s solutions? To redeem the promise of human capitalism, it is necessary to restore the connection between rising complexity and rising human capital cross the socioeconomic spectrum.
o Maintain growth through policies that encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.
o Reform K-12 education by unleashing competition.
o Step up experiments with early childhood interventions that can compensate for disadvantaged environments.
o Combat social exclusion of low-skilled adults through low-wage job subsidies, changes in disability insurance, and penal reform to reduce mass incarceration.
o Improve higher education by limiting tuition subsidies.
o Reform land use regulation and occupational licensing to facilitate upward mobility.
In this brief, clear, and forthright eBook original, Lindsey shows how economic growth is creating unprecedented levels of human capital—and suggests how the huge benefits of this development can be spread beyond those who are already enjoying its rewards.
Coming in Spring 2013, Princeton University Press will also be publishing an expanded hardcover edition of the book.
In the coming months, lots of people are going to have questions about why this or that school isn’t included in Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett’s new book Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools. The authors acknowledge that their list, presented as an Appendix in the book, may not be complete, but that it does represent, to the best of their present ability and knowledge, the most comprehensive, state-by-state list of examination schools in America. I asked them to describe the criteria they used to identify schools that should be included in their unprecedented study. Here’s what they had to say:
The first challenge we faced was simply identifying which schools should be included in our research, a process we liken to “searching for needles in the high school haystack.” There are 22,568 public high schools in the United States and after careful application of the following criteria, only 165 schools remained.
It may surprise readers to discover that the list of exam schools in Appendix 1 of our book is the first of its kind and it was difficult to assemble. There is no “Association of Examination Schools” from which you can cull this information, and we used information from a variety of information sources—published lists of top high schools in the country, SAT and ACT scores, professional organizations, and state/district websites and personnel—to assemble this list.
We made every effort to make sure the list is comprehensive and complete, but we acknowledge it may not be exhaustive or absolutely accurate. We invite readers to help us refine and update it. Let us know if we missed a school that meets our criteria and should be included in future studies. To this end, we are happy to share the criteria we used to find the schools currently listed in our book.
The Criteria:
First, it’s a public school, predominantly (or fully) supported with tax dollars, does not charge tuition, is operated by or under the aegis of a public body, and is accountable to a duly constituted public authority.
Second, it offers 12th grade and has a graduating class each year. That’s what we call a “high school,” even though it might also include elementary or middle grades. (This criterion barred a few new schools that were “growing” toward 12th grade but didn’t have a graduating class as of 2009–10.)
Third, it’s self-contained, not a program or school within another school. Hundreds of U.S. high schools contain academies, magnet or specialized programs, schools within the school, or distinctive course sequences that are selective or application based. Our list, however, is limited to schools where all enrolled students are selected through an admissions process.
Fourth, it offers an academic curriculum aimed at college readiness. The school may off er a variety of course sequences or specializations, but its overall curriculum is implicitly or expressly designed to give all of its students the skills and knowledge they will need for college-level work.
Fifth, it employs an admissions process that is academically selective. That process involves substantial attention to a student’s academic potential and/or academic record, usually incorporating some attention to exam results. An array of other factors may also be weighed–such as attendance and behavior–but the process primarily emphasizes criteria such as grades, test scores, or writing samples.
Sixth and finally, its admissions process is academically competitive. We considered it to be so if more students apply than can be accommodated, or if a student’s application could be rejected on the basis of his/her academic merit in relation to that of other applicants and/or the school’s standards.
Excerpted from Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools
by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Refining the List
These straightforward criteria yielded a significant number of schools that have programs catering to academically advanced students, but are not straightforward examination schools, so the list was further refined. For the complete details, we refer you to the book, page 23-35, but the schools eliminated in this step include partial-day schools, programs, and centers; competitive/selective programs within schools, schools for the arts; schools that admit via lottery; schools that skip the diploma en route to college.
New York City also posed a unique challenge as it uses a complex application-and-placement system for all of its 600+ high school programs. About 75 high schools technically meet all six of our criteria, but in order to identify the most academically selective, we included only those schools that required minimum scores of 85 percent on the state assessments. This brought the number down to 15, in addition to eight specialized high schools that have a separate exam for entrance.
The End Result
After all the searching and refining, we were left with a list of 165 schools in thirty states and the District of Columbia. Readers and education researchers now have a resource that shows that these schools are more prevalent in some parts of the country than others; that there are many of these schools in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, but none in Los Angeles, Denver, and Minneapolis. Identifying these schools allowed us to then survey their admissions processes; outcomes; demographics; and teacher, parent, student, and community expectations—all material included in Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.
John McGinnis, author of the forthcoming Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technological Change will be taking to Election 101 to blog regularly about technology and the election. This week he returns with an unusual structural argument for charter schools. With better tools available for evaluating success or failure of policy, can a case be made for charter schools on the basis that their sheer diversity of approaches provide perfect opportunities for testing which educational policies work and which are outright failures? Read his post here:
Education is again a central topic in many of this year’s political campaigns. One example: a state senate race in California seems to be turning on a debate about education in general and charter schools in particular. While the United States dominates the lists of the world’s greatest universities, it consistently fails to be near the top of the global charts of the best performing K-12 schools. There is a strong consensus in the United States over the need for better education. Political disagreements concern the policies that will improve learning.
The Economist had an article a week ago praising charter schools for generally better performance than other government funded schools. The article concedes that not all such schools work better. Some in fact need to be closed as outright failures.
In my book, Accelerating Democracy, I defend charter schools as injecting experimental dynamism into democracy. Because charter schools vary substantially from one another even within a single jurisdiction, they have the advantage of creating more experiments on different kinds of educational inputs (from smaller classes to merit pay). Because of the relentless increase in computational capacity we have continually better tools to evaluate through careful statistical analysis which policies work and which do not. Just as democracy in the eighteenth century needed to be nested in the technology of its time, like the printing press, so democracy today should be nested in our new information technology. Because we have the tools better to evaluate policy experiments, we should structure our institutions better to test policies. Democracy in the information age should be a more self-consciously experimental democracy.
Some structures of governance encourage experimentation more than others. Federalism, for instance, allows states to devise different solutions to social problems rather than have the federal government impose a single solution. But charter schools provide another experimental structure. Even if they deliver results that are not better on average than public schools, their diversity can help us make progress on choosing programs that make children more knowledgeable and successful. Charter schools take widely varying approaches with some emphasizing a back to basic education philosophy and others more progressive techniques. Some will use merit pay. Others will not. The results of such myriad differences can then be evaluated.
Decentralization at both the national and local level promotes experimentation. In this election season, it is important to think about what are the structures that will allow us to evaluate the success and failure of policies with the tools that modern technology makes available. That is the route to long-term policy progress.
John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.
Woolsthorpe Manor, home of Sir Isaac Newton, provided the perfect venue for the launch of Neil Downie’s new book ‘The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science: The Very Best Backyard Science Experiments You Can Do Yourself’ last week. We had an audience drawn from the local school science club and Neil and his colleagues demonstrated a range of projects taken from the book to great enthusiasm from all participants. To see how much fun we had follow this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHywyJIRsd0&feature=channel&list=UL
Why not join in the fun and send us your own video of your favourite Saturday Science experiments?
It’s great to see our first YouTube video inspired by one of the projects in Neil Downie’s, ‘The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science: The Very Best Backyard Science Experiments You Can Do Yourself ’ which was published earlier this month. The experiment is described by Michael de Podesta in his blog posting here: http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/vacuum-bazooka/ With summer vacations upon us why not get out into your yard for some Downie inspired science and send us your own videos to show us how you got on? We’d love to see them.
Andrew Delbanco sat down with Jeff Brown to discuss College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be:
Newshour also posted an extended video on their blog site:
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking publishes in September 2012 and you can find more information about it (including a Q&A with the authors) on our site.
“I remember as a kid in school being told by teachers to think harder and having no idea what to do. This book solves that once and for all. We now have a guide for people of all ages to learn how to think more effectively. I highly recommend this book.”–Jack Canfield, cocreator of the New York Times best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul® series and The Success Principles
Inside Higher Ed reports today that “Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have teamed up with a for-profit company to offer free versions of their coveted courses this year to online audiences. By doing so, they join a growing group of top-tier universities that are embracing massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as the logical extension of elite higher education in an increasingly online, global landscape.”
Coursera is not the first attempt by elite universities to break into online education, but hopefully it will fare better than its fore-bearers Fathom and AllLearn, two collaborative fee-based education programs that ultimately failed (and coincidentally are profiled in the definitive study of online courseware at elite universities–Unlocking the Gates by Taylor Walsh, on behalf of Ithaka S+R).
So, what lessons could these early programs offer to Coursera? As the Fathom project demonstrates, blurring the lines between not-for-profit and for-profit partners can be difficult as revealed by Walsh’s interview with Ann Kirschner.
Another lesson from Unlocking the Gates‘s AllLearn case-study? Keep it simple:
One of the most important lessons has already been incorporated into Coursera. As the IHE reports, the courses will be free. Both AllLearn and Fathom were fee-based models — something that many credit for their ultimate failure:
But perhaps the most important issue will be credentials. Will students want to take courses — even Ivy League courses — if they don’t ultimately have a certificate or some documentation to show for it? In the introduction to Unlocking the Gates, Walsh that what most students want out of an online education is the credential, but there are numerous obstacles to overcome:
So, how will Coursera address this obstacle? The IHE reports that the credential issue is still very much up in the air:
None of the universities will offer formal credit through the courses they put online through Coursera. However, several might give students the opportunity to earn certificates bearing the names of both the universities and the company. There is no formal credentialing mechanism currently in place, but some university officials indicated that tangibly recognizing the achievements of non-enrolled learners is a goal.
To learn more about online courseware and the various success and failures that have occurred in recent decades, pick up a copy of Taylor Walsh’s Unlocking the Gates.
At Goodreads, enter for a chance to win Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson.
This major biography sheds new light on Tesla’s visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Enter by May 28, 2013 for a chance to win!
Good luck!
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig |
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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, & Brian Sullivan |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
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Higher Education in the Digital Age by William G. Bowen |
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Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman |
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The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell by A. Zee |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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