Weekend Reading: Education

I’ve had an education theme going this week and don’t want to give that up quite yet. The discussion on the posts has been fantastic, and I’d love for you all to take the conversation off my blog, onto other blogs and sites, into your classrooms and next to the water cooler.

I’m off to Philly this weekend for a wedding and plan on bringing the subject up to my table at the reception once they’re good and rowdy. Should make for an interesting convo, don’t you think?

Without further ado…

Good Weekend Reading:

“Learning could happen everywhere through pop-up education. Much like TED Talks, pop-up education opportunities would be produced by experts, professors, and every individual based on something they know well and can train others on. They would pop up in locations like theaters, YMCAs, elevators, break rooms, restaurants, and wherever there is wait time…”

–          Ideas for Cities: Pop-up Education, 10/27/09, @good

“Mandel finds that college costs in real terms are up by 23 percent since 2000, while real pay for young college grads has fallen by 11 percent.”

–          Widening College Cost to Earnings Gap, 9/13/09, @Richard_Florida

“During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school. Instead, he started one almost by accident.”

–          Math Master of the Internet, 12/14/09, @sfgate

“I propose this instead – have the awkward drunken sex, live in abject poverty, eat the bad food and pretend to understand Marshall McLuhan for a couple of years without the burden of having to knock out 5,000 words on Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’.

Make the choice not to rack up an IOU to the federal government to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and have only a vague understanding of Foucault to show for it. Choose to tread your own beer-stained path to nebulous maturity unfettered by Union fees or having to actually read Ulysses (or pretend you’ve even started the damn colossus).”

–          Tune in, drop out, get drunk, become a hairdresser, 7/17/09, Daniela Elser

“Despite calls to more closely link higher education with job needs, colleges are only ‘moderately responsive’ to changes in the labor markets, a study found.”

–          American Colleges Lag in Meeting Labor Needs, 1/4/10, Karin Fischer

The U.S. government has poured $100 billion of stimulus money into the Education Department, but does paying more lead to better results?

–          How Education Spending Affects Graduation Rates, 11/10/09, @good

“The decline of the MBA just makes sense. After all, the world continues to move. For about 20 years in American history, it was good to be a farmer. Then, it was good to work in the automotive industry. Then (and perhaps ending now), it was good to have an MBA. We’re all dreaming bigger…”

–          Decline of the MBA, Increase in Social Good? , 1/5/10, @cdilly

“A grand total of zero states got an A. A few predictable ones got Bs (New York, Arizona, California, Massachusetts), a scary amount got Cs and Ds, and three got big fat Fs.”

–          Which State Has the Worst School System?, 11/11/09, @good

Links cited in this week’s posts:

The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor, 12/30/09, @nytimes

How being educated can render one helpless, 9/08/09, Natalie Lange

Are They Students? or ‘Customers’?, 1/01/10, @roomfordebate

Students as Customers – Not!, Edward Snyder

Colleges are Failing in Graduation Rates, 9/08/09, @nytimes

The Costs of Failure Factories in American Higher Education, 10/08, Mark Schneider

Making College ‘Relevant’, 12/29/09, @nytimes