You can shill for anything and get academics to jump on board, as long as you wrap it in the mantle of social justice. While this article is nominally ecumenical about postgraduate study, a disturbingly large portion of it is devoted to the question "How can we get disadvantaged students to take on nondischargeable loan debt and attend law school?" Never mind that salaries for new lawyers are strongly bimodal.
But remember, their main interest is in making sure that disadvantaged students are included. Maybe they're just being included in the debtors' prison, but still, they're being included.
Showing posts with label shilling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shilling. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
The restlessness
In response to a recent Kevin Drum post on how reading scores are up but nobody wants to talk about it, the bloggers at West Coast Stat Views have a theory:
Anyway, if this were only about marketing disruption, the teachers' unions would be saying very loudly that their results are more than good enough. Some do, but it's always tempered by lamentation over how much more needs to be done. And some of that is, of course, a call for more resources for themselves--failure can justify more resources for you as easily as it can justify more resources for your replacement. Some of it is also a heartfelt conviction that schools need to do more. The right and left both want the impossible from schools--the left wants to provide people with free schooling on how to catch a fish, the right wants to make sure that nobody can say "I was never taught how to catch a fish" as an excuse for not having anything to eat.
My opinion: because there is a lot of money in education and it won't be possible to "disrupt" education and redirect this money if the current system is doing well. Notice how there is always a lot of money in being a disruptive company, at least for the top management (see Uber -- it is clear that it pays better to run Uber than it does to run a traditional Taxi service).
It also moves the goalposts. If everything is falling apart then it isn't such a crisis if the disrupted industry has teething issues once they strip cash out of it to pay for the heroes who are reinventing the system.
But if current educational systems are doing well, and slowly improving through incremental change, then it is a lot harder to argue that there is a crisis in education, isn't it?I think that the shilling is definitely half of it. Failures in the status quo can justify more money for something else. But the other half of it is a restlessness, a refusal to accept that there are limits to what education can do. We don't just want schools to produce some good results, we want them to fix all of the problems in the world. And they can't. No educational innovation will fix that, so eventually people ask educational institutions to shed the pretenses and openly become much more. Look at this post by Dean Dad, asking for community colleges to effectively become full-scale social welfare programs in order to plug achievement gaps. The moral case for providing for the poor is quite straightforward, but nobody asks the local free clinic to teach college composition.
Anyway, if this were only about marketing disruption, the teachers' unions would be saying very loudly that their results are more than good enough. Some do, but it's always tempered by lamentation over how much more needs to be done. And some of that is, of course, a call for more resources for themselves--failure can justify more resources for you as easily as it can justify more resources for your replacement. Some of it is also a heartfelt conviction that schools need to do more. The right and left both want the impossible from schools--the left wants to provide people with free schooling on how to catch a fish, the right wants to make sure that nobody can say "I was never taught how to catch a fish" as an excuse for not having anything to eat.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Next book: Measuring Success
The next book that I'll blog about is Measuring Success, an edited volume with 11 chapters, 3 authors, and 26 contributors. The book is about the predictive validity of standardized tests in college admissions. This book poses something of a dilemma for me. On the one hand, it is rich in data and citations to the peer-reviewed literature. On the other hand, the editors include Lynn Letukas and Ben Wildavsky from the College Board (the organization that produces the SAT) and someone from a research center that includes the College Board on its client list.
I think the proper response is to take this with a big grain of salt. Nothing should be taken as a priori truth, but can be taken with a suitable dose of "Assuming that similar results are found in multiple, independent investigations..."
The first chapter is probably the least rigorous, simply because it's an introductory chapter titled "Eight Myths about Standardized Admissions Testing", hence several points are touched on briefly (though many of the same themes are visited in more depth in subsequent chapters). The putative myths are:
1) Standardized tests are very poor predictors of freshman grades: The authors concede that weak correlations are found if you look only at the set of admitted students, but if you correct for the fact that the proper comparison includes the students who were not admitted but nonetheless went to college elsewhere (or were admitted but chose other schools) the correlations improve. This is a point that I've made before and with quantitative detail. Moreover, students with weaker preparation often choose different majors than students with stronger preparation, so their grades might not be comparable. But the authors include data showing that when you look at a wider pool and control for common college curricula and also high school GPA, the correlation between SAT score and college grades improves considerably, reaching 0.8 (versus 0.35 in poorly-controlled studies).
2) Tests do not predict anything beyond grades: The authors show data indicating that students with higher test scores take more advanced college classes than those with lower scores, and enter majors that reflect their higher test scores (e.g. verbal versus math).
3) Alternatives to testing are superior: The authors reference work on various alternative measures, and show that often the sample sizes are small and correlations are weak. Moreover, even if there are superior sources of data for admissions decisions, I'm not sure why one would ONLY use one source of information. Why not build a multi-variate model? And since tests are not as vulnerable to the subjective biases of raters (e.g. interviewers, letter writers, essay readers) the claim of superiority over tests seems to be an extraordinary one, requiring extraordinary evidence. (Or, at a minimum, a very careful articulation of what could count as "superiority"--is lack of bias not one of the desiderata?)
4) Tests do not measure anything relevant to life after college: Here the authors cite correlations between test scores and quality of graduate work as evaluated by faculty (i.e. evaluations of the quality and quantity of research output) as well as work performance after graduate study. However, this is a weak point, because it is focused on the Miller Analogies Test as an admissions test for students preparing to work as counselors, rather than more widely-used tests for undergraduate admissions (e.g. SAT, ACT) or graduate admissions (the GRE is the main game in town here).
Still, the authors are psychologists, so counseling programs would seem to be near to their hearts. I'll give them one fumble here.
5) Beyond a threshold tests have little predictive power: In other words, this is an argument that above a threshold you can't use tests to distinguish decent from great performance. And, of course, it is true that tests can't do that with perfect predictive power. However, the authors cite evidence from large studies (6656 students in one study, 15,040 in another, and 150,000 in the third) that tests have non-trivial predictive power even at the upper end of the talent pool. Intuitively this makes sense: If test scores only had threshold predictive power then the correlations under point 1 would probably not be as large.
6) Tests only measure socioeconomic status: This one was an eye-opener. They show mean SAT score varying from 1300 (on a 2400 scale) for the lowest income bracket (<$20,000/year household income) to 1700 for the highest bracket (more than $200,000/year household income). That variation isn't trivial, but it is also hardly enough to generate the correlations seen earlier, especially when you take into account the wide variation within brackets. More importantly, even when controlling for family income, the predictive power of SAT scores remains quite strong.
7) Test are biased: Here the authors are careful to unpack what "bias" means. If a test is biased against group X and favorable to group Y, then if we take a bunch of students with the same test score and look at their college performance, the X students should do better than the Y students. In other words, such an outcome would tell us that X students are doing better than their score would predict while Y students are doing worse, so admitting based on the test gives X students a disadvantage (they're being treated the same as weaker Y students). However, SAT scores slightly over-predict college grades for minority students. The over-prediction makes sense to me, since disadvantage is multi-faceted, and there are aspects of it that cannot be fully captured by family income. If disadvantage matters and is related to ethnicity then I would expect minority students with a given family income and same academic preparation to fare slightly worse (on average) because they face burdens that otherwise-similar white students do not face.
8) Coaching produces large gains: The authors show data suggesting that gains from test prep and coaching are over-stated. This makes sense to me on a few levels. First, the students who avail themselves of test prep include a substantial pool of students who did poorly on their first try, and regression to the mean is surely a factor here. Second, this pool includes kids who did not make the minimal effort to familiarize themselves with the test beforehand. A bit of effort to get familiar with the task at hand is a modest task, one that does not require expensive tutors, but expensive tutors will nonetheless be happy to collect a fee for helping one with that modest task. There are no doubt gains from minimal due diligence, and gains from re-testing after some coaching may in part reflect that modest due diligence. The open question is whether those gains reflect much beyond that, i.e. reflect things that a kid couldn't do without substantial resources.
Besides, if shilling is a concern, then taking claims about the value of coaching at face value amounts to trusting marketing materials from Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc. That's a dubious thing.
Now, that said, all of the points made here are worthy of follow-up. The subsequent chapters have more in-depth analysis that we need to examine. The first chapter is suggestive motivation but hardly conclusive evidence.
I think the proper response is to take this with a big grain of salt. Nothing should be taken as a priori truth, but can be taken with a suitable dose of "Assuming that similar results are found in multiple, independent investigations..."
The first chapter is probably the least rigorous, simply because it's an introductory chapter titled "Eight Myths about Standardized Admissions Testing", hence several points are touched on briefly (though many of the same themes are visited in more depth in subsequent chapters). The putative myths are:
1) Standardized tests are very poor predictors of freshman grades: The authors concede that weak correlations are found if you look only at the set of admitted students, but if you correct for the fact that the proper comparison includes the students who were not admitted but nonetheless went to college elsewhere (or were admitted but chose other schools) the correlations improve. This is a point that I've made before and with quantitative detail. Moreover, students with weaker preparation often choose different majors than students with stronger preparation, so their grades might not be comparable. But the authors include data showing that when you look at a wider pool and control for common college curricula and also high school GPA, the correlation between SAT score and college grades improves considerably, reaching 0.8 (versus 0.35 in poorly-controlled studies).
2) Tests do not predict anything beyond grades: The authors show data indicating that students with higher test scores take more advanced college classes than those with lower scores, and enter majors that reflect their higher test scores (e.g. verbal versus math).
3) Alternatives to testing are superior: The authors reference work on various alternative measures, and show that often the sample sizes are small and correlations are weak. Moreover, even if there are superior sources of data for admissions decisions, I'm not sure why one would ONLY use one source of information. Why not build a multi-variate model? And since tests are not as vulnerable to the subjective biases of raters (e.g. interviewers, letter writers, essay readers) the claim of superiority over tests seems to be an extraordinary one, requiring extraordinary evidence. (Or, at a minimum, a very careful articulation of what could count as "superiority"--is lack of bias not one of the desiderata?)
4) Tests do not measure anything relevant to life after college: Here the authors cite correlations between test scores and quality of graduate work as evaluated by faculty (i.e. evaluations of the quality and quantity of research output) as well as work performance after graduate study. However, this is a weak point, because it is focused on the Miller Analogies Test as an admissions test for students preparing to work as counselors, rather than more widely-used tests for undergraduate admissions (e.g. SAT, ACT) or graduate admissions (the GRE is the main game in town here).
Still, the authors are psychologists, so counseling programs would seem to be near to their hearts. I'll give them one fumble here.
5) Beyond a threshold tests have little predictive power: In other words, this is an argument that above a threshold you can't use tests to distinguish decent from great performance. And, of course, it is true that tests can't do that with perfect predictive power. However, the authors cite evidence from large studies (6656 students in one study, 15,040 in another, and 150,000 in the third) that tests have non-trivial predictive power even at the upper end of the talent pool. Intuitively this makes sense: If test scores only had threshold predictive power then the correlations under point 1 would probably not be as large.
6) Tests only measure socioeconomic status: This one was an eye-opener. They show mean SAT score varying from 1300 (on a 2400 scale) for the lowest income bracket (<$20,000/year household income) to 1700 for the highest bracket (more than $200,000/year household income). That variation isn't trivial, but it is also hardly enough to generate the correlations seen earlier, especially when you take into account the wide variation within brackets. More importantly, even when controlling for family income, the predictive power of SAT scores remains quite strong.
7) Test are biased: Here the authors are careful to unpack what "bias" means. If a test is biased against group X and favorable to group Y, then if we take a bunch of students with the same test score and look at their college performance, the X students should do better than the Y students. In other words, such an outcome would tell us that X students are doing better than their score would predict while Y students are doing worse, so admitting based on the test gives X students a disadvantage (they're being treated the same as weaker Y students). However, SAT scores slightly over-predict college grades for minority students. The over-prediction makes sense to me, since disadvantage is multi-faceted, and there are aspects of it that cannot be fully captured by family income. If disadvantage matters and is related to ethnicity then I would expect minority students with a given family income and same academic preparation to fare slightly worse (on average) because they face burdens that otherwise-similar white students do not face.
8) Coaching produces large gains: The authors show data suggesting that gains from test prep and coaching are over-stated. This makes sense to me on a few levels. First, the students who avail themselves of test prep include a substantial pool of students who did poorly on their first try, and regression to the mean is surely a factor here. Second, this pool includes kids who did not make the minimal effort to familiarize themselves with the test beforehand. A bit of effort to get familiar with the task at hand is a modest task, one that does not require expensive tutors, but expensive tutors will nonetheless be happy to collect a fee for helping one with that modest task. There are no doubt gains from minimal due diligence, and gains from re-testing after some coaching may in part reflect that modest due diligence. The open question is whether those gains reflect much beyond that, i.e. reflect things that a kid couldn't do without substantial resources.
Besides, if shilling is a concern, then taking claims about the value of coaching at face value amounts to trusting marketing materials from Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc. That's a dubious thing.
Now, that said, all of the points made here are worthy of follow-up. The subsequent chapters have more in-depth analysis that we need to examine. The first chapter is suggestive motivation but hardly conclusive evidence.
Monday, February 19, 2018
STEAM punks
Still not a lot of time for in-depth commentary, but today's Inside Higher Ed has an article on the issue of whether to classify economics as a STEM field. I didn't realize how high the stakes are: Normally an international student graduating from a US university only gets one year to work in the US before they need to either leave or get a work visa. But now I have learned that if they get a STEM degree they get 3 years, and the more quantitative economics programs count. Needless to say, all economics programs are now trying to get classified as STEM.
This adds some context to the recent buzz around "STEAM" as a replacement for STEM.
This adds some context to the recent buzz around "STEAM" as a replacement for STEM.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Shills gonna shill; it's their code
The CEO of General Motors (a company that recently laid off workers) is announcing a $10 million initiative to improve STEM education and get more kids to learn how to code:
What I find most fascinating is that GM used to operate Kettering University but has walked away from it. If they have such great needs for STEM talent, why not keep running a university that meets their needs?
But the engineering talent and computer coding skills that the industry needs is in short supply. That's why General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced a new push to train engineers on Wednesday in New York City. The effort is specifically aimed at recruiting women and minorities.
GM has long helped train engineers. Barra earned a degree in electrical engineering from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan -- now Kettering University -- an engineering and business school that was, at the time, operated by GM.
"A car today has hundreds of millions of lines of code," Barra said in an exclusive interview with CNN. "We do see a shortage if we don't address this and I mean fully fundamentally. Every child needs to have these skills."Well, I checked out their job openings. As of June 28, 2017 they have 254 engineering jobs open, at a wide range of experience levels. They could, if they wanted, take that $10 million and use it to bump up the pay and benefits by an average of $40k per opening. Or they could invest in on-the-job training, bringing in people whose resumes show potential but aren't ideal matches to the jobs. That's what they would do if the talent shortfalls were as serious as they claim. Instead they're talking to reporters about STEM education.
...
Wednesday's announcement is part of GM's larger push to spend over $10 million in 2017 to improve education in the so-called STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and math.
What I find most fascinating is that GM used to operate Kettering University but has walked away from it. If they have such great needs for STEM talent, why not keep running a university that meets their needs?
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Lies, damned lies, and education research
As profiled today in Inside Higher Ed, the Center for Community College Student Engagement (a research center at UT Austin) released a study which shows that students who take full loads at least some semesters (preferably early on) are more likely to graduate than students who are always/mostly part-time. There are at least three plausible reasons why this might be true:
1) The more units you take the closer you are to finishing.
2) Attending full-time produces benefits beyond the accumulated credits, e.g. more interaction with faculty and classmates. They provide data in support of that.
3) People who attend full-time have the advantage of some amount of financial security and stability in their personal lives, so they can focus on school.
It appears that they did indeed ask students if they received Pell grants, i.e. they did ask about personal financial situations, but the summary that they provide says nothing about the analysis of that data, and simply says that everyone should attend full-time as much as possible. When the summary and recommendations say nothing about the analysis of financial information, it's hard to know whether they controlled for the third possibility, so it's hard to know if full-time attendance for all is a good recommendation or not. But they don't dwell on that. They just tell everyone to go as much as possible.
Sadly, this is par for the course in much of educational research.
1) The more units you take the closer you are to finishing.
2) Attending full-time produces benefits beyond the accumulated credits, e.g. more interaction with faculty and classmates. They provide data in support of that.
3) People who attend full-time have the advantage of some amount of financial security and stability in their personal lives, so they can focus on school.
It appears that they did indeed ask students if they received Pell grants, i.e. they did ask about personal financial situations, but the summary that they provide says nothing about the analysis of that data, and simply says that everyone should attend full-time as much as possible. When the summary and recommendations say nothing about the analysis of financial information, it's hard to know whether they controlled for the third possibility, so it's hard to know if full-time attendance for all is a good recommendation or not. But they don't dwell on that. They just tell everyone to go as much as possible.
Sadly, this is par for the course in much of educational research.
Sunday, March 5, 2017
How narratives are formed
One should always take it with a grain of salt when CEOs complain about skill shortages (maybe they'd get more skilled people if they offered more money), but here I'm less interested in the CEOs' claims than in the response to them.
Here's what CEOs said about the challenge of filling jobs:
Here's what the sub-headline says:
Here's what CEOs said about the challenge of filling jobs:
One executive said in discussions with White House officials that his company has 50 participants in a factory apprenticeship program, but could take 500 if enough were qualified. But he said that in his experience, most students coming out of high school lack the math and English skills to absorb technical manuals.That certainly accords with my experience.
Here's what the sub-headline says:
Manufacturing leaders urge President Trump to encourage high-tech skills training.
Basic math and English skills are not high-tech. They're essential to a high-tech job, but they themselves are not high-tech. And that's the problem: People want the hot and new, not the fundamentals. CEOs say that they will train people for high-tech manufacturing if they have basic math and reading skills, journalists translate that into high-tech skills, and no doubt some shill in higher ed is busy explaining that this is why we need people with advanced degrees in STEM...because a CEO wants a reasonably competent high school grad who can be trained to work on the production floor.
On the other hand, I find it fascinating that the CEOs are talking about technical manuals. Normally we assume that it's higher ed that's stodgy and unable to Get With The Times, but here we see business executives saying that they need people who can read manuals while the most progressive kool-aid drinkers in higher ed all say that we need to embrace the post-literate society and de-emphasize books in favor of videos. I find this amusingly ironic.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Bias, Madison, and Human Perfectability
Today's blog post by Dean Dad is a good one: He responds to a recent article in the Chronicle, by a hiring consultant talking about the importance of raising awareness of our implicit biases. Dean Dad makes the point that this smacks of trying to re-educate people and cleanse their thoughts. There's plenty of bad history behind such efforts, and it is ironically at odds with the idea of diversity: The goal is less to get everyone on the same page and more to bring together a bunch of different perspectives and let people check and balance each other. (Hence James Madison.) I like the way of looking at it. If our implicit biases are deep-seated, persistent, and always acting then the very utility of awareness is questionable. OTOH, bringing together different people with different viewpoints and giving them equal voting power in a consensus-oriented process might actually mitigate some of the effects of our biases.
It's also worth noting that the author of that piece in the Chronicle would be delighted if you wished to hire her firm to help you run a search process that will minimize the effects of bias...
It's also worth noting that the author of that piece in the Chronicle would be delighted if you wished to hire her firm to help you run a search process that will minimize the effects of bias...
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Beltway advocacy groups gonna Beltway
Something making the rounds among physicists right now is the following press release, which was posted by the American Physical Society but soon taken down after many physicists called it inappropriate:
(Click on the image too enlarge it)
The American Physical Society is a DC-area advocacy group. Yes, it exists to serve its members rather than the federal government, but most of its members are scientists who work or study in institutions that get federal money for research and educational purposes. In recognition of that reality, the American Physical Society has its headquarters in College Park, Maryland, just outside DC.
Professional Societies that want the federal government to spend money on science invariably articulate that goal in language that will be pleasing to the people in power. Donald Trump has used "Make America Great Again" as his slogan, and while that slogan carries quite a bit of baggage (e.g. it is historically uninformed, and carries an embedded assumption about certain demographic changes representing changes for the worse) it is clearly something that he likes to say and hear. In fact, there's already an official government website devoted to the concept. Moreover, we've been hearing for decades about an alleged "STEM crisis" threatening America's scientific pre-eminence and global leadership, so Trump's catch-phrase is (on the surface) tailor-made for the neuroses of academic scientists.
Seen on that level, the press release put out by APS was completely reasonable and squarely within their charge.
However, Donald Trump is also a bigot who threatens peace, prosperity, and freedom, and in light of his complaints about Mexicans and Muslims there's a clear implication that America will be great when we have sent certain people away. Seen on that level, no decent person should invoke his catch-phrase in anything except a critical (or perhaps ironic) manner. To the extent that the American Physical Society exists to serve its members as more than just an advocate for federal spending on science, they should pay attention to how the members will read and process their statements.
Here's the thing: Barring some unexpected change in direction, the American Physical Society will, one way or another, engage with the Trump Administration. It pains me to type "Trump Administration", but that is the reality that we live in, at least in this sector of the multiverse. Most APS members are dependent on federal research funding, and the APS will almost certainly pursue an agenda that is cognizant of that fact.
There are two possible responses to the reality I just identified: One is to ask something more substantial of the APS than slightly more sensitive phrasing of press releases while they continue to advocate for federal funding of science. It means operating as an opposition group rather than a group that seeks a piece of the pie within the existing system. There have always been proud dissidents in the physics community (e.g. some great anti-Soviet dissidents) and perhaps the American Physical Society should rally us in that spirit of dissent. But this is a radical path. It means retaliation both on the large scale (reduced funding for physics) and the individual level (professional consequences for federal employees who resist their employer). It is noble to choose that, and we can have that conversation, but it comes at a cost that people will have to weigh.
The other option is a practical one: Accept the reality that the American Physical Society will serve primarily as a DC-area advocacy group, and just ask that press releases be sensitive to the fact that most (but not all) APS members don't want to be reminded that this means engagement with the Trump Administration.
I'm not writing here to promote one path over the other. Resistance is hard. Physicists have mortgages and kids and medical conditions that necessitate keeping jobs with health insurance. Maybe it's better if the APS sticks to advocacy and lets physicists who choose the path of dissent do so in some other venue. On the other side of the coin, dissent is virtuous and the world may someday applaud those who took risks to dissent. Maybe the APS should do that. We can argue it either way and I'm not going to reach and defend a considered conclusion in this post.
What I am suggesting in this post is that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the second path is all that virtuous or sensitive. It is practical and seemly, but it is NOT making a stand in any meaningful sense. It is NOT a stride for social justice. It's just what people do when they have mortgages to pay. The reality is that--barring some substantial change in direction at the behest of the membership--professional societies will engage with the Trump Administration, and that engagement will mean speaking in the catch-phrases of the Administration. Now, I've written curmudgeonly articles on eschewing buzzwords and catch-phrases, so I'm fine with doing so, but I also choose not to chase large sums of money. Advocacy groups advocating for large federal research budgets will not make my choice. At best they will cloak their choices in seemly appearances.
Finally, remember that the physics community engages in hero worship of people who built nuclear bombs. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that using a new President's catch-phrase is the worst thing we've ever done. Moral outrage over pure appearances is shallow.
(Click on the image too enlarge it)
The American Physical Society is a DC-area advocacy group. Yes, it exists to serve its members rather than the federal government, but most of its members are scientists who work or study in institutions that get federal money for research and educational purposes. In recognition of that reality, the American Physical Society has its headquarters in College Park, Maryland, just outside DC.
Professional Societies that want the federal government to spend money on science invariably articulate that goal in language that will be pleasing to the people in power. Donald Trump has used "Make America Great Again" as his slogan, and while that slogan carries quite a bit of baggage (e.g. it is historically uninformed, and carries an embedded assumption about certain demographic changes representing changes for the worse) it is clearly something that he likes to say and hear. In fact, there's already an official government website devoted to the concept. Moreover, we've been hearing for decades about an alleged "STEM crisis" threatening America's scientific pre-eminence and global leadership, so Trump's catch-phrase is (on the surface) tailor-made for the neuroses of academic scientists.
Seen on that level, the press release put out by APS was completely reasonable and squarely within their charge.
However, Donald Trump is also a bigot who threatens peace, prosperity, and freedom, and in light of his complaints about Mexicans and Muslims there's a clear implication that America will be great when we have sent certain people away. Seen on that level, no decent person should invoke his catch-phrase in anything except a critical (or perhaps ironic) manner. To the extent that the American Physical Society exists to serve its members as more than just an advocate for federal spending on science, they should pay attention to how the members will read and process their statements.
Here's the thing: Barring some unexpected change in direction, the American Physical Society will, one way or another, engage with the Trump Administration. It pains me to type "Trump Administration", but that is the reality that we live in, at least in this sector of the multiverse. Most APS members are dependent on federal research funding, and the APS will almost certainly pursue an agenda that is cognizant of that fact.
There are two possible responses to the reality I just identified: One is to ask something more substantial of the APS than slightly more sensitive phrasing of press releases while they continue to advocate for federal funding of science. It means operating as an opposition group rather than a group that seeks a piece of the pie within the existing system. There have always been proud dissidents in the physics community (e.g. some great anti-Soviet dissidents) and perhaps the American Physical Society should rally us in that spirit of dissent. But this is a radical path. It means retaliation both on the large scale (reduced funding for physics) and the individual level (professional consequences for federal employees who resist their employer). It is noble to choose that, and we can have that conversation, but it comes at a cost that people will have to weigh.
The other option is a practical one: Accept the reality that the American Physical Society will serve primarily as a DC-area advocacy group, and just ask that press releases be sensitive to the fact that most (but not all) APS members don't want to be reminded that this means engagement with the Trump Administration.
I'm not writing here to promote one path over the other. Resistance is hard. Physicists have mortgages and kids and medical conditions that necessitate keeping jobs with health insurance. Maybe it's better if the APS sticks to advocacy and lets physicists who choose the path of dissent do so in some other venue. On the other side of the coin, dissent is virtuous and the world may someday applaud those who took risks to dissent. Maybe the APS should do that. We can argue it either way and I'm not going to reach and defend a considered conclusion in this post.
What I am suggesting in this post is that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the second path is all that virtuous or sensitive. It is practical and seemly, but it is NOT making a stand in any meaningful sense. It is NOT a stride for social justice. It's just what people do when they have mortgages to pay. The reality is that--barring some substantial change in direction at the behest of the membership--professional societies will engage with the Trump Administration, and that engagement will mean speaking in the catch-phrases of the Administration. Now, I've written curmudgeonly articles on eschewing buzzwords and catch-phrases, so I'm fine with doing so, but I also choose not to chase large sums of money. Advocacy groups advocating for large federal research budgets will not make my choice. At best they will cloak their choices in seemly appearances.
Finally, remember that the physics community engages in hero worship of people who built nuclear bombs. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that using a new President's catch-phrase is the worst thing we've ever done. Moral outrage over pure appearances is shallow.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Shove it up your pipeline
I know that I should treat this report on preparing students for non-academic careers as a good thing, because it involves academic physicists and professional societies finally recognizing that we need to get serious about the fact that most physics majors will go into industry, not the PhD pipeline/pyramid. I should be glad that people are recognizing this, and that the Important And Serious Types get it.
The problem is that I hate the important and serious types because they are always so disconnected from reality, half of them still say all the Acceptable And Serious stuff about PhD production, and it seems like they only figured out 4 minutes ago what the physics community should have figured out 4 decades ago: That most people don't get PhDs and don't wind up in academia. How can I take these jokers seriously when they started revising their Party Line yesterday while I've been taking students to industry meetings and teaching computational physics and applied optics since I was a junior professor? These jokers will no doubt get the world to pat them on the back for "Steering the Conversation to Recognize the Need for Change" while some of us have been in the trenches doing this stuff for a long time, and we figured it out without the Serious And Important People issuing reports and trying to "Change The Conversation" or whatever.
And they dress it up in all of their administrative language instead of plain English, speaking the language of administrivia and bureaucracy. And I know, I just KNOW, that when the next grant opportunity comes along, if it's for some PhD pipeline bullshit they'll be talking up the importance of that when five minutes earlier they were talking about preparing students for industry. Because they're a bunch of parasites.
The problem is that I hate the important and serious types because they are always so disconnected from reality, half of them still say all the Acceptable And Serious stuff about PhD production, and it seems like they only figured out 4 minutes ago what the physics community should have figured out 4 decades ago: That most people don't get PhDs and don't wind up in academia. How can I take these jokers seriously when they started revising their Party Line yesterday while I've been taking students to industry meetings and teaching computational physics and applied optics since I was a junior professor? These jokers will no doubt get the world to pat them on the back for "Steering the Conversation to Recognize the Need for Change" while some of us have been in the trenches doing this stuff for a long time, and we figured it out without the Serious And Important People issuing reports and trying to "Change The Conversation" or whatever.
And they dress it up in all of their administrative language instead of plain English, speaking the language of administrivia and bureaucracy. And I know, I just KNOW, that when the next grant opportunity comes along, if it's for some PhD pipeline bullshit they'll be talking up the importance of that when five minutes earlier they were talking about preparing students for industry. Because they're a bunch of parasites.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
sySTEM of a downturn
A fascinating quote in today's Science:
Leaving aside the fact that the assertion is made without a link to statistical evidence or context on how the number was arrived at, there are two problems with this assertion:
1) Part of the "problem" is that most people with STEM degrees do not work in jobs classified as being in STEM. On any given day you have to roll the dice to see if the narrative is "See, people are leaving STEM!!1!!11!" or "See, STEM training makes you very versatile and prepares you both for STEM careers and alternative careers!" Nobody ever says "Hmm, maybe it's because the economy doesn't need as many STEM professionals as the shills claim..."
2) Just a few years ago Science published an article in which people admitted that the retention rate in STEM is better than most other majors, and the rate at which people switch into STEM from other majors is higher than the rate at which people switch from STEM into other majors. They also admitted that they had not examined this prior to 2013, proving that there is indeed a shortage of people with scientific reasoning abilities in the United States...at least among the sorts of people who compile statistics on STEM shortages.
But let's not let "facts" get in the way of a good "The sky is falling!" narrative.
“Of every 100 people who walk in [to earn a bachelor's degree], we have about eight who stay through getting a bachelor's degree in STEM and actually working in STEM. And for minority students, it's even worse. It really is dismal,” said Roni Ellington, associate professor of mathematics education at Morgan State University.Wow, that sounds dire! We lose 92% of the talent!
Leaving aside the fact that the assertion is made without a link to statistical evidence or context on how the number was arrived at, there are two problems with this assertion:
1) Part of the "problem" is that most people with STEM degrees do not work in jobs classified as being in STEM. On any given day you have to roll the dice to see if the narrative is "See, people are leaving STEM!!1!!11!" or "See, STEM training makes you very versatile and prepares you both for STEM careers and alternative careers!" Nobody ever says "Hmm, maybe it's because the economy doesn't need as many STEM professionals as the shills claim..."
2) Just a few years ago Science published an article in which people admitted that the retention rate in STEM is better than most other majors, and the rate at which people switch into STEM from other majors is higher than the rate at which people switch from STEM into other majors. They also admitted that they had not examined this prior to 2013, proving that there is indeed a shortage of people with scientific reasoning abilities in the United States...at least among the sorts of people who compile statistics on STEM shortages.
But let's not let "facts" get in the way of a good "The sky is falling!" narrative.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
All of this has been shilled before and will be shilled again
I'm looking at a bunch of things I read a few years ago. Here's a fascinating infographic from the Brookings Institution:
I don't have any problem with the basic concept of parsing out different segments of the STEM job market,m and I certainly do NOT object to people who note that not all STEM jobs need a 4-year degree. At the same time, I have this nasty feeling that definition creep can easily lead to even more inflated estimates of our country's alleged "need" for STEM graduates. You start with a broad definition, one that isn't just about 4-year grads, and get a large number of jobs. Then you point to the large number while arguing for the importance of a particular segment, without noting any of the crucial context or caveats.
I don't have any problem with the basic concept of parsing out different segments of the STEM job market,m and I certainly do NOT object to people who note that not all STEM jobs need a 4-year degree. At the same time, I have this nasty feeling that definition creep can easily lead to even more inflated estimates of our country's alleged "need" for STEM graduates. You start with a broad definition, one that isn't just about 4-year grads, and get a large number of jobs. Then you point to the large number while arguing for the importance of a particular segment, without noting any of the crucial context or caveats.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Transparency
In this morning's Los Angeles Times, there's an op-ed calling for the College Board to release detailed question-by-question data on the SAT. The op-ed claims that this data is necessary to address questions about fairness and achievement gaps. This is a fine thing to be concerned about, but before you let this op-ed push your buttons take a look at the author info at the end of the article:
Mind you, there are plenty of good reasons why the world would benefit from more transparency in such a high-stakes matter as the SAT, and the pecuniary interests of the op-ed writer do not make the concerns any less valid. However, it is important to be reminded that even righteous causes attract all sorts of people with financial angles.
Jay Rosner is the executive director of The Princeton Review Foundation.I wonder why a test prep service would want detailed data on a test...
Mind you, there are plenty of good reasons why the world would benefit from more transparency in such a high-stakes matter as the SAT, and the pecuniary interests of the op-ed writer do not make the concerns any less valid. However, it is important to be reminded that even righteous causes attract all sorts of people with financial angles.
Friday, August 21, 2015
Lies, damn lies, and PhD job statistics
Today I went to the physics student club room (a place where physics majors hang out and study and socialize) to drop off a few science magazines for them to read when they come back for fall quarter. On a table I found this poster from the American Physical Society:
(A bit of Googling did not turn up a digital version of the poster. If I find one I will link it.)
This looks like a pretty nice set of numbers for PhD employment. 64% in the private sector, 22% in potentially permanent academic jobs (which can be a sweet gig), and those in the private sector start at $92k. Sweet! What on earth could I be complaining about?
READ THE FINE PRINT!
Those numbers exclude postdoc positions and temporary academic jobs like adjuncting. What percentage of physics PhDs start off as postdocs or adjuncts? According to the American Institute of Physics, 65%. 56% go into postdoc positions, and another 9% go into other short-term positions. Now, most of them will eventually jump off of the postdoc/adjunct/visiting/etc. treadmill and find a full-time, long-term job that is reasonably satisfying. That's great. If APS wants to put those statistics out there, go for it. However, they instead chose to lie with statistics, and put a really rosy picture of PhD job outcomes in big print, while putting a partial caveat in fine print, and never mentioning at all that their data only applies to 1/3 of new PhD graduates.
Now, if APS were a commercial organization attempting to sell something, well, caveat emptor. The world is full of people telling incomplete stories. The fact that it's ubiquitous does not make it right, but it does make it rather unremarkable. There aren't enough hours in the day to blog about every misleading sales pitch ever made. APS, however, is not a commercial organization. APS is a non-profit professional society that exists to serve the physics community at all levels, including students. (Indeed, off-camera the poster includes a link to this student membership site.) Professional societies best serve their members when they provide their members with accurate data on careers and education. APS is not serving the interests of their student members when they provide misleading statistical information to people who are trying to decide what to do after college.
Now, to be fair, they did include some information about careers for people with bachelor's degrees in the second half of the poster:
(For some reason Blogger is making it possible to zoom in on the first image but not these two. I'm working on it. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of making the fine print visible in only one image while complaining about people who are sweeping things under the rug. I'll try to find a fix.)
The bottom figure certainly sells graduate school as The Path, by lumping graduate school, k-12 teaching, government jobs, and non-profit jobs in the same category. It is clearly a slanted poster. There's no good reason for this. It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out why an organization that ostensibly exists to serve all of its members would target college students with misleading statistics that might influence their post-graduation decisions.
The bottom figure certainly sells graduate school as The Path, by lumping graduate school, k-12 teaching, government jobs, and non-profit jobs in the same category. It is clearly a slanted poster. There's no good reason for this. It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out why an organization that ostensibly exists to serve all of its members would target college students with misleading statistics that might influence their post-graduation decisions.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Prelude to the next book: Stages need sages
My next blogging topic will be Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter. My main motivation for reading this book is that I am trying to understand the roots of current educational fashions, and I believe that the roots lie outside the academy. Higher education is currently in the grips of two awful fixations: One is that there are easy solutions to timeless problems, and the other is that the Sage on the Stage is part of the problem.
Opposition to sages on stages is a rather strange stance for academics to adhere to, especially given the sizes of our egos. An easy explanation would be that those of us who have spent the longest time in school have encountered more bad lectures than anyone else, so of course we hate lectures. There's a valid point there, but most of us in academia also encountered some absolutely dazzling, inspirational lectures, and the sages who gave those lectures inspired us to go farther in our academic disciplines. Why is it that current educational fashion is more focused on the first case than the second? Another very easy explanation would be that there's a tremendous body of data in favor of active learning approaches in the classroom. That is certainly an argument against any classroom approach that is 100% lecture, and I certainly don't lecture all of the time.
However, if you listen to people who were inspired by an educational workshop, they aren't talking about learning gains that are statistically significant with a p value of less than 0.5% or whatever. They aren't talking about studies and control groups. Rather, they are talking about how it transformed their approach to their teaching, and how it resonated with them. There is something psychological going on, some sort of deep resonance with something in the mind of the modern academic. I want to understand this, and I believe that I might learn something about this issue if I combine discussions with colleagues and readings on American culture. Hence I will read Hofstadter's book and blog my reactions.
Besides the cultural and psychological resonances in the minds of workshop attendees, there's also something interesting going on in the minds of workshop presenters. I am quite certain that many of them are cynical hucksters and shills, people who would have peddled some other ware to the unwary if they had lived in a different time or entered a different field of endeavor. However, I am also certain that some of them are quite sincere and well-meaning, and I freely admit that some of their wares have real benefit--indeed, I do use clicker questions in my introductory classes! I know some truly sincere and intellectual careful ones (just as I know at least one shill...). What is interesting is that more than once I have heard both presenters and attendees speak of the value of letting go of their expert role, and how learning isn't occurring if the professor is talking and the student is listening. Leaving aside the fact that I'm pretty sure that some of these people would advocate for an approach of "Shut up and listen!" in other contexts, there is clearly a deep psychological resonance for them in letting go of the authority figure role. I believe that American views on intellectuals and expert voices might play a role here.
Opposition to sages on stages is a rather strange stance for academics to adhere to, especially given the sizes of our egos. An easy explanation would be that those of us who have spent the longest time in school have encountered more bad lectures than anyone else, so of course we hate lectures. There's a valid point there, but most of us in academia also encountered some absolutely dazzling, inspirational lectures, and the sages who gave those lectures inspired us to go farther in our academic disciplines. Why is it that current educational fashion is more focused on the first case than the second? Another very easy explanation would be that there's a tremendous body of data in favor of active learning approaches in the classroom. That is certainly an argument against any classroom approach that is 100% lecture, and I certainly don't lecture all of the time.
However, if you listen to people who were inspired by an educational workshop, they aren't talking about learning gains that are statistically significant with a p value of less than 0.5% or whatever. They aren't talking about studies and control groups. Rather, they are talking about how it transformed their approach to their teaching, and how it resonated with them. There is something psychological going on, some sort of deep resonance with something in the mind of the modern academic. I want to understand this, and I believe that I might learn something about this issue if I combine discussions with colleagues and readings on American culture. Hence I will read Hofstadter's book and blog my reactions.
Besides the cultural and psychological resonances in the minds of workshop attendees, there's also something interesting going on in the minds of workshop presenters. I am quite certain that many of them are cynical hucksters and shills, people who would have peddled some other ware to the unwary if they had lived in a different time or entered a different field of endeavor. However, I am also certain that some of them are quite sincere and well-meaning, and I freely admit that some of their wares have real benefit--indeed, I do use clicker questions in my introductory classes! I know some truly sincere and intellectual careful ones (just as I know at least one shill...). What is interesting is that more than once I have heard both presenters and attendees speak of the value of letting go of their expert role, and how learning isn't occurring if the professor is talking and the student is listening. Leaving aside the fact that I'm pretty sure that some of these people would advocate for an approach of "Shut up and listen!" in other contexts, there is clearly a deep psychological resonance for them in letting go of the authority figure role. I believe that American views on intellectuals and expert voices might play a role here.
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