Newmark's Door

The drop started five or six years before COVID.

I'm not sure Harvard and Columbia falling to a tie for sixth and tenth respectively qualify as a "plunge". But the piece itself uses "slipped" which seems appropriate.

As usual Eva Moskowitz is 100% correct. 

And my older daughter writes:

You have to serve all components of the meal to get reimbursed for the meal even if the vegetable and milk go straight into the trash. (This waste problem can be mitigated if you have a student like my one of my goofy delights who would drink as many milks as he could get his hands on, despite being lactose intolerant, just so he could fart all through math class after lunch.)

News from my former employer.

North Carolina State University professor Stephen Porter is celebrating after his university ditched DEI in its strategic plan following his formal complaint.

Standardized testing is imperfect but usually better than the other ways colleges have of evaluating applicants.

This is a most welcome development, one I've supported for a long time. College isn't right for everyone. Never was, never will be.

Argument from a math teacher that math instruction should deemphasize doing, "complex calculations most of them are never going to perform". 

"Companies are no longer interested in whether you have an MBA; they want to know what you can do": of course that should have always been true, but, hey, better late than never.

(But it brings to mind something I heard the distinguished economist Armen Alchian say in 1978. When asked how elite colleges could get away with charging so much for their product, Prof. Alchian said most of the value they were providing was the chance to meet potential mates. "If you can find someone who you'll spend the rest of your life with in college, the tuition is cheap," he said. I suspect a lot of the value of an MBA is similarly related to the friends the student makes.)

Heck of a rant by a college professor of over 30 years experience. Some memorable bits:

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” . . . .

This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. . . .

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight. . . .

Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. . . .

They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. . . .

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. 

Glenn Reynolds cracks, "On the upside, they’re ready for careers in journalism."

Related: "Harvard Students Can't Do Math".

Praise for his current employer from a University of Austin professor.