DailyDirt: College Tuition Is Expensive

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Paying for college has never exactly been easy, but it's been getting increasingly difficult over time. On top of that, it's getting more difficult to get into some of the more selective schools. CA Gov. Jerry Brown remarked that "normal" people can't get accepted to Berkeley anymore (hold the jokes on how normal the students at Berkeley have ever been, okay?). Proposals for free community college tuition (with fine print attached) might make higher education more accessible and certain colleges more socio-economically diverse, but what's going on with the costs of tuition?

• All the Ivy League universities and a bunch of prestigious schools like MIT and Stanford offer free tuition for students from families earning less than specified income levels. However, if the goal of these kinds of programs is really to achieve higher socio-economic diversity of student populations, perhaps efforts to level the playing field should start far earlier than college. [url]
• The putative reason for the increasing college tuition is related to slashed government funding, but the conventional wisdom seems to ignore the growth of the student population, as well as the administrative expansion which has been roughly ten times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Some folks point to the seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university executives as a scapegoat, but the situation seems to be much more complex. Is there a more efficient way to deliver higher education and reliably recognize student achievements? [url]
• Government subsidized higher education isn't going to lower the costs of educating -- it'll just obscure the relationship between that cost and tuition. Reducing administration costs for colleges and universities seems like the place to start, but it's not clear how the cuts there would begin... or why they would be initiated by the very people who are in charge of the administration budgets. [url]

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Filed Under: college, diversity, education, higher education, ivy league, jerry brown, moocs, tuition, university

DailyDirt: Incredible Skills

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

They say that to master a particular skill or discipline takes about 10,000 hours of practice. Talent bred in the bone plays a role as well, whether it's physical build or one of those strange genetic quirks like absolute pitch, and there's a long list of other factors that shape a person's abilities. But there's one distinct commonality: when a person is truly great at something, we love to watch them do it (even if their talent occasionally makes us burn with jealousy, too). Here are a few links about people who can do incredible things:

• A Japanese TV show pitted three master Olympic fencers against a mob of 50 amateurs, and filmed the results. Surprisingly, it's not entirely unlike how such scenes are choreographed in movies. [url]
• Axl Rose, Mariah Carey and Prince top out the list of popular singers ranked by vocal range. The Guns N' Roses singer's voice goes down to the contra F and has reached nearly a full octave above the soprano C. [url]
• A 17-year-old student has accomplished the almost-unprecedented feat of being accepted at all eight Ivy League schools. Kwasi Enin eventually chose Yale, admitting he had favored it all along. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: axl rose, fencing, ivy league, kwasi enin, mariah carey, prince, singing, skill, talent, yale