Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Report Was In Error: Freshman Enrollment Did Not Decline 5% Last Fall [ Forbes ]

The flava:

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center today released the following statement from Executive Director Doug Shapiro about an error that affected the freshman enrollment data in its October preliminary fall enrollment report:

“The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has identified a methodological error affecting its calculation of freshman enrollment in the preliminary enrollment report released in October 2024. That report, called the Stay Informed Report, is based on data provided by 50 percent of higher education institutions. The error in research methodology caused the mislabeling of certain students as dual-enrolled rather than as freshmen, and as a result, the number of freshmen was undercounted, and the number of dual-enrolled was overcounted. The error also affected the Special Analysis of 18-year-old Freshmen report released in November.”

The initially reported 5% drop in freshman enrollment was widely covered in news outlets and cited by numerous commentators over the past few months. . . .  

The article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/01/13/report-was-in-error-freshman-enrollment-did-not-decline-5-last-fall/

Sunday, January 12, 2025

John Aubrey Douglass: Leading a university is set to become even more difficult.





--John Aubrey Douglass, senior research fellow for public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Friday, December 27, 2024

Are we becoming a post-literate society? [ FT.com ]

The flava:

“Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.”

The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”

What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads more like prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. . . .

The article:

https://www.ft.com/content/e2ddd496-4f07-4dc8-a47c-314354da8d46

Thursday, December 19, 2024

On aging and wisdom

Personal note from Frank Bruni's newsletter today:

I was told I’d be wiser. I heard that all the time. When I grew older, I’d more accurately judge people and more quickly size up situations. That’s what adults in their 40s said when I was in my teens and what retirees said when I was midcareer. And they were mostly right.

I was told I’d know myself better, and indeed I do, but that seems to me an unimpressive function of simple arithmetic: I’ve had more years with the person in question and collected more evidence of his triggers and tics. He was a haiku to me at 13, a short story at 24, a novella at 35. He’s “Middlemarch” now. I guess he’ll be an encyclopedia in the end. I hope it’s the kind with illustrations and artful fonts.

I turned 60 this year — on Halloween, to be exact. That was hardly the main thing about my 2024 but it was a thing, milestone-wise. Days later I went to the movies at a multiplex where, I discovered, I qualified for the senior-citizen discount. I’ll consider that a silver lining to go with my increasingly silver hair.

But while I’ve matured in many ways, I feel less different than I thought I would, and I don’t mean physically. (On that front, the passage of time is palpable.) I mean emotionally.

Whatever wisdom and self-knowledge I’ve gained pale beside the lingering gremlins in my head and stubborn butterflies in my gut. I’m still needled by so many doubts, roiled by so many fears. At some point, I thought, I’d get a break.

There are moments when I’m 60 going on 16, and none of my elders ever told me about that. They never explained that a certain inextinguishable tremulousness isn’t an affliction of youth but an affliction of being alive, and that “forever young” is at once an aspiration and a curse. If turning 60 taught me anything, it’s that the magnitude of clarity and degree of confidence that I’ve long craved aren’t the rewards of aging, waiting for me if I just hung on. They’re pretty myths.