TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir

TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir a free online course this summer (June and July) diving into Film Noir.

82% of Americans want Congress to make student loans cheaper, but it's a bad idea

Libby Nelson in Vox says 82% of Americans want Congress to make student loans cheaper, but it's a bad idea. She says using public money to make loans more affordable will just mean more money to schools which are already charging too much. She'd rather the public money be spend better, such as on Pell grants which go to needier students or on incentives to states to spend their money on public colleges. These kind of trade offs sound good to me, but they're also the area of economics I never do well in.

Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t.

The New York Times reports Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t

America’s perceived international dominance of higher education, by contrast, rests largely on global rankings of top universities. According to a recent ranking by the London-based Times Higher Education, 18 of the world’s top 25 universities are American. Similarly, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gives us 19 of 25... International university rankings, moreover, have little to do with education. Instead, they focus on universities as research institutions, using metrics such as the number of Nobel Prize winners on staff and journal articles published. A university could stop enrolling undergraduates with no effect on its score.

The project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (known as Piaac, sometimes called “pee-ack”). In 2011 and 2012, 166,000 adults ages 16 to 65 were tested in the O.E.C.D. countries (most of Europe along with the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea) and Cyprus and Russia. Like PISA, Piaac tests people’s literacy and math skills...As with the measures of K-12 education, the United States battles it out for last place, this time with Italy and Spain. Countries that traditionally trounce America on the PISA test of 15-year-olds, such as Japan and Finland, also have much higher levels of proficiency and skill among adults.

Senate Announces Deal to Keep Student Interest Rates Low

Campus Progress reports Senate Announces Deal to Keep Student Interest Rates Low.

"With just a few days before student loan interest rates are set to double, party leaders in the Senate have reached a deal to keep the rate steady for 7.4 million students. The $6 billion agreement would be paid for primarily through savings from a change in how employer pension payments are calculated. Some savings will also come from tying the amount of time students can borrow at the low rate to the length of their degree program."

They still have to vote on it but the details seem to be:

"Under the deal, a 25-year stabilization range would be created that could be used to reduce dramatic fluctuations in calculating companies’ pension contributions. When the two-year corporate bond rates that companies have previously used to determine their pension liabilities fall outside of this 25-year range, they can now be computed using the closest two-year rate within that timeframe. This will result in businesses taking fewer tax deductions for their contributions and is estimated to generate roughly $5 billion in tax revenue.

Additionally, employers will be required to pay an increased rate to insure their pensions through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal government agency that oversees millions of employees’ pensions. The change is expected to generate $500 million.

The agreement also changes the amount of time students can borrow Stafford loans at the 3.4 percent interest rate, capping borrowing at 150 percent of the length of the degree program. For instance, a student earning a four-year bachelor’s degree would be eligible for subsidized Stafford loans for up to six years. Previous estimates have indicated this could save as much as $1.2 billion over the next decade, but specifics of this change have not yet been released.

This cap was originally included in President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget and was to be used to fill part of a $6 billion shortfall in Pell Grant funding for fiscal year 2014. As a result, Congress will need to find additional offsets to fill the Pell shortfall."

I don't follow all of this but it seems Republicans agreed to raise corporate taxes to help students. I wonder how that will play?

Romney's School Voucher Plan?

Ed Kilgore writes Wherever the Backpack Roams.

"I continue to be amazed at how little general attention has been drawn by Mitt Romney’s radical proposal to turn all federal K-12 education dollars into vouchers that will, as one of his advisors, Grover Whitehurst, likes to put it, follow kids around like a backpack wherever their parents choose to send them.

If the Romney proposal is implemented and becomes, as it appears designed to become, a super-charged magnet for state as well as federal money to flow into private schools, some pretty big questions will have to be asked about whether any conditions will be placed on private use of public dollars."

"So the Louisiana program is using state funds to prop up marginal church-based schools with zero vetting of their curriculum, facilities, instructional credentials or standards. “The market,” or, I suppose, the Good Lord will sort them out eventually. A separate piece on the Louisiana program by Alternet’s Bruce Wilson (published at Salon) notes that a number of beneficiary schools use textbooks that explicitly preach anti-evolution and anti-gay nostrums as science, along with revisionist history and political preferences."

For-Profit College Rules Scaled Back After Lobbying

A week ago the New York Times explained how For-Profit College Rules Scaled Back After Lobbying. "The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case."

"In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington. The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing."

Khan Academy ponders what it can teach the higher education establishment

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, Khan Academy ponders what it can teach the higher education establishment.

"“I think too much conversation about Khan Academy is about cute little videos," Khan said in an interview last week. “Most of our resources, almost two-thirds of [the staff], are engineers working on the exercises and analytics platform. That, I think, is what we’re most excited about.”"

"Using math and computer science concepts decidedly more advanced than most of those in Khan’s video library, the Khan engineers have trained the website’s exercise platform how to predict, with startling accuracy, how likely it is that a student will correctly answer the next practice problem -- and whether that student will be able to solve the same type of problem a week, two weeks, and a month later."

"“If [a user is] logged in, then we have the entire history of every problem they’ve done, and how long it took them, and how they did,” says Ben Kamens, the lead developer at Khan Academy. “So whenever anybody does a problem, we see whether they got it right or wrong, how many tries it took them, what their guess was, what the problem was, how many hints they used, and how long they took between each hint.”"

Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges

This seems crazy, but interesting. Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges "Once the two economists added these new variables, the earnings difference disappeared. In fact, it went away merely by including the colleges that students had applied to — and not taking into account whether they were accepted. A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn.

‘Even applying to a school, even if you get rejected, says a lot about you,’ Mr. Krueger told me. He points out that the average SAT score at the most selective college students apply to turns out to be a better predictor of their earnings than the average SAT score at the college they attended."

High School Senior Leads Louisiana Fight Against Anti-Evolution Law

The Washington Post wrote High school senior leads Louisiana fight against anti-evolution law "A 17-year-old Baton Rouge high school senior is leading the fight to repeal a Lousiana law that gives teachers license to equate creationism with evolution -- and now he is doing it with the support of more than 40 Nobel laureates."

“The single most important reason why I took on this repeal was jobs,” Kopplin told me. “This law makes it harder for Louisiana students to get cutting-edge science-based jobs after we graduate, because companies like Baton Rouge’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center are not going to trust our science education with this law on the books.”

American Schools Are Better Than 50 Years Ago

Kevin Jones wrote American Schools Are Better Than 50 Years Ago "This is a myth. The United States never led the world. It was never number one and has never been close to number one on international math tests. Or on science tests, for that matter....[And] there has been no sharp decline—in either the short or long run. The United States performance on PISA has been flat to slightly up since the test’s inception, and it has improved on Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) since 1995."