Fredrik deBoer has an excellent post on this topic. He approaches this from the pro-Affirmative Action perch.  His salient points are:

This is a question that people… absolutely have to answer if they want to grapple with this issue in an honest way: are you comfortable with a university system with incredibly low percentages of black and Hispanic students? With percentages of black and Hispanic students that are far lower than their averages in the population? That’s what you’re actually advocating […]

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The graph below (from Jonathan Wai’s article in Quartz (Qz.com), illustrates clearly the career advantages derived from an elite school education and/o obtaining a graduate degree.

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There have been a lot of discussions about career success and its linkage to attending elite schools.  We are not in a philosophical discussion here, questioning what truly is success! For purposes of this analysis, we will go by what society generally considers as having a highly successful career. This means becoming CEOs of big corporations, Entertainment Stars, Journalists at highly acclaimed Newspapers, Magazines, TV, Radio, etc., Federal Judges, Congressmen, Senators, Nobel Prize winners and Presidents.
While attending an elite school […]

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 If you and your parents are worried about getting into an elite school, odds are that you are already elite.                                                                                                                          […]

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Some thoughts from Exxon Mobil Chairman & CEO, Rex Tillerson, who is himself a Civil Engineering graduate from the University of Texas.

One of the challenges we’ve had as a profession is that young people don’t really know what an engineer does. And it can take on a certain connotation of being nothing more than a technician, when in reality scientists discover things and help us understand why they are. Mathematicians help us calculate and measure. …

Engineers are the marriage of […]

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Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects. – Will Rogers

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The New York Times published a recent article by Maria Konnikova that wondered whether hand writing mattered anymore in these days of smart phones and iPads.

The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that […]

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From the Pew Report

Some general trends extend through these findings, as documented in our earlier reports such as How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities:

Socioeconomic status: Broadly speaking, adults with higher levels of education and household income are more likely to use public libraries than those with lower household incomes and lower levels of education. However, among those who have used a library in the past year, adults living in lower-income households are more likely to say various library services are very important to them and […]

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Harvard university has retained its number one spot on the Times Higher Education’s world reputation ranking of universities, with US institutions taking eight of the top 10 positions.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford follow to make up the top three. Cambridge and Oxford are both down one place on last year’s rankings which puts them in fourth and fifth place respectively. The University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles take the […]

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will human beings ever change (for the better)? Here's the sad plight of Roma Children in Europe:

European leaders everywhere speak ominously of the ‘Roma Problem’ and how to limit migration of a community deemed by an increasingly hostile public to have criminal tendencies. Following a controversial deportation of a Roma schoolgirl in France last October, Manuel Valls, the country’s socialist Interior Minister, said "The majority [of Roma] should be delivered back to the borders. We are not here to welcome […]

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