Students Unite!

You have only your student loans to lose: America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

[..] Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Previously: Are Too Many People Going to College?

(yes)

For some reason, the first thousand names in the Boston phone book come to mind

Interesting musings on the academic insult "I've never heard of you."

FWIW, I think that many of the comments are funny or true or funny and true, although there is a "back in the day whipersnappers respected their elders," which I kinda doubt. Did nickels have pictures of bees on them? Did you get five bees for a quarter?

The basic gist of all of this, is that in the university research program administration business, where much of the effort is very front-loaded, respect and recognition feel hard to come by. To which I say, the punishment fits the crime. Namely, stop worrying if other people think you're smart.

No one is reading this

Via the internet, proof that graders don't read too closely. This wouldn't happen if they had followed my grading advice.

How to grade papers

A Guide to Grading.

Clipped, quoted, duly noted.

20/20 linkdump:

• Suitcase nukes? Totally not worth it Iran.
• How to scale video for better HDTV viewing. On a related note, Hollywood hates you.
  
• Wisdom for grads.
• Ah, yes, the old lego ball and plate dohicky.
• VQ35DE + Nissan Sentra = Crazy Delcious. Actually, more like, Crazy Torque Steer. And yet I want one.
• Which reminds me, NBC is a douchbag.
• This is a photoshop, right? I mean, c;mon - Scotland?
• Check it out: They're spinning, cracker, they're spinning!
• Home made Futurama Pinball Machine. And now, for no raisin, I will mention that my favorite Futurama episode is the one where Fry makes a pact with the Robot Devil. Crazy flipper action indeed.
• Housing Bubbles. Judging from the number of flyers that I get each day, there's a blinking contest going on between buyers and sellers in DC right now. If rates keep going up, those floating ARM loans are going to go pop. By the way, so might Sallie Mae, given their debt /asset portfolio. You know, like my student loans. Ha!
  
• If that's a little obscure, perhaps you can decode it with this DIY Enigma Kit.
• More stuff whenever.

Gotta pay your dues if you want to sing the blues,etc etc

I'm not going to follow this train of thought too far, but it's clear that I instill a desire in people around me to tell me all about all of the things I'm doing wrong. I have a "Mentor Me" sticker on my back. Number one with a bullet is that I'm arrogant, e.g., my sister will tell me, "You're so arrogant." Or friends will say, "Hey, pass the salt, and by the way, you're an egomaniac."

But let's ignore them talking about me for the moment and let me talk about other people. Which I guess is arrogant - Perfect! Arrogance is a widespread character trait among my colleagues. So why do so many scientists, and in particular, physicists think so highly of themselves? It may seem counter-intuitive, but let me suggest that it's because we fail at almost everything we try, almost all of the time.

By "almost all the time," I mean 99% of the time. If this sound like an exaggeration, consider this: If their graduate work ever comes up, and somehow it always does, experimentalists will tell you that out of their 6 years toil in grad school (or whatever), all of the data for their thesis dissertation was collected in a week or two. Every single one of them will say this.

Granted, the work accomplished in this golden moment usually depended on much of the prior work, at least for knowledge about what experiments don't work. So allow me some hemming and hawing room there. Plus, they always say this with a wry look of nostalgia in their eye, so part of its bragging about... I'm not sure quite what, but besides that, what they say implies that, over the course of six years, the total profitable time spent in the lab was about a week. That's ~1 day per year, ~0.274% of the total time, or 0.4% of the working year. So actually, stipulating a 1% success rate is a somewhat Polyanna viewpoint.

This is a phenomenal amount of failing to endure. Many times a lot of work can go into a project, only to have it totally abandoned after 3 or 6 months. Because of this constant experience of walking uphill into a sideways blowing sleet and shoveling coal with your bare hands after your father shoots you to wake you up at 3 in the morning after you worked until 4, it's really helpful to have a unshakable certainty that you're headed towards a worthwhile destination.

Getting there is besides the point, because you always immediately start on towards the next project. Really there's never this moment of exultation. Just feed another log into the fire, another car into the crusher, etc. Lest I sound self-pitying, I'm not - it's just seems like a plausible explanation for where I've ended up and how I'm like those already there. The process is self-selecting, and so it tends to concentrate the field around these sorts of people.