The Wily Filipino

Weekend Link Roundup.

1. Via Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds, Alton Thompson at Conductor's Notebook:

Half the students who begin school do not finish.

If this statement described an American inner-city public school system, the story would already have made headlines. Outraged parents would be asking hard questions of the mayor at the next press conference. If it described undergrad athletes at your local collegiate sports factory, the NCAA would already be leaning on the program to change something.

But this statistic is not about those students. It describes students enrolled in American Ph.D programs.

This dirty secret, long known to officials at universities, is gradually becoming public. For decades, half the students who begin doctoral programs at American universities have been walking away.

...

The secret is dirty because the students who walk away are not failing. They are successful. The grades non-completers earn are as high as those of their colleagues who complete their degrees. Recent research shows the undergraduate GPAs of female students, in fact, to be higher among the walkoffs than among their colleagues who finish. The secret is dirty because these are adults who have already completed at least two college degrees just to get where they are. Their competence for academic work, and their willingess to follow through, is established. The secret is dirty because these are adults who have invested enormous amounts of time and personal resources into the very programs they decide to abandon.

And from the original article, Barbara E. Lovitts and Cary Nelson on grad student attrition from AAUP's Academe magazine:

As we begin to think through the differences such practical programmatic changes can make, a more fundamental conclusion begins to take shape-that the real problem is with the character of graduate programs rather than with the character of their students. Yet most faculty assume that the best students finish their degrees and the less talented and qualified depart. Those who leave are often called "dropouts" to emphasize both volition and inevitability; the term suggests the problem is with the student, not with the program.

Everything about the way students depart reinforces this conviction. Most leave silently; they simply disappear, without communicating any reservations about the program to faculty or administrators. Exit interviews or follow-up contacts with departing students are rare. Moreover, students are effectively discouraged from voicing complaints while they are still actively enrolled. The "successful" student is "happy" and compliant; such a student is more likely to receive financial support, good teaching assignments, and strong letters of recommendation. A student who criticizes the program is a problem. Of course this reasoning is circular and self-fulfilling, since complaining students may well be turned into problem students by neglect or discrimination. Meanwhile, the accumulated silence of previous "dropouts" reinforces the view faculty prefer to hold: the problem is with the student, not the program.

2. Playing around with the Jing Project. Easy as pie -- I just used it to walk a student through the U.S. Census Bureau website, using City College's address for the demo. My first attempt.

3. And via Stereogum: the dance routines of inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. It's funny, yes. But this isn't funny: the massacre of Muslim prisoners at Bagong Diwa Prison is only a little over two years old. And the Philippines seems hellbent on pushing more people into prison, including children -- a 30 square-meter cell in Quezon City Jail, for instance, that holds 20 has 180 to 200 inmates crammed in it.

4. My brand strategies professor handed an article out yesterday from the Washington Post by Karen DeYoung about "boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world" and "establishing a brand identity." The $400,000 monograph from the Rand Corporation -- though the discounted web price is $27! -- argues, among the following (this is from the DeYoung article):

[Todd C.] Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the 'force' brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands.

Helmus added "that it could be too late for extensive rebranding of the U.S. effort in Iraq." I think my professor was amused by all this. I wasn't.

5. Going to hear Slint perform all of Spiderland at Bimbo's tonight. And I'm representin' by wearing my "SUPPORT PINOY ROCK" t-shirt from SaGuijo.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 22, 2007 10:30 AM