What to do with degrees like these?

“In 2010, the New York Times reported on Cortney Munna, then 26, a New York University graduate with almost $100,000 in debt. If her repayments were not then being deferred because she was enrolled in night school, she would have been paying $700 monthly from her $2,300 monthly after-tax income as a photographer’s assistant. She says she is toiling “to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back.” Her degree is in religious and women’s studies.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-subprime-college-educations/2012/06/08/gJQA4fGiOV_story.html

But what are all those tuition and fee increases going for?  In part, narcissism.  Bloat. Says George Will.  And I’ve blogged about it when I see it at Ohio State which has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion; Faculty of Color Caucus of the Department of History; the Race, Ethnicity, and Nation Constellation of the Department of History; and DISCO, Diversity and Identity Studies Collective . Courses like “Gender and race in contemporary architecture.”

UCSD found money to create a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an administrator of diversity education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a diversity program coordinator; an early resolution discrimination coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression”; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” California’s budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new vice chancellor for diversity and outreach to supplement its Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become “a Diversity Change Agent”), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

When black men succeed

they probably have a dad in the home with mom and the two parents had high expectations. Sixty percent of black male achievers grew up in homes with two parents. “Census data show that only 35 percent of black children grow up in two-parent homes,” reports Inside Higher Ed.

Shaun Harper set out to do something about the image of black men as failures.

"He built his own research agenda as a graduate student a decade ago. In a study released today, the first from his new Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at Penn, Harper analyzes a cohort of 219 black men (at a range of institutional types) who meet rigorous criteria that define them as "achievers," to understand both how and why they succeeded in college, and what campus leaders and others might do to help others follow in their footsteps.

The answers drawn from the National Black Male College Achievement Study are anything but elemental. Demographically, the subjects look much like their black male peers -- three in five hail from low-income or working class backgrounds (compared to about two-thirds of all African-American families) and nearly half have parents with no college degree -- and as a group they shun the idea that they are cognitively smarter than their less-successful friends or cousins or other peers (and their high-school academic records largely back that up).

What does differentiate them, the study suggests, is a complex stew of mostly external factors that appeared to give them a sense that college was not only possible but expected, and engaged them academically and otherwise in their schools and colleges. Among those influences: involved parents with high expectations for them; at least one K-12 teacher who took a personal interest in their academic and personal future; adequate financial support to pay for college; and a transition to college in which high expectations were set for them as much if not more by influential black male juniors and seniors at their institutions as by formal programs designed to smooth their way.

This study has implications for white families, too. Many children are growing up, not just in divorced families, but with a mom or dad who didn't marry the other biological parent. Lack of marriage is the biggest reason for poverty in the United States. Uncle Sam is not a good step-father.

Who will employ these college graduates?

These numbers don't look good. Apparently a lot of students go to college just to keep the professors employed, because they aren't finding jobs in their fields. According to Alexander Tabbarok we are graduating too many in the humanities and not enough in the sciences to maintain a sound economy. Hmm. Maybe this is an area where "free markets" and "choice" aren't working?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science, less than 25 years ago; 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology—about the same number as 25 years ago; 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years ago. In mathematics and statistics there were 15,496 graduates in 2009, slightly more than the 15,009 graduates of 1985.

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985, and 95,000 students a year in psychology, more than double the number of 25 years ago and far in excess of the number of available jobs. And everyone knows what is happening with the print media, but journalism and communications graduates have doubled since 1985!