Got a college degree but couldn't find a job? Not going to be a problem in China!

The ever practical China's Ministry of Education has the perfect solution to college graduates that can't find jobs: eliminate the college majors producing unemployable people. Problem solved!

Much like the U.S., China is aiming to address a problematic demographic that has recently emerged: a generation of jobless graduates. China’s solution to that problem, however, has some in the country scratching their heads.

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which the employment rate for graduates falls below 60% for two consecutive years.

Link (Photo: Zhu Difeng/Shutterstock)

It's a time-honored practice for politicians and educators to wring their hands over how American students have fallen behind in science and technology. Many have pointed out how large class sizes, lackluster teachers, and non-challenging curriculum in elementary and high schools are shortchanging our students and (gasp!) the country's future global competitiveness.

But who's really at fault here? Could the problem actually be on the shoulders of the vaunted American colleges and universities?

Christopher Drew wrote an intriguing article for The New York Times that examine how more and more students are turned off by science at the college level:

... it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

It's all a matter of the lack of preparation from high school, you say? Actually those who are better students are more likely to drop out of science:

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree.”

Link

This is something quite interesting. According to new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, almost half of all college graduates in the world come from only three countries: United States, China, and Japan.

Among the 34 OECD and G20 countries, nearly 26 percent of the total 255 million college-educated individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 hail from the United States. China comes in a distant second at 12.1 percent and Japan is a close third at 11.4 percent.

Link

There’s certainly some validity to this explanation. Yes, those charts and diagrams are expensive to produce, and the relatively small print runs of textbooks keep publishers from enjoying the kind of economies of scale they get on a bestselling popular novel. Any economist who has a pulse (and probably some who don’t) could poke holes in this argument pretty quickly, though.

In the simplest economic terms, the high price of textbooks is symptomatic of misaligned incentives, not exorbitant production costs. Students hold the reasonable stance that they’d like to spend as little money as possible on their books. Students don’t really have the latitude to pick which texts they need, though.

Read the real story behind sky-high textbook prices at mental_floss. Link

We’ve already linked to Mental Floss’ list of weird college courses, but if you can’t get enough of these strange course listings, then you probably ought to head over to Cracked and read about six more of these classes including Super Smash Bros. Melee Theory and Practice.

Link

16. How to Watch Television
Montclair State
Has that big screen in your living room always perplexed you? Flummoxed by the little rectangle that seems to control its every image and sound? Sorry to say, this class isn’t going to help. Despite its title, “How to Watch Television” is really about analyzing the medium and evaluating TV’s impact on our lives.

17. Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond
University of Texas at Austin
The class explores the Star Trek language and Esperanto, among others. I’m willing to bet there’s a bit of Elvish thrown in there, too.

18. The Phallus
Occidental College
I feel like this one speaks for itself, but just in case you need it spelled out for you, here’s an excerpt from the syllabus: Topics include the signification of the phallus, the relation of the phallus to masculinity, femininity, genital organs and the fetish, the whiteness of the phallus, and the lesbian phallus.

Find all 22 of them at mental_floss. Link

If you want white tiled floors and cleanrooms, these are not the labs you’re looking for. PopSci has ranked their choices for the 25 most awesome college labs, and the diversity and locations might surprise you. From the experimental mine for demolitions students (who learn to “blow things up extremely well”) at the Missouri University of Science and Technology to the geophysics program at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory–where students wake up before dawn to hike to the top of one of the world’s most active volcanoes–these awesome hands-on programs put your five credit hours of making Punnet squares to shame. Featured careers include game design, rainforest biology, oceanography, brewery and alien-hunting. Link

Image: U.S. Geological Survey/Hawaiian Volcano Observatory

The story is often told to explain the absence of sorority houses on certain campuses. But for as many times as the tale is told, these laws have never actually been documented anywhere. In 1998, a group of eight Tulane University students searched through municipal and state law books going as far back as the 1800s and came up empty. I did a little digging of my own closer to home; I couldn’t find any laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or the municipalities where I went to school.

This is a completely strange concept to any single mother with daughters, or anyone who ever lived in the old-fashioned dormitories that were segregated by sex (I have lived in both situations). Have you ever heard of such a thing? Read more about housing laws that do and don’t exist at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user albioncollegespecialcollections)

Over at the Neatoshop, we have some cool personalized bobbleheads and portraits, but I can’t help but wish that we were able to add Dr. Jesse Weiss’ custom action figures to our shop, but for now we will have to appreciate his collection of action figures based on his colleagues at The University of the Ozarks.

Link Via The Mary Sue

I think that the system, grading in general, grading as a gold standard of employability, college as the necessary step between high school and employment, all of these things alone aren’t necessarily wrong. But when you get them all together in this network, and college is going to define your future, the grades will determine where you go, one, for a fifth of you, those of you who are going to grad school or law school or med school. For the rest of you, to get that job, you need that paper that says, “Diploma,” which means you need to pass. That’s all that matters.

If the only purpose in going to college is to get a diploma (not knowledge, not an education, and not good grades), then its no wonder students assume that you should get one just for paying the tuition and arranging for the required papers by any means necessary. Link -via TYWKIWDBI, where you can join the discussion.

(Image credit: The “Gold Guys”)

The PC version of Portal 2 launched today. Obviously, there will be a drop in productivity in all sectors, and no reason to bother holding class. Geoff Pado’s professor gave in. Link -via reddit

It has long been theorized that the week prior to an exam is an extremely dangerous time for the relatives of college students. Ever since I began my teaching career, I heard vague comments, incomplete references and unfinished remarks, all alluding to the “Dead Grandmother Problem.”

Few colleagues would ever be explicit in their description of what they knew, but I quickly discovered that anyone who was involved in teaching at the college level would react to any mention of the concept. In my travels I found that a similar phenomenon is known in other countries. In Eng- land it is called the “Graveyard Grannies” problem, in France the “Chere Grand’mere,” while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as “The Toadstool Waxing Plan” (I may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution this may have changed anyway.) Although the problem may be international in scope it is here in the USA that it reaches its culmination, so it is only fitting that the first warnings originate here also.

The basic problem can be stated very simply:

A student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.

While this idea has long been a matter of conjecture or merely a part of the folklore of college teaching, I can now confirm that the phenomenon is real. For over twenty years I have collected data on this supposed relationship, and have not only confirmed what most faculty had suspected, but also found some additional aspects of this process that are of potential importance to the future of the country. The results presented in this report provide a chilling picture and should waken the profession and the general public to a serious health and sociological problem before it is too late.

Table 1: The mean number of family deaths/100 students for periods when no exam is coming up, the week prior to a mid-term exam and the week prior to finals. Values are corrected for the number of students in each grade class and the relative frequency of mid-terms and finals.

As can be seen in Table 1, when no exam is imminent the family death rate per 100 students (FDR) is low and is not related to the student’s grade in the class. The effect of an upcoming exam is unambiguous. The mean FDR jumps from 0.054 with no exam, to 0.574 with a mid-term, and to 1.042 with a final, representing increases of 10-fold and 19-fold, respectively. Figure 1 shows that the changes are strongly grade dependent, with correlation coefficients of 0.974 for mid-terms and 0.988 for finals. Overall, a student who is failing a class and has a final coming up is more than 50 times more likely to lose a family member than is an A student not facing any exams.

Figure 1. Graph of data in Table 1, showing the relationship between exam, student grade and FDR. The equation for the simple linear regression on each is shown, as is the correlation coefficient.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from these data. Family members literally worry themselves to death over the outcome of their relatives’ performance on each exam.

Naturally, the worse the student’s record is, and the more important the exam, the more the family worries; and it is the ensuing tension that presumably causes premature death. Since such behavior is most likely to result in high blood pressure, leading to stroke and heart attacks, this would also explain why these deaths seem to occur so suddenly, with no warning and usually immediately prior to the exam. It might also explain the disproportionate number of grandmothers in the victim pool, since they are more likely to be susceptible to strokes. This explanation, however, does not explain why grandfathers are seldom affected, and clearly there are other factors involved that have not been identified. Nonetheless, there is considerable comfort to be had in realizing that these results indicate that the American family is obviously still close-knit and deeply concerned about the welfare of individual members, perhaps too much so.

Family Values
As some colleagues have expressed some degree of skepticism over my interpretation of these data, I have extended the scope of my research into the phenomenon. Using readily available sources (including the National Census Bureau and The National Enquirer ) have examined the relationship between education and family structure. Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between FDR and the size of the extended family (Table 2). Either large families worry less on a per capita basis than do small families, or there is a single “designated worrier” in each family, who bears the brunt of the danger. The exceptionally high death rate among grandmothers (24 times greater than for grandfathers) suggests the latter explanation is correct. If not, then people from very small families would be well advised to discourage other family members from attending college, since the potential risk becomes excessive with so few members to share the danger.

Table 2. Mean FDR for all exam periods and all student GPAs over the last decade. Families ranging in size from 1-30+ show no significant correlation (0.04) between family size and FDR. The figure for students with no family would have been zero, had the class not included a family-less student (a member of the baseball team) who tragically lost at least one grandmother every semester for four years.

The problem is clearly far more pervasive than most people realize. For example, if one examines the percentage of the population attending college and the mean divorce rate on a country by country basis, there is a very strong positive correlation between the two. The United States has the highest percentage of its population attending college and also the world’s highest divorce rate, while South Yemen is last in both categories.

Although this study is still in progress and will form the basis for a future CSU grant proposal, it seems results already are becoming clear. As more people go to college, their families find that, for safety reasons, it is wise to increase the number of grandmothers per family. Since there is currently no biological way of doing so (though another grant proposal in preparation will ask for funds to look into the prospect of cloning grandmothers, using modern genetic engineering techniques), the families must resort to increasing the pool by means of divorce and remarriage. Sociologists may wish to use these data to examine the effect of education on family structure from a new perspective.

While the general facts of this problem have been known, if not widely discussed, I have recently become aware of a potentially far more dangerous aspect of the whole process. This trend came to light when a student reported two family members dying prior to an exam. Examination of the numbers of deaths over the last two decades clearly showed that we are in a period of “death inflation.” When the figures for all students and all exams are pooled for each year, a disturbing outcome is seen (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The mean FDR/100 students for all exams and all grades of students for the years 1968-1988. The best-fitting curve shows an exponentially rising curve, with the equation shown in the figure.

Three Solutions
The FDR is climbing at an accelerating rate. Extrapolation of this curve suggests that 100 years from now the FDR will stand at 644/100 students/exam. At that rate only the largest families would survive even the first semester of a student’s college career. Clearly something will have to be done to reverse this trend before the entire country is depopulated. Three possible solutions come to mind:

1. Stop giving exams. At first glance, this seems to be the simplest answer to the problem. Like many simplistic solutions, however, it fails to consider the full ramifications of such a course. Without exam results, all medical schools would be forced to close their doors, having no way of identifying worthy students. The resultant dearth of physicians in the next generation would throw so many other professionals (tax accountants, malpractice attorneys, golf pros, etc.) out of work that the economy would go into a nosedive. Regretfully, we cannot recommend this solution.

2. Allow only orphans to enroll at universities. This is an attractive idea, except for the shortage of orphans. More could be created, of course, but this would replicate the very problem we are trying to avoid, i.e., excessive family deaths.

3. Have students lie to their families. Students must never let any of their relatives know that they are at university. (Initial field tests show that keeping just the grandmother ignorant is neither feasible nor safe for the rest of the family.) It is not enough merely to lie about exams; if the family doesn’t know when the exams are, they may then worry constantly and this may lead to even higher death rates. The only solution is that the family must never be aware that the student is even enrolled at a university. Students must explain their long absences by pretending they are in the armed forces, have joined some religious cult, or have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. All of these alternate explanations will keep the family ignorant of the true, dangerous, fact. Although it might be argued that such large-scale deceptions cannot be maintained for long periods, the success of many politicians suggests other- wise.

What I Recommend
It will take time to discover whether any of these solutions are feasible. In the interim, the problem is clearly far too important to be ignored. Following the US government’s lead on so many similar, potentially catastrophic problems (global warming, ozone layer depletion, and ocean pollution), I propose that a commission be established to study the problem in more depth. While the state is deciding on the make-up of such a committee and what its charge should be, I would urge all members of the academic community to start keeping their own records. If faculty throughout the world were to send me summaries of their own knowledge about this matter, I could compile a follow-up report for publication in a year or two.

(Title illustration by Peaco Todd)

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the November-December 1999 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

These unofficial spring break merit badges can be sent to your friends via Facebook. The Lobster badge is for someone who didn’t use enough sunscreen. The one on the right is called Icarus, for your friend who went after someone who was too hot for them and was then shot down. See all ten badges at MyEdu. Link -Thanks, A S!

Psst, freshmen! Are you feeling stressed? You’re not alone: a survey revealed that this year’s incoming students are the most stressed in 25 years. The economy, it seems, is to blame:

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”

Other findings in the survey underscore the degree to which the economy is weighing on college students.

“Paternal unemployment is at the highest level since we started measuring,” said John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A.’s Higher Education Research Institute, which does the annual freshman survey. “More students are taking out loans. And we’re seeing the impact of not being able to get a summer job, and the importance of financial aid in choosing which college they’re going to attend.”

“We don’t know exactly why students’ emotional health is declining,” he said. “But it seems the economy could be a lot of it.”

Link

The class of 2013 perform a medley of songs from The Wizard of Oz for the annual Nykerk Cup competition at Hope College. Sure, they sing well, but where are they hiding all those props? You can also watch the performance of their competition, the freshman class. -via Buzzfeed

He said: “I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”

Prof Quinn also added a requirement for those who came forward complete a four hour course in ethics. In return there would be no permanent record of the cheating.

So far more than 200 students have admitted to cheating.

A video of the 15-minute lecture is included with the story. Link -via reddit

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

It’s not plagiarism, as each paper is paid for and written to specifications with the understanding that the author will receive no writing credit. But the student does none of the work to produce the paper. There’s a serious discussion at Metafilter on whether this activity is wrong or not. I was surprised that there was any question as to the ethics of hiring someone to do your college work, but I graduated over 30 years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. What you do think? Is this cheating or just another path to your goal? Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review)

Yes, that’s right:

Adventure sports like scuba diving, snowboarding, white water rafting, and bungee jumping are big business. People are wanting controlled ways to break out of their normal nine-to-five office life and these sports on fun mini-breaks and vacations are the perfect release. Who is going to supply these cubicle monkeys with their fun though?

If you have a passion for adventure sports and enough experience to train others, you might want to look in the undergraduate programs at Green Mountain College in Vermont that aim at helping people like you in establishing their own businesses in the area of adventure recreation where they can train newcomers to the sports and just show people a fun, exciting time that is a bit out of the norm.

Read more about weird college majors over at Road Tickle: Link

US college football conferences have reshuffled their membership this year. That’s the subject of a tough Lunchtime Quiz today at mental_floss. If you know the history of the conferences, you just might do well. I didn’t. Link

In order to separate doting parents from their freshman sons, Morehouse College in Atlanta has instituted a formal “Parting Ceremony.”

It began on a recent evening, with speeches in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Then the incoming freshmen marched through the gates of the campus — which swung shut, literally leaving the parents outside. [...]

Moving their students in usually takes a few hours. Moving on? Most deans can tell stories of parents who lingered around campus for days. At Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., a mother and father once went to their daughter’s classes on the first day of the semester and trouped to the registrar’s office to change her schedule, recalled Beverly Low, the dean of first-year students.

Link (Photo: Brian C. Frank / The New York Times) – via Fark

YouTube link.

Prepared by students at Kansas State University, this short video summarizes “some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

The methodology is explained here, along with a textual summary of the contents.   Responses to the video on a variety of education-related websites range from praise and sympathy to disagreement and dismissal.

Via Libraryland, where there is also a response by faculty at the University of South Carolina.

Mental_floss presents a sequel to an earlier much-enjoyed quiz about movie and TV characters who went to college. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz, you’ll be given a television character, then you select which real college he or she was supposed to have attended. Just by guessing, I scored 40%. You will do better! Link

Beginning in May, people who take six-week courses in certain subjects will be guaranteed a job within a year — or else they’ll be refunded their tuition money.

It’s a radical idea, particularly for a school located in Lansing, Mich., where unemployment sits at 11.7%. Lansing Community College, the third largest community college in the state, has 30,000 students a year but is looking for more. The new money-back guarantee will apply to the four most in-demand technical jobs in the area: call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors and computer machinists.

Link

You might remember Biola University professor Matthew Weathers from his Halloween prank video last year. He also went the extra mile for April Fools Day. Even the university president got involved! -via Buzzfeed

The NCAA basketball tournament brackets were finalized last night. I am happy to see that Kentucky is a #1 seed, and the management at mental_floss is happy to see that Duke is also a #1 seed. But there are 64 teams in the tournament; some aren’t that easy to place. In Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to match tournament colleges with the states they are in. I scored 75%. Link

Yesterday, students at the University of Mississippi voted to update their image with a new mascot. The previous mascot Colonel Reb, who resembles a antebellum plantation owner, hasn’t been seen at a game since 2003, due to his Confederate symbolism. Who, or what, will the new mascot be? The athletic teams at Ole Miss are the Rebels, so the logical symbol would be Admiral Ackbar, the highest ranking member of the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars universe. Only time will tell if the students and administration at Ole Miss will embrace the campaign. Link -via Geekosystem

The Crouches’ perfect batting average represents a first for Yale — the first time in anyone’s memory that it has offered admission to quadruplets. It is also, of course, no small milestone for the siblings, who were born more than two months premature. (Ray was the last to be released from the neonatal unit, more than four months later.)

They made up for that rough start. Their class rankings range from 13 out of a class of 632 (Kenny) to 46 (Martina) — and they have sky-high SAT scores (including Carol’s perfect 800 on the verbal part of that exam).

The siblings have until May first to decide whether to accept Yale’s invitation. They say their decision will depend on financial aid. Link

(image credit: Christopher Capozziello/The New York Times)

Many college students use laptop computers to take notes during class. The student in this video, as a prank, took an old mechanical typewriter to a lecture for that purpose. The professor gets quite perturbed and asks him to mute the sound effects.

via Gizmodo

(YouTube Link)

ESCP Europe is a business school that recently promoted itself with this stop motion video.  Well done, people, well done.  ESCP website.  via Yay!Everyday

Professor Matthew Weathers went the extra mile for his math lecture Wednesday at Biola University. Who says math isn’t fun? -via Cynical-C

Harry Potter and the Scheming Students

Screwy Scoreboards

Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.

“We Suck”

In Cod We Trust

Rooftop Ride

Rice Gets More Comfortable

Fictional Facebook Fox

Students at Politechnika Wroc?awska or the Wroclawska University of Technology in Poland had themselves a grand ol’ time rigging their dorm with a light show that played the theme from Knight Rider.

After this clip, check out their website P.I.W.O.3 (Google Translate) for many more video clips.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by oezicomix.

Mindy Babbitt entered Davenport University in her mid-20s to study accounting. Unable to cover the costs with her previous earnings as a cosmetologist, she took out a $35,000 student loan at 9% interest, figuring her postgraduate income would cover the cost.

Instead, the entry-level job her bachelor’s degree got her barely covered living expenses. Babbitt deferred loan repayments and was then laid off for a time. Now 41 and living in Plainwell, Mich., she is earning $41,000 a year, or about $10,000 more than the average high school graduate makes. But since she graduated, Babbitt’s student loan balance has more than doubled, to $87,000, and she despairs she’ll never pay it off.

"Unless I win the lottery or get a job paying a lot more, my student debts are going to follow me to the grave," she says.

Link (Illustration: Alex Nabaum) – via The Zeray Gazette

The Triple Crown never seemed so two-sided. 

There are those who go to the races to see and be seen.  The rich and famous, and the classy entourage they bring with them. 

And then, there’s this crowd…sound is mildly NSFW.

Sure, it may not be the smartest behavior, but doesn’t this  spontaneous-looking game say something about culture?