Comments on: College Days

By: Caitlinator

Caitlinator — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 18:39:12 +0000

I got my first undergraduate degree from NYU and I have to say that although NYU was a great school, it was absolutely useless in the end. I’m getting my second degree from CUNY Queens College and it will still get me where I need to go in life.

This relates a little back to your issue about race and men’s vs. women’s intelligence. In general, maybe people who go to the higher caliber schools are smarter than those who don’t, but there are probably tens of thousands of individuals who prove that generality wrong one way or another.

By: Citizen of the Month » The Blogosphere is Like Orange County, 1969

Citizen of the Month » The Blogosphere is Like Orange County, 1969 — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:59:35 +0000

[...] In my post about colleges, I noticed that a few women are still upset about ex-Harvard Dean Lawrence Summers and his speech about women and science. Although he was quoted as saying “women thinkers were inferior to men thinkers,” he never actually said that. From Wikipedia: In January 2005, Summers suggested at an economic conference that one reason there are fewer women than men in science and engineering professorships might be innate sex differences in the distribution of intelligence. The suggestion was that variation in intelligence (in particular with regard to science and math ability) is higher in males, resulting in a higher number of highly intelligent males, resulting in more men at the very high levels of “intrinsic aptitude” that scholarly jobs required. An attendee made his remarks public, and a firestorm followed in the national news media and on Harvard’s campus, which incorrectly implied that Summers argued that men are somewhat more intelligent than women on average. [...]

By: Dave G

Dave G — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:17:26 +0000

I think parents’ current obsession with getting their children into the BEST SCHOOL IN THE WORLD is from a study awhile back that showed Ivy Leaguer graduates made X% more than state school graduates. Their kids make more, they will be better able to provide for me when I retire, kind of thinking.

What the study didn’t investigate was if the greater income was a product of the superior schooling of the Ivys or the greater motivation and work ethic of the students.

In an effort to control for this, researchers found kids who had been accepted to Ivy League schools but instead opted to attend state schools. They found there was no variation of income. The greater income was almost entirely derived from the kids’ motivation, not the school he/she attended.

By: Paris Parfait

Paris Parfait — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:02:47 +0000

Very clever piece. That “good ‘ole boy” network is also alive and well in Europe. Makes you wonder what would happen if everyone had the same educational opportunities.

By: deannie

deannie — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:19:32 +0000

I laughed and laughed with the closing paragraph where you proudly proclaim that you now know how to feel up a woman and then the archive link is, “Sophia made me gay”. Oh Neil…

hugs,

By: Brooke

Brooke — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 02:53:43 +0000

Seriously, that picture has got to be the strongest argument for birth control I have ever seen.

By: Neil

Neil — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 02:12:56 +0000

My worst Columbia experience was taking Shakespeare with Frank Kermode, who is one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars from Britian, and having to keep my eyes opened as he mumbled his lectures.

By: Dagny

Dagny — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:57:58 +0000

Jodi, Gamecock? ROFL. When I am in that part of the country, I have to remind myself that there is actually a different kind of USC. Somehow whenever I think of SC, I think Clemson. Then again I dated a guy who went there. As far as mascots go, whenever I think of the one from my undergrad (Tritons), I can rest easy knowing that there is worse. The Banana Slugs of UCSC comes to mind.

And Dawn, Berkeley, Michigan, and UVA like to think of themselves as prestigious public schools. In fact I have been told that legacies of Berkeley have different admissions requirements than those for everyone else.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:36:12 +0000

Can there be a prestigious public school? No? Nevermind.

(Go Badgers!!)

By: Dustin

Dustin — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 23:39:49 +0000

Niel, don’t you know? Where you go to college is directly related to what level of heaven you get into…at least that’s how important my guidance counselor in HS always made it seem.

KJ says that Columbia wasn’t any harder learning curve wise than the University we both went to in WA. The only real difference she claims is that the profs. were A.) more senile, and B.) assigned 10x as much homework.

I added that the local pizza was better but she didn’t seem to think that affected the academic outcome. How wrong she is. =)