But why would you pay $100 for something that is obsolete?

Quote:George Anders
6/05/2012 @ 2:34PM
How Would You Like A Graduate Degree For $100?
This story appears in the June 25, 2012 issue of Forbes Magazine.

Ask Sebastian Thrun what makes him tick, and the inventor and Google Fellow ­offers up three favorite themes: big open problems, a desire to help people and “disrespect for authority.” Thrun, 45, has been aiming high—and annoying the old guard—for nearly two decades. As a college student in Germany he dashed off to conferences to present major papers on machine learning without getting his professor’s permission. Thrun made the cover of FORBES in 2006 with his talk of creating self-driving cars that could navigate traffic and follow directions without human guidance. As the founding head of Google’s advanced-research X Lab, Thrun helped turn those robocars into reality. After 200,000 miles of road tests his vehicles are safe enough for Nevada to approve them on public roads. California may follow suit.

Thrun has found a fresh challenge that excites him even more: fixing higher education. Conventional ­university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ­ineffective to survive for long, he contends. He wants to ­foment a teaching revolution in which the world’s best instructors conduct highly interactive online classes that let them reach 100,000 students simultaneously and globally.

Financiers at Charles River Ventures have already pumped $5 million into Thrun’s online-ed startup, Udacity. “I like to back people who have disruptive ­personalities,” explains CRV partner George Zachary. “They create disruptive solutions.”

Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”

There’s a startup boom in online higher education, but nearly all of the players hope to advance by working within the system. EdX is a joint venture of Harvard and MIT. Coursera has backing from Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. 2Tor, which has raised $90 million in venture capital, runs online graduate programs in business and nursing for the likes of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Georgetown. Such startups see benefits in teaming up with universities to ­decide what should be taught online, how to teach it and how to handle delicate issues such as grading, course credits, diplomas and anticheating safeguards.

Such careful collegiality is not the Thrun way. “It’s pretty obvious that degrees will go away,” Thrun says. “The idea of a degree is that you spend a fixed time right after high school to educate yourself for the rest of your career. But ­careers change so much over a lifetime now that this model isn’t valid anymore.”

So Udacity is charting its own path as a career academy for brainy people of all ages. Udacity’s offices are just a few hundred yards from Stanford, but they’re a world away from the school’s idyllic environs. Its open, barnlike work area has stained beige carpets, cheap desks and a Go board perched on a flimsy coffee table. Most of its 25 employees are video, graphics or software whizzes determined to make each second of online instruction as eye-catching and compelling as possible.

It currently offers 11 courses, for free, in subjects such as computer programming, statistics and mathematics, plus a robocar programmer’s workshop with Thrun himself. It rustles up some instructors from the likes of Rutgers and the state universities of Virginia and Utah. Other teachers are experts from industry. Faculty pay runs between $5,000 and $10,000 per course. Many of Udacity’s students are midcareer professionals who want to sharpen specific skills. Udacity later this year is expanding into the humanities. Thrun says the service will always have “a free path,” but the idea is eventually to charge for certificates or enhanced features such as chat.

It was only last year that Thrun seemed like a fast-track scholar thriving within academia. In eight years he rose from a Ph.D. student at the University of Bonn to a tenured post in Stanford’s computer science department (with a stint in between at Carnegie Mellon). “I was a popular professor,” Thrun says. “My teaching ratings were usually good. I could take complicated subjects and explain them in an entertaining way.”

Even so, professor Thrun privately knew something was wrong. In many of his classes students fared much worse on the midterm exams than he expected. He says he had fallen into the “lecturing trap,” in which the instructor looks brilliant and a handful of top-performing students create the appearance of a lively class—but most students aren’t keeping pace. Thrun needed a way to engage all students.

Down the road in Mountain View an obscure hedge fund analyst named Salman Khan was winning acclaim for his short math tutorials watched by millions on YouTube. At Stanford another computer science professor, Daphne Koller, was finding success by experimenting with ways to “flip” the classroom, covering lecture material as video homework while using scheduled class time to solve problems.

Thrun decided to apply new elements to a fall 2011 artificial intelligence class that he and Google research chief Peter Norvig cotaught at Stanford. They offered a free ­online version to the world, attracting 58,000 signups by August. After a burst of press coverage, enrollment tripled. Online dilettantes dropped out fast, but 23,000 committed learners finished the course. To Thrun’s delight many of them aced his exams. By Thrun’s tally he influenced more students through that single online course than he had in all his two decades of classroom teaching.

Thrun in January let the world know his full-time status at Stanford was over. The retreat evoked mixed feelings on campus. He had already surrendered tenure in March 2011 because his off-campus commitments (such as overseeing the Google Glass augmented reality program) claimed too many hours. Running Udacity is his main job now, though he has a 20% time commitment at Stanford as a research professor, guiding graduate students. He still works one day a week at Google, reporting to Sergey Brin.

Thrun lets his Udacity students know he is a Stanford professor, but he knows he can’t promote Udacity as a conduit to Stanford’s top professors. Doing his best to be diplomatic, Thrun in late May called his association with Stanford “fantastic.” Computer science department chair Jennifer Widom returned the courtesy, declaring herself “a big fan of Sebastian.” Still, tensions exist.

When Thrun started sketching out his online course in the summer of 2011, he briefly considered ways of offering some of Stanford’s cachet to the free online students. ­Stanford administrators shuddered. “We told Sebastian: ‘You really can’t do that,’” Widom recalled. So online students didn’t get a completion certificate with a Stanford ­insignia; they also didn’t get a sheet showing how their test scores compared with those of Stanford students.

Big-name universities are understandably loath to alter long-held procedures for course content, academic credit and faculty status. So be it, Thrun says. Udacity, still in its infancy, can write its own rulebook. Thrun’s philosophy of online teaching involves a nonstop barrage of online quizzes, one every two to five minutes, that become the centerpieces of each lesson. “You don’t lose weight by watching someone else exercise,” he says. “You don’t learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.”

Sometimes a quiz will call for a quick calculation. Other times students must choose among options or create a line or two of computer code. Students’ entries can be automatically scored within seconds. A correct answer lets students move on right away; a faulty solution elicits an offer to try again.

Whimsy is a frequent visitor. In an introductory course on search engine techniques, instructor David Evans, a Virginia professor, explains network design by sketching a map of ancient Greece, with stylized little bonfires showing how primitive smoke signals helped spread the word that Agamemnon had returned from battle. Evans then asks ­students to identify ways that this long-ago network could be made to operate faster. Among the options: Zeus could increase the speed of light.

Thanks to a global boom in cheap, high-speed Internet connectivity, such courses can be beamed around the world for just 50 cents to $1 per student. That makes mass teaching much more affordable than it was a few years ago. Just as important, the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks means that today’s students are comfortable forming multihour study groups with online acquaintances they’ve never met in the physical world.

Udacity’s engineers are learning which little things they need to get right. The company’s production studio carefully avoids full-body shots of professors lecturing; that makes for tiresome viewing. Instead, most footage consists of close-up shots of instructors writing out key lecture points on a digital tablet. Clever editing speeds up long words. When everything clicks, one instructor says, “it feels like a personal tutorial.”

Technique alone will carry Udacity only so far. Figuring out how to assess 100,000 people’s work in the humanities or social sciences will be a huge challenge. There, tough questions aren’t meant to elicit the same answer from everyone who knows the subject. Thrun has high hopes for peer-based grading, perhaps with a social-reputation score attached, so that classmates help identify their wisest peers. But such methods haven’t been tested yet.

Another roadblock: making sure that grade-obsessed students don’t cheat by swapping answers among friends or setting up lots of dummy accounts that they control. It’s an awkward secret of online education: People who crave an A can use multiple accounts to learn so much about course design that they can masquerade as geniuses when finally retaking the course under their own names.

Thrun’s decision to shake free of any direct ties to big-name universities could haunt him, too. Rival player Coursera is building up its course catalog faster, thanks to outspoken support from a variety of university presidents.

Still, Thrun likes his odds. “I love to throw myself into situations where I don’t understand everything yet,” he says. “That way I learn so much. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I succeed. But the goal is to reemerge at the other end, doing something good.”

Academic BS no one cares about?? Why is this guy bothering to run for the Board of Regents?? He sounds totally qualified to be a CHEA director!? He should have gotten 15 pals to write that thesis for him, then he could proclaim himself an expert in a completely different field.

Quote:CU regent candidate raps "minutiae" amid false-degree claims
Posted:? 06/08/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT
By Lynn Bartels
The Denver Post

A Republican running to sit on the governing board at the University of Colorado has erroneously told voters he has a master's degree in international economics from a prestigious East Coast university.

Called on it by critics, Matt Arnold mocked advanced degrees Thursday, explaining he completed the coursework but not his thesis.

"I was more interested in getting on with my life than trying to, quite frankly, waste more time in pursuit of academic BS that no one cares about," he said.

"I think that's one of the big problems, quite frankly, with education these days. We're graduating a bunch of people who hang letters after their names, but they have no useful skills."

Arnold is best known as the director of Clear the Bench, a group aimed at unseating what it sees as activist judges. He is one of two Republicans running for the at-large regent post at CU. He faces Brian Davidson in the June 26 primary in the only statewide race on the ballot.

"This is minutiae," Arnold said when asked about his degree. "What we ought to be talking about is who has the better ideas for reforming higher education in Colorado, and, quite frankly, I'm the only one who has put forward any ideas."

Arnold, a captain in the Army Reserve, attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, in the fall of 1991 and spring of 1992. The one-year program has a reputation for rigorous academic studies.

Earlier this year, when told by The Denver Post that some Republicans said he didn't have a master's degree, Arnold said "they're wrong" and produced his diploma from Hopkins' SAIS school in Bologna.

Johns Hopkins spokeswoman Felisa Klubes said the diploma amounts to a "graduate-level certificate."

"It's not the same thing as having a full-blown master's degree," she said.

Arnold transferred to Hopkins' D.C. campus to complete the second year of the program. He said after finishing his courses, he was working on his thesis -- one of the degree's most significant requirements -- when his computer crashed, and he lost much of his material. He said he couldn't afford to fly back to Germany to recoup his research.

"I had to get a job," he said.

Arnold said he mistakenly used the phrase "master's" on the campaign trail at times as a sort of "generic shorthand."

Critics contend Arnold is guilty of embellishing his academic credentials and should drop out of the race.

"It would be bad enough for anybody to lie about their r?sum? for any reason -- especially about academic achievements -- but for a candidate running for CU regent to do so is entirely unacceptable," said Bob Balink, a Republican and the El Paso County treasurer.

Arnold countered that Balink is one of Davidson's supporters and that Davidson is the candidate who should drop out because he has a "clear conflict of interest."

Davidson is a physician and faculty anesthesiologist at CU's medical school.

"He'll be voting on budgets that affect his livelihood," Arnold said.

Davidson said university physicians are "essentially self-funded," noting that patient fees cover the majority if not all of the salaries and benefits for physicians on the Anschutz campus.

They aren't talking about the thuggish sociopaths at degreediscussion....yet. Now that the sleazy cockroaches have been exposed to the light and forced to scurry back into the noxious cracks and crevices, isn't it just a matter of time before one of them decides that Kimberlin's tactics are "delightful"?

Quote:Friday, June 8, 2012
Freedom Isn't Free: Support Bloggers Being Harassed By Thuggish Sociopaths Like Brett Kimberlin #BrettKimberlin

This is not really a conservative or liberal thing. The thuggish intimidation tactics being used by Brett Kimberlin and his ilk could be used by anyone, for political or personal reasons. It is a form of terrorism intended to shut down free speech and should not be tolerated. Let all have free speech. Let the market place decide which ideas have merit.


But using lawsuits to shut down free speech? That is not acceptable. Nor are cowards who call in false police reports to send SWAT teams to someone's house that could easily result in someone being killed. I support Aaron Walker, Robert Stacy McCain, Ali Akbar, Patrick Frey, Erick Erickson and other bloggers who have been targeted or attacked by Brett Kimberlin and his allies. Here is Ali A. Akbar's statement.


I greatly welcome the attention brought to this issue by Senator Saxby Chambliss and Rep. Kenny Marchant. I would encourage other politicians to act and to put pressure on the Justice Department to investigate what Kimberlin is up to. I thank the ACLJ and Eugene Volokh in stepping up and assisting in this matter.


Michelle Malkin outlines quite well what Brett Kimberlin and his associates have been up to and how you can respond. Many other bloggers are doing the same today. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted on it. Others will also be doing so today. Support them and get the word out to your elected representatives.

You can start here:

GOP House Speaker John Boehner
Online contact form
Phone: (202) 225-0600
Fax: (202) 225-5117
Twitter

GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor
Web form
Phone: (202) 225-2815
Fax: (202) 225-0011
Twitter

Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
Web form
Phone: (202) 225-4965
Twitter

...

Quote:Who Will Protect the Freedom to Blog?
Michelle Malkin
Jun 08, 2012

Free speech is under fire. Online thugs are targeting bloggers (mostly conservative, but not all) who have dared to expose a convicted bomber and perjuring vexatious litigant who is now enjoying a comfy life as a liberally subsidized social justice operative. Where do your elected representatives stand on this threat to our founding principles?

On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, bravely stepped forward to press this vital issue. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Chambliss decried the "harassing and frightening actions" of Internet menaces who recently have gone after several conservative new media citizen journalists and activists.

GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas added his voice, telling Holder in a statement that he is "very afraid of the potential chilling effects that these reported actions may have in silencing individuals who would otherwise be inclined to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech." And the American Center for Law and Justice, a leading conservative free speech public interest law firm, announced it was providing legal representation to the National Bloggers Club -- a new media association that has provided support and raised funds for targets of this coordinated harassment. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the National Bloggers Club board of directors.)

The ACLJ described the importance of the case very simply: "Free speech is under attack."

Chambliss and Marchant called specific attention to one terrifying tactic against these bloggers: SWAT-ting. These hoaxes occur "when a perpetrator contacts local police to report a violent incident at a target's home." Callers disguise their true identities and locations in order to provoke a potentially deadly SWAT/police response descending upon the targets' homes.

As online conservatives -- and now ABC News -- have reported, recent SWAT-ting victims include New Jersey-based Mike Stack, a blogger and Twitter user targeted last summer after helping to expose disgraced former N.Y. Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's shady social media activities; California blogger Patrick Frey, a deputy district attorney at Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office who recently posted a bone-chilling account and audio of his summer 2011 SWAT-ting on his blog, Patterico.com; and CNN contributor and RedState.com managing editor Erick Erickson, whose Georgia home was targeted by a faker claiming an "accidental shooting" there late last month.

A common thread among these and other online targets: They all have published web links, commentary or investigative pieces related to Brett Kimberlin, the infamous "Speedway Bomber."

In 1978, Kimberlin was sentenced to more than 50 years in federal prison for drug dealing, impersonating a federal officer and a weeklong bombing spree in Speedway, Ind. The violent crimes left one victim so severely injured that he committed suicide. A civil court awarded the widow of the victim, Carl DeLong, $1.6 million. Kimberlin was released from jail in 2001, but has yet to pay up.

Investigative journalist/researcher Mandy Nagy, who blogs for the late Andrew Breitbart's Internet media powerhouse, Breitbart.com, dared to chronicle Kimberlin's lucrative business and political ventures over the past two years. Kimberlin has a large hand in two well-funded outfits, Velvet Revolution and the Justice Through Music Project, that have received funding from the likes of George Soros' Tides Foundation and left-wing activist and singer Barbra Streisand. The charitable groups have viciously attacked prominent conservative individuals and groups, including Breitbart, investigative journalist James O'Keefe and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Nagy has been hounded relentlessly online and falsely accused of wild criminal conspiracies by Kimberlin associates for blowing the whistle on his shady online network.

After providing brief pro bono legal services to a liberal blogger who refused to whitewash Kimberlin's past, conservative blogger and lawyer Aaron Walker lost his job. His employer was terrified by the thought of Kimberlin bombing his office and also fired Walker's wife, who had worked for the same firm.

Walker is embroiled in Kafkaesque, free speech-squelching litigation with serial lawsuit-filer Kimberlin in Maryland. Last week, an inept judge who admitted abject ignorance about the Internet -- and appalling apathy toward key free-speech Supreme Court cases -- essentially gagged Walker from exercising his First Amendment rights and blogging about Kimberlin. Kimberlin pulled off a snow job in court, bizarrely claiming that an independent online effort to support Walker and expose Kimberlin's past amounted to a criminal terror campaign against him. Renowned constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA is providing pro bono help to appeal the order against Walker.

National Bloggers Club President Ali Akbar was targeted for spearheading charity efforts for Kimberlin targets; stalkers publicized his mother's home, and Texas authorities are now investigating. Another conservative blogger who had the audacity to report on Walker's plight, Robert Stacy McCain, was forced to move out of his home last month after Kimberlin phoned his wife's employer and intimidated his family.

Never in the eight years that I have worked as an independent blogger have I seen such a concerted threat to the fundamental right of citizen journalists to speak their minds freely and without fear of bodily harm. As former Justice Department official J. Christian Adams points out, it is a federal violation of Title 18 U.S.C. Section 241 to conspire to deprive someone of his "free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States."

Members of Congress swore an oath to uphold the Constitution -- all of it. Who means it?

I'm not a math major, but if 20% "go on to get two-year associate degrees" doesn't that mean that 80% do not? This "stepping stone" thing makes me think of "sinkers & floaters" on MXC. Are a lot of people just getting a faceful of fluids?

Eduspeak word of the week: "attainment." We can beat those damn Red Chinese--with bite-sized educational awards! Makes you smart...and tastes good going down!

Quote:Posted at 10:50 AM ET, 06/06/2012
Are certificates the future of higher education?
By Daniel de Vise

Certificates, not degrees, are the future of higher education, a Georgetown researcher contends in a new study.

Certificates are a relatively new and increasingly popular postsecondary credential, awarded typically by a community college or for-profit college for training in a particular occupation. Most certificates take less than a year to complete, although some “long-term” certificate programs can take as long as four years.

Since 1980, certificates have grown from 6 percent to 22 percent of all postsecondary awards, making them the fastest-growing credential, according to a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. It is titled “Certificates: Gateway to Gainful Employment and College Degrees.”

Lead author Anthony Carnevale says certificates could be the key to delivering American higher education from its current college-attainment slump.

Certificates are a “stepping stone” to a degree, the report states, in that 20 percent of certificate holders go on to get two-year associate degrees and another 13 percent eventually earn bachelor degrees.

Many surveys of college attainment don’t count certificates. The authors estimate that if even the most economically valuable certificates were properly counted, the nation’s college attainment rate would rise from 41 percent to 46 percent.

“At a time when 36 million American workers who attended college did not complete a degree, certificates are piecemeal, attainable, bite-sized educational awards that can add substantially to postsecondary completion,” the report states.

The authors reason that this increase would theoretically lift the nation to 10th in international standing for college attainment, from 15th currently. The international survey, by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, includes degrees but not certificates.

In a recent article, I wrote that our rank in attainment had dipped from 12th to 16th, based on the current figure of 41 percent attainment. (Our analysis was based on a slightly larger group of nations than the Georgetown researchers considered.)

Carnevale contends certificates should factor into President Obama’s goal of regaining the world lead in attainment. Indeed, the president’s American Graduation Initiative focuses heavily on community colleges and professional training.

Certificate holders earn more in some fields than people with bachelor’s degrees in less-well-paying fields. Carnevale’s research focuses heavily on the notion that the American job market increasingly rewards field of study rather than level of degree. In other words: It’s more important what you study than how long you study.

Regionally accredited Morgan State University ups the ante--not just murder, but cannibalism! By a student who already had blinded another student with a wallop from a baseball bat. The university was "in the process of expelling him." And the former Morgan State student he ate was a convicted stalker. Who says there is no justice in this world?

Quote:Maryland man charged with killing, eating man's brain, heart
Man, 21, charged with first-degree murder


By Justin Fenton, Kayla Bawroski and Kevin Rector, Baltimore Sun Media Group
8:34 p.m. EDT, May 31, 2012

The 21-year-old college student allegedly told detectives that he hadn't just killed the man who'd lived with his family for months, but had eaten his heart and portions of his brain. The victim's severed head and hands were found in the men's Harford County home; more remains were left in a trash container outside a church.

Authorities outlined the macabre circumstances Thursday in charges against Alexander Kinyua, an electrical engineering major at [regionally accredited] Morgan State University and member of his school's ROTC program, of first-degree murder in the death of 37-year-old Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a Ghanaian national and a former master's degree student.

Kinyua's father reported that Agyei-Kodie went missing last Friday after going for a jog, but the investigation eventually led back to the family home. Kinyua was being held Thursday without bond, and authorities were exploring whether others participated in the crime or knew about it, based on what they called inconsistencies in statements made by the suspect's family.

Harford authorities said the killing was among the most brutal — and bizarre — they'd seen. The case comes on the heels of grisly incidents in Miami — where a naked man believed to be high on synthetic drugs known as "bath salts" ate another man's face — and New Jersey, where a man disemboweled himself and reportedly threw his intestines at police officers.

Harford County Sheriff Jesse Bane said of the allegations against Kinyua: "I've been with the agency 40 years, and I would say this is the first time I can remember … where someone was placed under arrest in Harford County and as part of his crime he consumed the victim.

"I've not encountered that in this county, and I hope we never encounter it again," he added.

Despite Kinyua's alleged confession, which a spokeswoman described as "matter-of-fact," police said they did not know of a motive for the crime and said they would not speculate on his mental state or whether drugs played a role. They were consulting with the FBI's behavioral analysis unit for guidance.

But accounts from Morgan officials and classmates, as well as social media postings by Kinyua, suggest he was growing increasingly troubled as his third year of school came to a close. In January, he was dismissed from the ROTC program after an outburst, and in May he was arrested for allegedly fracturing the skull of a classmate with a baseball bat. The classmate was blinded in one eye as a result of what campus police called a "random" attack.

His Facebook page includes commentary about the "destruction of the black family" and "mass human sacrifices."

"THIS IS THE BRUTAL BASIS, AN EVIL & TERRIFYING METHOD OF THIS DEATH CULTS," he wrote in one message.

Students familiar with Kinyua said he was well known around campus but regarded as odd. Jasmine Bloomfield said he was "always in his own little world, preaching everywhere he went and talking about how he was writing a book."

Natalie Fabien, 21, who had mutual friends with Kinyua, said his behavior was often unusual and he was prone to outbursts, but also showed genuine concern for others. "If anything ever happened to me, he'd be like, 'Who did it and why?' He always wanted to protect people from bad stuff," Fabien said.

Word of Kinyua's arrest was a hot topic Thursday around Morgan's campus, even though most of its 7,000 students are on summer break. "If you're part of the Morgan family, it's a big family, so word goes around fast," said Stephen Copeland, 28, a senior. "Everybody's in shock."

The victim, Agyei-Kodie, had also attended [regionally accredited] Morgan State on a student visa. He was dismissed by the university after a 2008 conviction in Baltimore County for a fourth-degree sex offense, harassment and stalking, resulting in an 18-month jail term. He also had attended [regionally accredited] Towson University for a time, a spokeswoman for that school confirmed.

Agyei-Kodie had lived with Kinyua's family in the 500 block of Terrapin Terrace in Joppa for about six months and did not know anyone else in the area, according to police reports. Kinyua's father, Antony, told police that Agyei-Kodie had recently been "depressed" after being apprehended on an immigration warrant and was facing likely deportation.

Police issued a public appeal Monday for help in finding Agyei-Kodie, who was said to have left for a jog at 5:30 a.m. on May 25 wearing a T-shirt and black athletic shorts. Monica Worrell, a county police spokeswoman, said investigators had concerns about statements made by Kinyua's family.

Late Tuesday night, Antony Kinyua notified police that his son, Jarrod Kinyua, had found what they believed were human remains in the basement of the house, according to charging documents. Upon their arrival, Jarrod Kinyua told police he found a human head and two human hands inside metal tins under a blanket in the laundry room.

When he asked Alexander Kinyua about the remains, Jarrod Kinyua said, his brother denied that they were human and said they were animal remains, according to charging documents. After calling his father downstairs, Jarrod and Antony Kinyua discovered that the remains had been moved and Alexander Kinyua was washing out the metal tins.

With a search-and-seizure warrant for the location, deputies were able to locate the head and hands on the main floor of the house, according to charging documents.

They also interviewed Alexander Kinyua, who allegedly admitted that he had killed Agyei-Kodie by cutting him up with a knife and then eating his heart and portions of his brain.

Kinyua also directed police to Towne Baptist Church, about a mile away in the 500 block of Trimble Road, where the rest of the remains were found in a trash container on the property, according to charging documents.

Bane said the remains were being sent for further analysis, to assure investigators that "we're dealing with one victim," Bane said. But officials said they did not have any reason to believe there were additional victims.

At Kinyua's first court appearance Thursday at Harford District Court in Bel Air, defense attorney Lynne McChrystal requested reasonable bail in the case, adding that Kinyua has been in Harford County for six years and in Maryland for nine years. She said he was self-employed, performing "consulting work."

Appearing via live video feed from prison, Kinyua wore a Harford County Detention Center uniform: a black-and-white striped pair of pants and matching T-shirt. Upon questioning by Judge John L. Dunnigan, Kinyua said that all of his family members lived in Maryland and that he was originally from Nairobi, Kenya.

Assistant State's Attorney Trenna Manners cited those out-of-country ties, as well as the "grisly" nature of the crime, when she asked for Kinyua to be held without bail, and the judge agreed.

Before May, Kinyua had no prior criminal record. In January, he was dismissed from the ROTC program after 2 1/2 years of participation, said Lt. Col. James Lewis, a professor of military service who oversees the program. Officials said it followed a disciplinary incident.

Then on May 20, Kinyua was charged with first-degree assault and reckless endangerment. In that case, according to police, Kinyua attacked another Morgan student in a doorway of the on-campus Thurgood Marshall apartment complex with a baseball bat, then fled into a nearby wooded area.

The victim, listed as Joshua Ceasar, suffered fractures to his skull, arm and shoulder, as well as blindness to his left eye. The first responding officer saw Ceasar stumbling toward her with blood coming from his forehead, and the officer noted a large amount of blood in the doorway.

Fabien, who said she knew Kinyua, said she saw him in the moments before the attack. She said he was sitting in a chair, clutching the bat. "He kept saying, 'Somebody has to protect the kids. I gotta protect the kids,'" she said.

Kinyua was ordered held on $220,000 bond in that case, and university officials said the school was in the process of expelling him. According to court records, two Baltimore residents posted property to secure bond for his release on May 23.

On May 25, what appeared to be a plea from his parents for help paying Kinyua's legal fees in the case was posted on Mwakilishi.com, a Kenyan news website. The post, which has since been removed, said Kinyua had been arrested for "being involved in a fight in his dormitory room at Morgan State University."

The online plea said, "In order to get him the best defense possible, we need to secure an attorney who will take his case and leave no stone unturned."

It also stated that a fundraising event was scheduled at the International Christian Community Church in Baltimore. The church was locked Thursday afternoon, and nobody answered a knock on the door.

Pictures on Facebook taken before this past semester show Kinyua with a wide grin at a laser tag event and showing off a blue jacket for the National Society of Pershing Rifles, a fraternal group for students in ROTC programs. Another shows him in military fatigues, standing at attention.

More recent posts to the social networking site reflected a shift. In the two most recent posts, Kinyua uploaded "QR Codes," bar code images that, when scanned with a smartphone, lead to a Web page. They both led to a message about something called "Project Crack the Code," promising "more information on survival of the human family."

Attempts to reach Kinyua's family have been unsuccessful. A man who answered the phone Wednesday night at a number listed for Antony and Beatrice Kinyua said they were resting and that the family did not wish to speak to the news media without an attorney present. On Thursday, no one answered the door of the Joppa townhouse.

On tidy, well-kept Terrapin Terrace near Joppatowne High School, Mary Ellen Murray, who lived several houses down from the Kinyuas, said the parents, Beatrice and Antony, were quiet, "wonderful" people.

"They would give you the shirt off their back," Murray said. "Nobody has anything bad to say about them."

Harry Olson, the family's next-door neighbor and a physics professor at Morgan who once taught Kinyua, said police squad cars and two hazardous-materials vehicles were stationed on his street Wednesday, and investigators brought "lots of stuff" in bags out of the home.

Investigators also took an entire toilet from the home and dug up a garden in the front of the house, Olson said.

"It's shocking," another neighbor, Kenny Day, said of the allegations of cannibalism. "You don't want to hear about that stuff, but you certainly don't want to hear about it in your neighborhood.

"You can't be scared of stuff like that, though, because you can't run from crazy, and that's total crazy," Day added.

Quote:Are universities scared of the online learning movement?
Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to slow it.

By Peter G. Klein, Guest blogger / May 17, 2012

I posted last week on Organizations and Markets about the tepid, and entirely predictable, reaction of the higher education establishment to the information technology revolution. Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to retard it. The strategy has been to make a few easy, low-cost, conservative moves that preserve the status quo, such as putting some existing courses online, while trying to suppress the innovative outsiders like Phoenix, DeVry, TED, Kahn Academy, etc. It’s a classic example of what Clayton Christensen calls sustaining innovation — incremental changes that keep the existing market structure intact. The last thing the higher-ed establishment wants is disruptive innovation that challenges its dominant incumbent position.

As Morgan Brown wrote earlier this year, universities are guilds, and it’s this organizational structure, not bad leadership or the wrong ideology, that underlies the universities’ hostility to markets. If there is fundamental reform, it will surely come from outside the guild system, not within it. It’s great that Harvard and MIT and other elite universities are offering some classes online. But look instead to bolder experiments like the Mises Academy — not a duplicate of the standard degree program, but a modular, flexible, focused approach to teaching Austrian economics and related subjects. Call it guerrilla teaching. Let’s see where this new movement can go!

Question the value of black studies programs, lose your job. Honest discussion of race relations has no place in the close-minded world of RA higher ed.

Quote:Conservatives defend fired writer on race
Value of black studies at issue

By Ben Wolfgang
The Washington Times
Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Conservative commentators and think tanks have rushed in recent days to the defense of embattled journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, who was fired from her job as a blogger with the widely respected [] Chronicle of Higher Education for questioning the value of black-studies programs.

Chester E. Finn, president of the conservative education think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the decision “a truly reprehensible episode in the annals of American journalism.”

Liberal-turned-conservative Harry Stein, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal magazine, said it represents “one more nail in the coffin of American higher education.”

Commentary Magazine writer Jonathan Tobin argued that Ms. Riley “transgressed no rules of journalism other than the need not to offend powerful constituencies.”

The heated debate, which has escalated quickly in the days since Ms. Riley’s April 30 piece was published, has again shined a spotlight on the sticky issue of race relations in America, particularly in academia.

In her post to the magazine’s Brainstorm blog, commenting on a lengthy Chronicle news feature on black studies, Ms. Riley said several of the black-studies dissertations cited in the piece were “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.”

She also argued that their topics — which included supposed racism in the subprime mortgage market and an examination of “historical black midwifery” — miss the mark by failing to address the real problems facing the black community.

“There are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates,” she wrote. “But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments.”

Shortly afterward, the Chronicle asked her to write a second article defending herself from a swelling tide of criticism including a petition demanding her firing. It attracted more than 6,000 signatures before the Chronicle responded by dismissing her on Monday.

Editor Liz McMillen said that the writing didn’t meet the publication’s “standards for reporting and fairness,” and she also apologized to readers who may have felt “betrayed.”

Ms. Riley also endured rampant accusations of racism across the internet, with some branding her as a peddler of hate speech.

But her termination has generated its own backlash from those who believe an honest discussion about American race relations has again been pushed aside to ensure no one is offended.

“There was little reasoned argument, almost no attempt at factual refutation from these supposed defenders of free thought and lively exchange of ideas, but mainly name calling,” Mr. Stein said. “As always, the ultimate conversation stopper — ‘racist’ — was at the top of the list.”

Others have noted that the Chronicle, founded in 1966 and viewed as a leading authority on higher-education issues, should have handled Ms. Riley’s piece and the reaction to it much differently. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Ms. Riley pointed out that her former employer at first “stood its ground,” keeping her on staff for a week after the piece was published.

But that position didn’t last long. In her statement, Ms. McMillen flatly, and uncharacteristically, admitted that the uproar played a role in Ms. Riley’s firing, telling angry readers “we’ve heard you.”

“For an influential and widely read publication that’s been around since I was a graduate student myself and that boasts of its vibrant discussion forums, [Ms. Riley’s firing was] wrong,” Mr. Finn said. “Vibrancy, it seems, has been replaced by political correctness and intimidation.”

Quote:The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.

April 30, 2012, 10:24 pm
By Naomi Schaefer Riley

NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the below post, please read “A Note to Readers.”

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Quote:May 13, 2012
Naomi Schaefer Riley and the Corruption of the Academy
By Abraham H. Miller

Even though The Chronicle of Higher Education long ago reflected the leftist agenda of its readership, I never could have imagined it would stoop so low as to fire someone for writing a piece at variance with the political correctness it has come to uphold. But it did. The Chronicle fired Naomi Schaefer Riley for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if there were real intellectual, and not political, standards on campus, it would be shut down.

There is, however, a larger issue: not only is what Schaefer Riley says true about why black studies should be closed down, but her statements could also be easily extended to many fields in the social sciences and humanities. The vulnerability of the campus on this issue is why the Chronicle chose the unseemly and totally inappropriate device of censorship. It was so willing to placate its audience of ideological leftists massing with pitchforks in hand that it inadvertently gave Riley's exposé on black studies far and away more visibility than it would otherwise have achieved.

For a higher education periodical to substitute censorship for debate speaks volumes about the deterioration of the entire educational edifice. In order for this failing institution to persist, its reality must be hidden from the larger public. Large segments of higher education are not education at all, but an expensive immersion in leftist propaganda for the attainment of a degree that is as worthless as all the multicultural requirements coerced on a captive and overly passive audience of students.

A large part of academia is a bubble, and like early warnings about the housing crisis, few in academia want to acknowledge that the bubble is about to burst. In academia, as in the world of investment banking, no one wants to kill the golden goose. Too many have such strong and vested interests in the system as it exists that they have no motivation to consider the long-term consequences.

There is the already bloated academic bureaucracy that keeps growing. Where else can a degree in an intellectually demanding field like education administration command a mid-six-figure salary? There is the student loan industry that charges variable-rate interest and has created spiraling debt that an increasing number of former students cannot pay. There is the local construction industry that is turning universities into country clubs. There is the faculty that has transformed departments into a propaganda mills for left-wing causes. There is the diversity industry that has used universities to create make-believe jobs for black professionals, who thrive on allegations of victimization. And, of course, there are the students and their parents, who want easy degrees and only later become disappointed when those degrees are found to be not gateways to economic success but debt-laden albatrosses.

At the same time, minority legislators want to know how well universities are doing for their constituents. In many states, state legislators have courtesy adjunct appointments on university faculties and are present to intrude personally in the university's business, especially when it comes to a school's responsiveness to minority students.

For public universities, not only is it necessary to all but go to the shopping malls to recruit minority students, but it is also vital to make sure that the institution is committed to their retention and their advancement through the system. This serves to keep the caucus of minority legislators -- the minions of perpetual outrage and the bloodhounds of discrimination -- at bay. Social promotion, consequently, is no longer restricted to high school. It is vital in minimizing the intrusiveness of legislators. As one legislator told me, "I watch to see how many blacks get degrees." Indeed, we knew he watched, and we certainly knew how to produce blacks with degrees, which sometimes was something altogether different from education.

Even with grade inflation, institutionalized minority sympathy grading, and departments that are little more than left-wing propaganda mills, some minority students fall through the cracks. Many of them are totally unprepared for college. They were recruited to keep up the numbers for the government record-keepers and to assuage the minority caucuses in the legislature. These students need a safety net. And this is one of the functions of the various studies programs like black studies.

When athletes do poorly in their classes, they become ineligible. The athletic program then enrolls them in a summer course that might be called "the theory of the forward pass." This is obviously not a course in the physics of trajectories, but is one that generates four easy hours of "A" to balance out bad grades and maintain eligibility. Studies programs serve similar purposes. Courses in "black hair," "gangsta rap," and "the politics of white oppression" can pump up the most dismal of averages and retain students.

So why all the outrage over Schaefer Riley articulating what has long been in the public domain for anyone who cared to read it? Schafer Riley's "crime" is that she made it too visible. A half-century ago, the South Korean government invested in the creation of a resort complex called Walker Hill and publicly advertised all its licentious activities to lure the patronage of American soldiers. The U.S. military immediately declared Walker Hill off-limits. The South Koreans were both incredulous and outraged. When they confronted the American military, saying that the soldiers went to Tokyo to indulge in all the same vices and yet the military never declared Tokyo off-limits, the military simply responded that Tokyo did not advertises its vices on large billboards. The South Koreans took down the billboards, and the military's restrictions were lifted.

Schaefer Riley was unwilling to join The Chronicle of Higher Education in playing cover-up or in going along with its fatuous pieces on black studies that ultimately led to her biting and controversial response. Academia cannot tolerate the antiseptic of truth. And as students know, it is about not just black studies, but a large number of required courses that teach nothing useful, but intead serve the vision of those who think academic freedom gives them a license to use the classroom to indoctrinate social and political values.

I had an advisee, an older student and veteran, whose schedule put him in an English lit section where the professor was obsessed with animal rights. All the readings were about the abuse of animals. In addition, the students were coerced to work at a local animal shelter, tending to animals and cleaning cages in order to get their credits for English lit. Imagine paying hundreds of dollars a credit-hour for the sublime experience of cleaning up animal dung.

I know of departments where dissertations never mentioned "Israel," but instead referred to it as the "Zionist entity," and this was considered scholarship. I know of dissertations written totally from Marxist and Soviet Union sources. I know of faculty who wrote dissertations for minority students. I know of Middle East departments where faux history required students accept that the current-day Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines. I know of a psychology department where any departure from the "fact" that Beethoven was black will be tolerated to the sound of one's grade falling through the floorboards. I know of faculty who passed people on preliminary examinations by simply asking leading questions and doing so without a tinge of embarrassment or conscience.

Black studies might be different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. The same corruption, the same useless propaganda masquerading as scholarship, the same turgid scholarship sanctified with the frequent but often inappropriate use of statistics, and the same social promotions all exist throughout the liberal arts colleges. The system is corrupt. The students are learning how to mouth the political banalities of their professors and little more. That is why they are unemployable in positions that require college educations. That is why they cannot pay off their student loans. That is why we continue to recruit professionals from overseas.

Naomi Schafer Riley exposed not just black studies; indirectly, she exposed the bubble that is academia. Academia in the liberal arts and sciences has become a therapeutic society for angry leftists able to act out in class under the guise of academic freedom, and higher education has deteriorated into a propaganda mill for those seeking their own brand of social justice. Although nearly everyone knows what academia has become, just as everyone knew about Walker Hill, there is a large vested interest in not having it splattered on billboards for the world to see. Naomi Schafer Riley had the courage to run afoul of those interests. The academic world needs more truth-telling.

The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Pay For

God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation are Changing America

Quote:Daniel Fisher, Forbes Staff
5/02/2012 @ 1:01PM |6,291 views

Poor Students Are The Real Victims Of College Discrimination

Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to ban affirmative-action policies at U.S. universities in Fisher vs. University of Texas. President Obama and Mitt Romney are falling all over themselves, meanwhile, with promises to keep college-loan rates low so more Americans can attend school.

Lost in all the debate is this simple fact: Income, not race, is the real determining factor in higher education today. Millions of otherwise-qualified high school students aren’t attending college, either because they can’t afford it or because the admissions system screens them out.

Some statistics: While 79% of students born into the top income quartile in the U.S. obtain bachelor’s degrees, only 11% of students from bottom-quartile families graduate from four-year universities, according to Postsecondary Education Opportunity. Put another way, about 55% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. went to students from top-quartile families with 2010 income above $98,875; 9.4% of those degrees went to students with family income below $33,000.

“It’s a far greater disparity than anything we’d talk about with race,” says Richard Sander, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who studies racial and economic disparities in higher education. “The pervasive problem in admissions offices is class-ism, not racism — they’re biased against low-income students.”

The problem gets worse the more selective the school is. At elite law schools like Yale and Harvard Law, 60% of the incoming students tend to come from the top 10% of the socioeconomic spectrum, Sander says, while only 5% come from the bottom half. Similar studies of competitive undergraduate schools have shown that three-quarters of students come from the top economic quartile, while less than 10% come from the bottom half.

No one’s suggesting this is conscious discrimination, any more than it would be reasonable to suggest that admissions officers at the University of Texas or Harvard would discriminate against black and Hispanic students if they didn’t have affirmative-action policies to prevent it. The question is whether, in their zeal to increase ethnic and racial diversity, colleges are ignoring the larger problem of getting poor students into their schools.

Most universities “spend much less time worrying about socioeconomic diversity than racial and ethnic diversity,” said Richard Vedder, a University of Ohio economist who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, which researches the rising cost of higher eduation. “There’s no question they engage in aggressive affirmative action at the top schools, but you see less aggressive efforts to let in a poor white kid from Appalachia.”

At Harvard, for example, 12% of this year’s entering class is African-American, roughly the same proportion as the country at large. That is a startling accomplishment given that many black students come from lower income strata and attend poorly run inner-city schools that otherwise provide a much lower overall percentage of college students.

Many of those students may come from wealthy families. (Or overseas, according to this 2007 Harvard Crimson article.) Sander’s research into the files at one unnamed “very elite college” shows that in 1999, there was only a 4% chance a black student with SAT scores above 1200 but from the bottom 20% of socioeconomic status would even apply for admission. Equally qualified black students from the top quintile had a 48% chance of applying. The comparable spread for white students was 14% for the lowest quintile and 34% for the wealthiest.

One problem facing lower-income students is the government-subsidized student loans that politicians like Obama and Romney support so vociferously. They’re designed to make college more affordable, but critics say they have had the opposite effect by driving up tuition expense in much the same way as easy mortgage financing drove the housing bubble a decade ago.

“The effect of this is the cost of higher education has been pushed up by people who want to go to college,” Vedder said. “That’s mostly middle- and higher-income students.”

Congress started the Pell Grant program to give low-income students grants to pay for college but the maximum grant today is $5,550, or about half the cost of a typical state university and a tenth of the cost of a prestigious private school. Students must fill the rest of the gap with scholarships or loans, which low-income families may be uncomfortable taking out. Elite Ivy League schools have countered this by offering essentially free tuition to students with family income below $50,000 — at Yale, the average aid for the 57% of students who qualified was $38,900 last year — but their enrollments are still largely from the middle and upper classes.

This Education Dept. report shows the result: Enrollment rates for academically qualified, but low-income, high school graduates in four-year schools plunged from 54% to 40% between 1992 and 2004, while the rate for moderate-income students fell from 59% to 53%.

“The schools that tout affirmative action aren’t reaching the (low-income) kids who have taken the SAT and did well, let alone building up the pool” of qualified minority applicants, Sander said.

Fisher represents a direct assault on this system. Student Abigail Fisher, who is white, sued after being refused admission to the University of Texas under a program that gives extra weight to black and Hispanic applicants. Texas stopped considering race after losing a court challenge in 1996, instead offering admission to all students in the top 10% of their high school classes to get a mix from poor and rich communities. But the school added race back into the equation after the Supreme Court upheld limited use of racial preferences in 2002′s Grutter vs. Bollinger. The state defends its policy as necessary to establish “critical mass” of black and Hispanic students who are still underrepresented despite the top 10% plan.

Under the plan, UT considers academic records and a Personal Achievement Index with “special circumstances” including race. The special circumstances category accounts for 57% of the PAI compared with 47% for essays.

Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. filed a brief urging the high court to strike down the university’s use of racial preferences because they hurt less-preferred minorities, like Asians and poor students, as well as black and Hispanic students who are ill-prepared to succeed at more competitive schools. The statistics for University of Texas undergraduates illustrate this last “mismatch” complaint: According to this recent analysis, black and Hispanic undergraduates had median GPAs of around 2.6, compared with 3.04 for whites and 3.17 for Asians.

Among students accepted outside the state’s 10% plan, Sander and Taylor report, Asians scored 467 points on the SAT above blacks, averaging in the 93rd percentile nationwide, while whites scored 390 points higher and averaged in the 89th percentile. Blacks averaged in the 52nd percentile.

California’s public university system offers a good comparison. The state’s voters banned the consideration of race in public college admissions in 1996 and since then, black and Hispanic enrollment and graduation rates have increased dramatically, even though enrollment of those minorities at the most selective schools fell as much as 50%. Berkeley and UCLA used to grab half of the black and Hispanic students who otherwise qualified for the UC system, he said, leaving other schools with less diversity. Now the university system is more integrated overall and black and Hispanic students — many of whom through no fault of their own came from lower-performing high schools — are attending universities that are better matched to their academic skills.

Berkeley and UCLA, meanwhile, have found it expedient to invest in programs to improve public schools to try and increase the pool of qualified minority applicants. They also may have returned to some of their old practices. Sander said admissions officials at the elite UC schools are “very unhappy with the race-neutral process and keep trying to get race back in.” He will report in an upcoming paper that Asian high-schoolers who attended outreach programs where they could meet university officials in person had “dramatically lower” chances of being admitted compared with those who didn’t, while black students who attended those programs had a higher chance.

“Here you are an Asian student, and if you were enthusiastic, you got shafted,” he said.

What none of the schools seem willing to do is take aggressive action increase the numbers of very poor students. Some Ivy League universities have made tuition essentially free for most poor and middle-income families, but national statistics still show that colleges enroll a disproportionately low number of qualified low-income students. According to the Education Dept. the average four-year public university costs $11,700 per year, or more than 20% of the median U.S. household income and half of what households in the bottom 20% earn.

For Sander, this is the issue the Supreme Court should be concentrating upon instead of whether schools are discriminating against black and Hispanic students. Bias against low-income applicants is “unconscious,” he says, but reinforced by policies such as seeking out students with rich extracurricular activities on their resumes.

“A lot of admissions officers tend to focus on how `interesting’ a student is,” he said. “Being `interesting’ tends to be inversely related to being poor. Doing an internship in Indonesia is incompatible with holding a summer job.”

One solution would be for the most competitive schools to strip all identifying information from their applications, including names. An admissions official at an Ivy League university told me that was unfeasible because of all the separate pieces of paper that must be assembled into a student’s file. Each would have to be coded instead of filed by name, with a master list stored on a computer.

Another alternative would be to copy what New York City does with its hypercompetitive public schools for “gifted” students: Pick a pool of qualified applicants several times the entering class and let a computer make the final cut.

This approach would eliminate all of the subjective bias that may favor wealthy applicants over poorer ones, but it could have a devastating effect on admissions for certain minorities including blacks. If Harvard, say, selected the top 20% of its 35,000 applicants as a pool for 1,700 entering freshmen, there’s a good chance that pool would be overwhelmingly Asian and white. The computer might do a better job of letting in low-income students, but it would probably fail miserably at racial balance. (For confirmation of this, check out the startling statistics in this New York Magazine article on Asian students: Asian-Americans, who represent about 13% of New York City students, hold 72% of the places at super-elite Stuyvesant High School.)

This gets at the real problem lurking inside the Fisher case: The failure of primary schools to prepare enough black and Hispanic students for competitive four-year college programs. Admissions officials continuously attempt to address this by tinkering with their racial formulas, but the Supreme Court, which has grown increasingly skeptical about affirmative action in recent years, may choose to take this approach away. What will be left is old-fashioned recruiting, neighborhood school by neighborhood school.

George Gollin said I was an "idiot" and a "fool." Well, he was right!

I repeat all the lies he tells me just like a parrot. Or maybe a retarded parrot.

I especially like posting his lies at DebrisInflow because the only thing I like better than gay boy pornography is gay boy sex!!!

Johann

Bad news for students unfortunate enough to be studying at APUS/AMU. DETC has been one of the most responsive accreditation agencies in defending and assisting students getting hosed by abusive or non-responsive college administrators. Regional accreditors literally do nothing about student complaints. Now that the most aggressive advocate of equitable treatment for students has been jettisoned, expect the worst from the borderline illiterates running APUS.

Quote:Resigned DETC Accreditation
The American Public University System (American Military University and American Public University), Charles Town, WV, resigned its DETC accreditation as of April 30, 2012.