It’s the Thought that Counts

Senator Grassley recently held hearings into how colleges use their endowments. There’s some understandable interest here. Universities frequently control large amounts of money, with a handful of them controlling huge assets. (Harvard, the richest by far, has over $34 billion.) With college costs rising faster than inflation, some in government have thought about ways to force colleges to put this money to work faster to help out with their expenses and reduce tuition. I really think this debate, though, has missed a few points.

First of all, and I think this is the most important point, the money has to be used on education/research eventually. Most of the money in endowments is tied to specific uses. It’s for scholarships, or the salary for a named professorship or something. Even what isn’t specifically targeted is going to end up being used by an educational institution. The real complaint here is just that colleges are saving more than they should — overvaluing education in the future as compared to the present.

I’m inclined to think they are not. Recognize first of all that, to a great extent, any lack of them funding education out of their endowments right now will be replaced with funding from people paying tuition, as long as tuition doesn’t get so high as to dissuade people from going to college. Now, I believe it’s clearly the responsibility of government to provide enough financial aid that everyone can attend college (assuming they put in the effort in high school to make themselves qualified). This is what’s annoying congressmen, since they don’t want to make room in the budget for it, and of course that’s understandable.

The real problem here, though, is that the vast majority of endowment money is held by only a small handful of schools. Maybe Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT can make college free for everyone for a little while by spending down their endowments (or at least, not growing them fast enough to keep up with inflation), but that only affects a tiny minority of college students in the US, and those schools already offer enough financial aid that students from poor families pay very little if anything. Most students go places that don’t have much in the way of endowments, and Congress is still going to have to offer enough financial aid to keep those places affordable.

However, these big endowments do constitute a form of national savings for the US. The American savings rate is low (or negative, really) and could use every bit of help it can get, and a half-trillion dollars in savings isn’t something we should be trying to get rid of. Also, more importantly, it helps to lock in the leading status of US universities. The world’s most elite universities are near-universally in the US (the main exceptions being Cambridge and Oxford). This is largely a consequence of economics. The schools with the ability to bring in the top people will always be the best. The US isn’t going to stay the world’s biggest economy forever, and the gap is definitely going to shrink fast. Building up huge endowments in our top universities essentially locks in their top position, guaranteeing that they’ll be able to fight and stay at the top even as the overall position of the United States deteriorates.

The government should try to avoid forcing private actors to spend their money. I’m not a libertarian, and regulation of nonprofits is something I could live with when clearly necessary. Here, though, I don’t think it is. Harvard is still raising lots of money, so clearly their donors don’t have a problem with the way the endowment is being used. At a time when the United States is failing in general to invest in the kind of long-term society-building things that keep a country at the top of its game, private charities that devote resources to planning for the very long term should be helped, not hurt.

Tags: college, economics, education

Several stories have been floating about lately, all generally on the topic of popular understanding of science. Here are the highlights.

A court has ruled that the University of California was well within its rights to deny admission to students they found unqualified as a result of their having attended Christian schools. The schools in question taught many classes that were extremely Bible-centric, to the exclusion of nearly all other content, making it impossible to meet the UC admissions requirements with their courses misleadingly called “biology” or “history.” I found this personally interesting in light of my earlier comments on how far it’s appropriate to extend religious tolerance. Even though it has upset some religious people, the courts have ruled that it’s okay to assess religious descriptions of the world and find them academically lacking.

Speaking of lack of academic background, I was happy for once to read USA Today, which reported that 76% of Americans believe that improving science education should be a priority issue for presidential candidates. In keeping with this, about 26% say that they themselves have an adequate understanding of science, but more ridiculously “44% couldn’t identify a single scientist, living or dead, whom they’d consider a role model for the nation’s young people.” My reaction is similar to Doug Natelson’s: Or dead? Really? We couldn’t name, oh I don’t know, Einstein? Perhaps he is not hip enough for the youth. (Check out Doug’s post for some more details on presidential candidates and their support for science research funding, as well.)

The USA Today article discussed science literacy in the context of voting ability. If Americans aren’t sufficiently “science-savvy,” how can we make the right choices about science issues? It’s not just about budgeting for research, it’s also about healthcare availability, education, stem cells, abortion… and it’s about every issue that invokes statistics. A bit more math than science, yes, but if we were more educated about science we’d be better at identifying large enough sample sizes and acknowledging deviations from the mean. That applies to almost every issue on which there is public debate involving presentation of evidence.

I certainly agree that science education should be a bigger priority than it currently is, and my opinions were only reinforced by this report on end of life care, which stated that 57% of the American public believes that “God’s intervention could save a family member if physicians declared treatment would be futile.” Almost 20% of medical professionals share this belief. While I don’t believe in miracles myself, I of course can’t offer positive falsification of their existence. What we should all be able to agree on, though, is that if all medical signs point to imminent or already-real death, a miracle recovery is not coming this time. There are many other interesting outcomes in the study, such as differing opinions about persistent vegetative state and how long it is acceptable to demand continuing treatment of a dying loved one. Orac of Respectful Insolence wrote a very thoughtful and thorough treatment of all this, cautioning against becoming too preoccupied with the religion aspect. I agree wholeheartedly with his bottom line:

Indeed, the focus on religion takes away the focus from the real issue: improving public understanding of scientific medicine and what it can and cannot accomplish. Lots of patients have unrealistic beliefs about health care based on all sorts of things, be they religion, faith in pseudoscientific quackery, or just fears based on misinformation that is rife in the media (i.e., the claim by antivaccinationists that vaccines cause autism). … Persuading families and patients that what evidence-based medicine recommends is the best for their injured or ill loved ones requires a far gentler touch.

Tags: discrimination, education, pseudoscience, religion, science

It’s carnival time again.  My post on reasons for learning math has been featured in the Carnival of Education.  This carnival has plenty of interesting stuff, especially if you teach.  There are a couple more general audience articles as well, including this cool post adding a bit of reality to the classic teacher-inspires-troubled-youth genre of movies.

Tags: carnival, education

There are lots of students who aren’t interested in math, and lots of math teachers who want to motivate them to actually put effort into the subject.  Most of this struggle seems to revolve around how useful math is, with kids saying (or at least perceived to be saying) something like “I’ll never need this” and teachers trying to convince them that math is everywhere.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve never been happy about this way of looking at why one learns math.  Most importantly, I think, teachers are bound to fail at convincing students of the usefulness of math, even with the most applicable of topics.  Part of the reason is that the subjects that apply the math are always taught after the math itself.  Physics, economics, and so forth make the need for quadratic equations very clear, but you would never teach someone physics unless they had first mastered quadratic equations.  This means that the math a student is currently learning is never being used in their other classes as they learn it.  Some students see stuff they learned years before now being used routinely, and they learn to trust that the things they’re being taught now will turn out equally useful in years to come.  That’s a healthy attitude, but even with an explicit explanation of the situation, many students will not adopt it.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are in fact topics taught in high school (especially in a school with a strong math curriculum) that aren’t likely to be used in the future by many of the students.  Calculus is helpful in a variety of occupations, but far from all.  Geometry, barring the straightforward basics, is only helpful in unusual circumstances.  Imaginary numbers are unlikely to come up too frequently.  A teacher is therefore bound to fail at showing the usefulness of these things directly.

I also think, though, that judging math by its usefulness is missing the point.  Why do math teachers need to prove that their material will be vital for daily life in order to make it worth learning?  Poetry would never be able to pass that test, nor would history or art.  You don’t “use” Shakespeare very frequently.  Of course, that’s obviously not the point.  We fully recognize that sonnets aren’t “useful,” but we still learn them.  We think it makes your life better to have the wider, deeper view of the world that comes with having studied art and literature.  We think they’re part of being an educated person.  We think that by studying them you build fundamental skills of critical thinking, imagination, and interpersonal relationships that are important, even if the actual material you’re learning is not.  These things are all true about math as well, but people don’t think of math that way.  They think of it as a prerequisite for other (important) things.

Math should be taught as something you learn because it’s interesting and enlightening.  It should of course be mentioned that it’s also useful, but that should never be seen as the only reason why it’s being taught.  To do this, it would help to change the math curriculum a bit.  Anyone who’s ever taken proof-based math in college knows that mathematicians don’t spend their days doing the stuff that’s taught in high school.  Engineers solve a lot more equations than mathematicians do.  Mathematicians deal with abstract topics, proving new facts.  This kind of open-ended, puzzle-like problem is a lot more fun to do, and a much better way to show students what math is really like, than the computational topics that take up the current standard curriculum.

If math can be taught as something that’s interesting, rather than as something that’s useful, it changes the way students look at it.  It becomes the kind of thing that one would expect some people to really, deeply like.  It can be fun and exciting.  If it’s being done because it helps design bridges, it’s a chore.  The application is cool sometimes, but the thing you’re learning never is.  Math as useful calculation will never be appreciated by anyone who can’t see themselves going into science, engineering, or accounting, but math as clever puzzles that help us understand the wonder of pure reason can be something people really want to learn.

Tags: education, math

Given all the comments on my post about people who readily admit to being bad at math, as well as the discussion occurring on various other blogs, I figured it was time to respond to some of what’s been said.

There were some people who expressed skepticism of the phenomenon I was complaining about.  These comments (both here and elsewhere) were things like “I always talk about how bad I am at writing” or “I’m an English major, but I know plenty of science.”  I have no doubt at all that the incidents cited in the comments really did happen, and they do go against the trend I talked about, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

Putting aside for a moment the question of how much knowledge someone should have about any particular field, I want to give some clear support for my assertion that math/science people do know more about the humanities than humanities people know about math and science.  I should first be clear about what I’m counting as what.  By “humanities” I mean not only literature and fine arts, but also history, social sciences and languages.  While there are some arguable cases (economics comes to mind), I think it’s pretty clear that that stuff clearly goes on the humanities side of the divide.  When I refer to “sciences,” I mean technical fields in general, including both theoretical and applied math, computer science, engineering, and applications like medicine.

It’s obviously impossible to compare levels of understanding in two different fields.  How much calculus do you need in order to equal the amount of knowledge that encompassed by fluency in a foreign language?  It doesn’t make any sense to compare these things directly.  Still, I believe that we can make the general claim that some incredibly basic, simple science is considered “equivalent” to much more advanced levels of humanities knowledge.  Z commented to this effect, using Jeopardy! questions as a proxy.  Something a little more quantitative (ha, ha) would of course be preferable.

The best metric I could come up with was simply to look at how much effort was being put into learning material on the other side of the divide, rather than how much material was actually being learned.  I decided to look up core curricula at some of the country’s most prestigious universities.  These curricula seem as good a proxy as any for what the intellectual class feels a well-educated person should know.  The humanities part of the core requirement generally determines how much time a science student has to spend on humanities, while the reverse is true of the science part of the requirement.  Of course, many on both sides choose to learn much more than is required, but I think the requirements are a good proxy of what is considered necessary in order to consider yourself well-educated.  I tried to vary the colleges I looked at.  I chose two schools with a technical focus (MIT and Caltech), three general top universities (Harvard, Princeton, and Yale), and two of the top liberal arts schools (Swarthmore and Williams).  Results below:  read the rest »

Tags: culture, education, math, science

If you work or study in a technical field — particularly if you’re in math itself — you get used to a particular type of reaction when you tell someone what you do.  It’s far from universal, but frequently the response is something like, “I was never very good at math” or “Math just wasn’t my thing.”  You learn to get used to it, but really, I’m sick of it.

It’s not that it’s not true.  Probably these people really are bad at math.  Probably it was always their worst subject.  I’m just tired of no one feeling bad about it.  These kinds of sentiments are very common, but imagine how weird it would be if you replaced “math” with “English” or “reading.”  Do you think authors, when they tell people they write for a living, ever get told “I was just never very good with words” or “I’m just not a reading person”?  They obviously don’t, because it’s not acceptable to be lacking in reading skills.  Some people are, but they would never go around saying so, and they usually work very hard to get better.  Somehow it’s become dishonorable to admit English is a bad subject for you, but perfectly fine to say the same for math.

It’s really sad that in a technical age, where more and more people are engineers, scientists and computer programmers, we don’t have this deep societal appreciation for math and science.  The same thing that makes people freely admit their math skills also affects college curricula.  Look at the required curricula at most liberal arts colleges, which proudly proclaim the value of the “well-rounded” education that they give.  There are very few math/science/computer/engineering classes, and extremely few math classes in particular.  What requirements there are can always be filled by worthless classes.  Then look at the curricula for technical, math/science-focused schools.  They always have a substantial humanities requirement, and a totally unscientific survey of people I know has found that there tend to be few joke courses to fill those requirements, and that most students don’t take them.  Which schools really give the most well-rounded education?

In this day and age, there is no excuse for brushing off math.  It’s tough if you’re bad at it, especially since faking competency is a lot harder in math than in the humanities.  Nevertheless, brushing it off and not caring is not an acceptable defense mechanism.  There’s a part of me that really wants, next time I hear someone say “I was always bad at math” to respond with “Well, I guess you’re just stupid.”  It’s obviously not the correct response, but at least it’d move the average in the right direction.

Update: some follow-up comments here.

Tags: culture, education, math

Female Science Professor wrote a great post today, prompted by an essay in Journal of Cell Science, about how stupid can be a good feeling. I found it really spot-on and insightful. “What are you talking about, Z?” I can hear you saying with outrage. “This blog is about being intelligent and using your brain! How can you agree with the idea that stupid is good?”

I don’t think it’s good to be stupid, so hold your horses. The problem is, it’s easy to feel stupid when you’re really not. Somehow, the popular conception of a smart person is someone who knows lots of things. That has an element of truth to it, but true intelligence is a lot more than being able to recall trivia. It’s important for scientists — and I dare say people in general — to get comfortable saying “I don’t understand this at all,” really confronting their lack of knowledge rather than staying in a safer place where all the answers are memorized or easy. Acknowledging your ignorance is really the smartest thing to do. If you never find yourself asking questions you don’t already know the answers to, you’ll never find out anything new. That seems pretty obvious in an abstract sense (it’s a big part of why Socrates is revered as a great thinker), but if you’re used to sailing through your classes and being the smartest kid in the room, the feeling of not getting it right away can be pretty jarring.

In order to do well in science, or in math, or in analytical aspects of any pursuit, it’s important to learn to appreciate a feeling of cluelessness, because it’s out of those moments that major learning really happens. That’s why, whenever I tutor or teach, I make an extra effort to help my students realize that they’re not the only ones who’ve had a hard time understanding the material. I like to say things like, “I thought this was really confusing the first time I heard about it, but I found it useful to…” or “That last part was pretty tricky, do you want me to go through it again?” That feeling when you’re struggling to understand can really turn people off to science, especially when they wonder how anyone could make a whole career out of studying stuff that’s not yet in a textbook (or a solution manual). That’s why students really need to hear that everyone makes mistakes, gets confused, or spends days blankly staring at a problem with no idea where to begin. Those experiences don’t mean you’re unsuited for science — they only become an issue if you respond by panicking and giving up.

I was surprised that FSP and some of the commenters on her blog were worried about sending that essay on to some friends/students/colleagues they knew who were feeling discouraged. They anticipate those people will read it as, “Yes, you’re stupid” rather than, “See? Everyone feels this way, and it’s a good thing.” I’ve doubted whether I was cut out for physics on plenty of occasions, and I’m sure if even at the worst of those times I was given an article called “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” I would find it uplifting rather than upsetting. Maybe it just needs to be framed with the right introduction and given at an opportune time. I do think it could do a world of good.

Tags: education, psychology, science

Science News and The Economist are reporting on a study published in Science by Guiso et al. that shows a correlation between ratings of a country’s gender equality and the size of the mathematics testing gap between male and female students. Countries with more gender equality exhibit a smaller gap. (Hat tips to Women in Science and to Skepchick for the links.)

My first reaction: well, duh. In places where it’s less likely for a girl to be laughed right out of the math classroom, girls tend to do better in their math classes. The only thing surprising about this is that someone thought it was worth doing a study to prove it.

On second glance, things get a bit more complicated. As with any social science study, interpreting the data is a tricky task. I’m going to start out by assuming for simplicity’s sake that the testing data and gender equality rankings are reliable, because the details of that are really more than I can cover here. I do want to talk about ways to interpret the data and implications for policy decisions.

Those of us who are equity-minded and sensitive to issues of political correctness want studies of this sort to show that girls and boys are equally capable of performing well in different types of tasks. We’re particularly aware of discrimination in STEM fields and eager to show that women are just as capable as men of succeeding there. Naturally, the likely way to approach this study is to note that in a country with a higher Gender Gap Index (GGI) the difference between girls’ and boys’ math scores basically tends to zero, while the difference is large in favor of boys in a country with a low GGI. Therefore women and men are equal, QED, let’s go home.

Wait, let’s not — because the reading scores matter too. read the rest »

Tags: education, gender, math, science

16% of US high school biology teachers are creationists, and about 12.5% lecture on it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species,” according to this study led by Prof. Michael Berkman at Penn State University. New Scientist reports:

Science teaching experts say they are not surprised to find such a large number of science teachers advocating creationism.

“It seems a bit high, but I am not shocked by it,” says Linda Froschauer, past president of the National Science Teachers Association based in Arlington, Virginia. “We do know there’s a problem out there, and this gives more credibility to the issue.”

I am shocked, even if Ms. Froschauer isn’t. I had always assumed it was interventionist school boards and activist parents who were pushing the creationist agenda. Apparently naively, I assumed that science teachers had been educated in the science they were teaching and were doing their best to communicate real scientific knowledge to their students. Silly, silly me.

How does this happen? Why are we as a society so apologetic for these people? We don’t tolerate it in other fields… but maybe no one’s tried it yet. Can you imagine a math teacher who taught that pi was exactly 3 (as in 1 Kings 7:23) or a history teacher who taught nothing more than six thousand years of who begat whom? Honestly, “My religion told me so” isn’t a valid reason for ignoring the facts in front of your nose. These numbers are more than “a bit high.” One biology teacher who lectures on creationism as a valid scientific theory is one too many.

The concept of evolution by natural selection doesn’t say anything about where life originally came from. It doesn’t answer every question we have about how the world works — even though Ben Stein seems to think that’s the claim — but it explains and predicts a lot. (Here are fifteen well-written answers to creationist nonsense by John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American.) If you’ve received any kind of scientific education, you know that you don’t form a scientific theory merely by saying, “Some aspects of the world are not explained by your theory!” then asserting what you would like to be true. Creationism/”intelligent design” hasn’t come anywhere close to science.

These biology teachers can’t possibly have an adequate biology education. An education degree, however impressive it might sound to school administrators, simply does not demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the subject material, and the bar must be set higher. We ought to require high school teachers to have a college-level education in the actual subjects they’re teaching. Indeed, Berkman’s study showed that teachers who had taken more science courses, particularly in evolutionary biology, were less likely to spend class time on creationism or ID. This isn’t stacking blocks and playing dress-up in kindergarten; in order for someone to be able to teach biology (or any other subject) properly it’s necessary for them to have truly learned it themselves first. If these teachers don’t know that creationism belongs in religious services rather than in science classrooms, they should never have been hired.

Tags: education, evolution, science