Category Archives: Education

The Purpose of Asian American Studies

In another internet group, someone posted the following article: Has Asian American Studies Failed? Take a look at it. It’s an article by a professor of Asian American Studies who argues that maybe Asian American studies has failed, since Asian Americans don’t seem to be shaping the public dialogue. This was the very first topic I ever blogged about. Back to my roots, baby.

Posted in Asian American, Education | Tagged | 9 Comments

Our Grade School and Higher Education Disparity

Saw the above video on how Americans drop out of engineering. One young man talks about how he took lots of math and science in high school, including calculus, but he was somehow unprepared for science and engineering at the college level. He had interest in the subject but was not adequately prepared.

What is crazy and makes little sense is that America has one of the best systems of higher education in the world, and yet we have one of the worst systems of grade school education.

Posted in Education | Tagged | 16 Comments

Don’t Check Asian

Thank you, Dali, for sending this article: Some Asians’ College Strategy: Don’t Check Asian. The article interviews some hapa Asian women with White last names (because their fathers are White) who decided to better their chances of getting into good colleges by checking the White box or not checking a race at all on the application. We’ve seen people who are full Asian actually change their last names to get around admission policy racism, but it’s probably a LOT easier to just be born with a White last name. What this also means is that if you’re an Asian American female who wants to do what’s best for your kids, it might make sense to just join the Club.

Posted in Asian American, Education | Tagged , , | 95 Comments

China to Cancel College Majors Where Grads Can’t Find Work

China is having a similar problem to the U.S.–people are graduating college and are not able to find work. But instead of a laissez-faire attitude, they’re taking the reins and chopping those majors that don’t pay: China To Cancel College Majors That Don’t Pay. The article says:

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

Posted in Education | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Lawyers, Law School, and Law Salaries

Lawyer training takes place at the firm, not the university

Two interesting articles about law and lawyering in the NY Times.

The first was an article about how law schools focus on theory rather than how to be a lawyer. Lots of law schools hire professors who have never practiced law, and often law clients wind up paying for a new lawyer’s on-the-job training. It has always been like this, but it’s more of an issue in recent days because: a) clients don’t want to spend the money anymore, and b) many law students are having trouble finding work these days and paying off those big student loans.

Posted in Asian American, Education, Strategy | Tagged | 38 Comments

Screen Time and Education

I saw these two seemingly contradictory articles in the NY Times recently.

The first article was about a rich, private school in Silicon Valley which discourages the use of technology as a learning tool: At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait. Parents, many of whom work at Apple, Google, EBay, and Yahoo, pay thousands of dollars to send their kids to this school, and yet there isn’t a single computer on campus. Instead they learn with pens, paper, and bright colored chalk. One father who is a Google employee says:

Posted in Education, media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

More Free Market Woes

This in the NY Times:

A new report suggests that American students would do well to major in science, technology, engineering or math.

The report, based on government data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shows that professions that depend heavily on skills learned in these fields are the second-fastest growing occupational group in the United States, after health care.

Posted in Education, Knowledge | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

Education IS Oversold, But We Also Need More Education

Ha-Joon Chang’s book helped me to reconcile some differing but not mutually exclusive viewpoints that I’ve held in the past, namely that:

a) Education is oversold (also see here)

and

b) We need more education in the humanities (also see here)

In “Thing 17,” Chang compares the literacy of different countries and shows how increased literacy doesn’t necessarily mean that a country will do better. In 1960′s, for example, the literacy rate of the Philippines was 72% compared with a rate of 54% in Taiwan, and the per capita income of the Philippines was almost twice that of Taiwan, but Taiwan’s per capita income today is nearly ten times that of the Philippines (180). The main reason a nation’s economy grows, as Chang shows, is because of its government and institutions, not because of it’s education.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Snowlipsism

Thanks to TZ and King for our internal discussion.

Here is a Fighting 44s koan that Xian wrote a while back: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no White Man to hear it, did it really fall?

Posted in Asian American, Education, Knowledge, media | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

The Jews and the Chinese and the Humanities (Podcast)

A Chinese guy who isn't me; a Jewish guy who isn't Hertsel

This is a podcast that I’d been hoping to do for a while. On this podcast, my good friend Hertsel and I discuss the Jews, the Chinese, and the humanities. It’s about fifty minutes, and it’s 46.2 MBs. Download it here, or listen to it here:

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Posted in Asian American, Education, parenting, Podcasts | Tagged , , | 109 Comments