This is not a college success site. It's a site about using college to succeed.
First came the surprise: Stanford University, perhaps the front-runner in a competition to build a big, new science-and-engineering campus on free land in New York City, suddenly withdrew on Friday.
Now come the recriminations: Did Stanford pull out because it took on more than it could handle and didnt want to face an embarrassing loss? Or did New York City pull a bait-and-switch on an unsuspecting partner?
Stanfords Dream of Silicon Valley II Dissolves Into Angry Recriminations
While specialized education tools have long played an important role in the classroom, some of the most commonly used gadgets and Web sites have become teaching tools of choice at business schools like Essec and elsewhere.
Facebook is increasingly used to foster a sense of community for business school classes that meet just a few times a semester; Twitter is used as a way for students to be heard in big halls, letting them ask questions during lectures without having to raise their hand or voice; and videoconferencing software is used at many business schools as a tool for communication between far-flung networks of professors and experts.
With a demographic crisis looming, the government now admits that the expansion has gone too far. “We allowed too many universities to open,” says Sung Geun Bae, director general of South Korea’s education ministry. Mr. Sung points out that his country simultaneously has one of the world’s highest university enrollment rates—and one of the world’s lowest birthrates. “Fifteen years ago we needed all those universities, but times have changed.”
After Decades of Expansion, South Korea Has More Colleges Than It Needs
Even before the recession began, young people were leaving home later; now the bad economy has tethered them there indefinitely. Last year, just 950,000 new households were created. By comparison, about 1.3 million new households were formed in 2007, the year the recession began, according to Mr. Zandi. Ms. Romanelli, who lives in the room where she grew up in Branford, Conn., said, “I don’t really have much of a choice,” adding, “I don’t have the means to move out.”
A prominent if disputed criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been its amorphous, platform-free nature. But as the protests that began in New York in September have continued, spreading across the United States and the world, one clear issue of concern has emerged: student loan debt.On the movement’s unofficial manifesto, the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr blog, young adults hold handwritten signs with their personal stories. More often than not, they include tens of thousands of dollars of debt and, the former students write, little hope for good job opportunities.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Goodbye city park, hello college green.
As city officials around the country move to disband Occupy Wall Street encampments amid growing concerns over health and public safety, protesters have begun to erect more tents on college campuses.“
We are trying to get mass numbers of students out,” said Natalia Abrams, 31, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and an organizer with Occupy Colleges, a national group coordinating college-based protesters.
While students at other colleges cram into shoebox-size dorm rooms, Ms. Alarab, a management major, and Ms. Foster, who is studying applied math, come home from midterms to chill out under the stars in a curvaceous swimming pool and an adjoining Jacuzzi behind the rapidly depreciating McMansion that they have rented for a song.
Homework and Jacuzzis as Dorms Move to McMansions in California
China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
Our society, culture, and economy have turned to quagmires all at the same time. Nothing is as it was nor is anything even like it appears to be, so how does a seven year-old prepare for the future? “What will you be when you grow up?” is a much harder question than it used to be.
There are near term and longer term implications to this question. In the near term how do we creatively respond to jobs going overseas? In the longer term what happens if Ray Kurzweil is correct and the Singularity rolls along in 2029 or so and humans suddenly become little more than parasites on a digital Earth?
The easy answer to this problem has been the same since the 1960s — become Paul McCartney. But how many Beatles can the world sustain?
