Wednesday, June 17, 2015

THIS AND THAT FOR JUNE

Here are some interesting articles and topics from the past several weeks:

Poverty, College Graduation Rates, and Student Debt

In an article from The New York Times' The Upshot entitled "For the Poor, the Graduation Gap Is Even Wider Than the Enrollment Gap", author Dr. Susan Dynarski, an economics professor from the University of Michigan, describes the results of a longitudinal study begun in 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics examining college graduation rates among 15,000 high school sophomores.

The study looked at the parental demographics of the students, their scores on standardized math and reading tests, and their college graduation rates. 



As Dr. Dynarski wrote:

"A poor teenager with top scores and a rich teenager with mediocre scores are equally likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. In both groups, 41 percent receive a degree by their late 20s."

In two other articles, "Student Loans and Defaults: The Facts" and  "The Rise of Student Debt for Those Who Get DegreesDr. Dynarski wrote about the percentage of students accumulating certain amounts of debt during their college careers. Here are a couple of charts from those articles, reprinted with permission of Dr. Dynarski.



Among those attending college, 68% accumulate $10k or less in debt, while only 2% garner more than $50k.


For those attaining a Bachelor's degree, only 48% accumulate less than $10k, and 5% have more than $50k. 

According to Dr. Dynarski, "These borrowing numbers for B.A. recipients, though higher than those of dropouts, still do not resemble the six-figure debts we hear about in the news media. To find those, we have to look to graduate students. Of the $1.2 trillion in outstanding student-loan debt, 40 percent is borrowing for graduate school. Borrowing is highest among law and medical graduates; their median debt (combined undergraduate and graduate) is $141,000 and $162,000, respectively, for 2012 graduates."

Fascinating articles - we'd recommend The Upshot as a resource for interesting research in a variety of areas, including demography and education.

Belated Graduation Congratulations

The class of 2015 has left the building - literally. Marian Pritchett's graduation ceremonies were held at Timberline High School, Frank Church students graduated at the Morrison Center, and Boise, Borah, Capital, and Timberline from Taco Bell Arena at BSU. Congratulations 2015 graduates!

Each graduation speaker had a different tone, but all reflected the anticipation of great things to come. The Borah graduation ceremony was the grand finale, and proceedings concluded with the singing of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, once the song requested by other schools to make sport of the Lions, but now a unifying song emblematic of Borah's spirit and pride.





Borah students perform The Lion Sleeps Tonight at the conclusion of graduation ceremony. Dots of light are from cell phones in the audience.


Alternative Views of the STEM "Shortage"

The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields have received increasing amounts of attention in the past few years, with general agreement as to the need to produce more graduates in these fields. Recently, the Idaho Statesman featured an article by education reporter Bill Roberts highlighting the problem and featuring data for the Boise District about the increasing number of STEM graduates from the District.

Clearly, students in the District have increasingly listened to the messaging about STEM and are enrolling in those fields in record numbers.

Here are two alternative views of the "crisis". 

From The Atlantic magazine last March is an article by Michael S. Teitelbaum entitled "The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage", in which he wrote:

"A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree. All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more."

In August 2013, Robert N. Charette, writing for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum, authored "The Stem Crisis is a Myth", a well-researched piece which included this quote:

"To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.

Charette's argument, that students in general are not getting a good grounding in STEM fields is interesting, and might explain why districts which have high percentages of students taking advanced math and science courses might have more students choosing STEM fields in college.

Happy reading!