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What We're Reading: New Thinking on Financial Aid

Welcome to another new miniseries of the Education Optimists. Once in awhile we get a chance to sit and read-- it's rare, but when it happens it's crazy fun. Here's a taste of what we've liked lately. For those pondering the reform of financial aid programs, I want to draw your attention to two papers--one very new, and one a year old. In Postmortem for the Current Era: Change in American Higher Education, 1980-2010 , Penn State historian Roger Geiger cogently tackles the many dismal trends of the last several decades. Among my most favorite of his observations is the following: "The four vectors of the current era—-the financial aid revolution, selectivity sweepstakes, vocationalism, and research intensification—all bear an underlying signature by invoking private, as opposed to public or social, interests. They do not necessarily contradict public interests. On the contrary, to significant degrees, financial aid has allowed students with limited means to pursu...
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Fear and Loathing in Calcville: Who Makes Kids Anxious About Math?

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Recently, another study ( Researchers Probe Causes of Math Anxiety : It's more than just disliking math , according to scholars) has appeared proposing to explain the causes of mathematics anxiety. It shows up as part of a book called CHOKE: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, by Sian Beilock. If what's in the article is an accurate depiction of what the study has to tell us, there's not much new to see.  On my view, math anxiety is obviously not something many people, if any, are born with: for the most part, we catch it from others. However, it is worth noting that there are many carriers who are not themselves suffering from the disease. Contemptuous, arrogant math ematics teachers can readily drive someone into math anxiety , and frequently do, I strongly suspect. So can rigidity about what doing and being "good at" math ematics entails. Given how most US teachers present the subject in K-12, math is only or ...
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Human Resource Directors and Employee Unions

Tomorrow afternoon, the Faculty Senate at UW-Madison will hear from Bob Lavigna , the institution's Human Resources Director. Lavigna will be discussing HR Design , a new plan I've covered several times recently on this blog . It's a controversial proposal, in part because it shifts the focus on setting compensation from internal equity towards external markets .  It also reduces some of the benefits held by classified staff, who are currently unionized, and for whom perks like substantial vacation time slightly dull the pain stemming from the terrible wages. I was therefore intrigued when this morning I delved into my Inside Higher Ed backlog of reading and found the results of a brand new national survey of HR directors and their opinions about the future directions universities need to take.  The results help to at least partially set the broader stage on which HR Design is occurring.   (Partially: the response rate for this survey is 15% and with just 324 particip...
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