With the sting of the latest terrorist attacks still lingering, questions regarding radical Islam have once again surfaced, from the legitimate to the Islamophobic. When it comes to support for ISIS, the Economist reports that a Pew study from last spring finds that attitudes toward the terrorist group in 10 Muslim-majority countries were “overwhelmingly negative.”:
It found that 99% of Lebanese and 94% of Jordanians, for instance, held “very unfavourable” views of the group. Even in Saudi Arabia, a country whose Wahhabist creed is seen as a wellspring of jihadism, there is little indulgence: in a face-to-face poll in September sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think-tank, a scant 4% of Saudi respondents expressed any degree of support for the group.
However, the same article provides this interesting, if not disturbing, insight about those who do support the terrorist organization:
“Teachers and preachers and professors declare support for the bombings, and stay in their jobs, and then we wonder why youths go and join [IS],” laments a Twitter message from Ali al-Jifri, a popular Sufi leader in Abu Dhabi. Muhammad Habash, an exiled Syrian Islamic scholar, argues on the website All4Syria that IS is not a product of some conspiracy but the outcome of mainstream religious teaching: he notes that one of the group’s most effusive Facebook cheerleaders is a former professor at a Saudi university and the daughter of a noted Syrian preacher. Interviewed on SkyNews Arabia, Ibtihal al-Khatib, a Kuwaiti writer, contends that IS did not emerge from a void but from a heritage that Islamic thinkers refuse to re-examine: “We are paying a price for keeping silent for many years, but now that harm comes knocking on our doors we have to accept responsibility.”
Research indicates that many terrorists are both educated and well-off financially. While increased education may slightly decrease support for terrorism, economist and Brookings fellow Madiha Afzal finds that ideological curriculum (specifically in Pakistan) may be responsible for the rising extremist views among the younger population:
My regressions also show that older people have more unfavorable opinions toward the Taliban, relative to younger people; this is concerning and is consistent with the trend toward rising extremist views in Pakistan’s younger population. The problems in Pakistan’s curriculum that began in the 1980s are likely to be at least partly responsible for this trend. Urban respondents seem to have more favorable opinions toward the Taliban than rural respondents; respondents from Punjab and Baluchistan have more favorable opinions toward the Taliban relative to those from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which as a province has had a closer and more direct experience with terror.
Afzal’s research finds that across the educational spectrum, an overwhelmingly majority hold unfavorable views of terrorism. But her data provides an important counterpoint to those who simply think education in the abstract is the answer. One can be highly educated, but when that education is ideologically biased, intolerant, and exclusionary, then those indoctrinated are likely to be as well.
I shared a post by AEI’s James Pethokoukis last month on how not to reduce inequality. In a recent post, he provides more reasons to be wary of the usual “solutions” provided by the hardcore anti-income inequality crowd. These include:
“[C]ompanies that are best able to navigate the globalized, technologically intensive modern are more profitable and pay their workers better than those who can’t.”
“A new study on preschool finds that kids who attended Tennessee’s pre-K program were worse off by the end of first grade than kids who didn’t. And a new study on Quebec’s universal childcare program finds that “children’s outcomes have worsened since the program was introduced along a variety of behavioral and health dimensions.”
“Economist Alan Krueger, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, cautions that a national $15 an hour minimum wage “is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive.””
““What Is the Case for Paid Maternity Leave? by Gordon Dahl, Katrine Løken, Magne Mogstad, and Kari Vea Salvanes looked at a series of policy reforms in Norway which expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks and found that “the expansions had little effect on a wide variety of outcomes, including children’s school outcomes, parental earnings and participation in the labor market in the short or long run, completed fertility, marriage or divorce.””
In other words, income inequality is in part driven by inequality between companies, pre-K schooling doesn’t help and might actually make kids worse off, minimum wage hikes won’t do the trick, and neither will paid maternity leave.
Readers of Difficult Run likely know that family structure and child well-being is a subject that I have spent quite a bit of time studying and reporting. It is this reason that I was excited to see this very subject revisited by the Princeton-Brookings collaboration The Future of Children in their October 2015 issue. According to the introduction article, this issue has a number of interesting points:
While many of marriage’s mechanisms “could be bolstered by public programs that substitute for parental resources—greater cash assistance, more generous health insurance, better housing, more help for caregivers, etc.—studies of child wellbeing that attempt to control for the indirect effects of these mechanisms typically find that a direct positive association remains between child wellbeing and marriage, strongly suggesting that marriage is more than the sum of these particular parts. Thus…the advantages of marriage for children are likely to be hard to replicate through policy interventions other than those that bolster marriage itself” (pg. 6).
“Cohabitation…is associated with several factors that have the potential to reduce children’s wellbeing, including lower levels of parental education and fewer legal protections. Most importantly, cohabitation is often a marker of family instability, which is strongly associated with poorer outcomes for children. Children born to cohabiting parents see their parents break up more often than do children born to married parents; in this way, being born into a cohabiting parent family sets the stage for later instability. On the other hand, stable cohabiting families with two biological parents seem to offer many of the same health, cognitive, and behavioral benefits that stable married biological parent families provide” (pg. 6).
Social science evidence indicates that “same-sex couples are as good at parenting as their different-sex counterparts. Any differences in the wellbeing of children raised in same-sex and different-sex families can be explained not by their parents’ gender composition but by the fact that children being raised by same-sex couples have, on average, experienced more family instability, because most children being raised by same-sex couples were born to heterosexual parents, one of whom is now in a same-sex relationship” (pg. 6-7).[ref]Which is actually something the controversial sociologist Mark Regnerus has stressed.[/ref]
“Race continues to be associated with economic disadvantage, and thus as economic factors have become more relevant to marriage and marital stability, the racial gap in marriage has grown” (pg. 7).
Causes of the retreat of marriage “include growing individualism and the waning of a family-oriented ethos, the rise of a “capstone” model of marriage, and the decline of civil society. The authors argue that these cultural and civic trends have been especially consequential for poor and working-class American families. Yet if we take into account cultural factors like adolescent attitudes toward single parenthood and the structure of the family in which they grew up, the authors find, the class divide in nonmarital childbearing among U.S. young women is reduced by about one-fifth” (pg. 7).
The link between student loans and rising tuition has been debated for years, but a brand new study from the New York Federal Reserve lends support to the claim that it is indeed subsidized loans that are driving up tuition. As The Week reports,
When subsidized federal loans have the effect of “relaxing students’ funding constraints,” universities respond by raising tuition to collect the newly available cash.
The resultant tuition hikes can be substantial: The researchers found that each additional dollar of Pell Grant or subsidized student loan money translates to a tuition jump of 55 or 65 cents, respectively. Of course, the higher tuition also applies to students who don’t receive federal aid, making college less affordable across the board.
The report also found that subsidized federal loans do not appear to increase enrollment.
It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare’s Othello — painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its overtones of a clash of cultures, of the partial acceptance of and consequent effect upon one of a minority group. Against this background, the jealousy of the protagonist becomes more credible, the blows to his pride more understandable, the final collapse of his personal, individual world more inevitable. But beyond the personal tragedy, the terrible agony of Othello, the irretrievability of his world, the complete destruction of all his trusted and sacred values — all these suggest the shattering of a universe.
I was reminded of these words after reading Dana Dusbiber’s post on why Shakespeare should not be taught. In a nutshell, he is difficult, white, and long dead. How could someone like that be relevant in today’s diverse classroom? The words at the top of the page were written not by any white academic in an ivory tower, but by Paul Robeson, the singer, athlete, actor, and black activist. Growing up, Paul Robeson was a hero to me. I always felt a little out of place, and though Robeson died before I was born, his story was inspiring. He had talent, courage, and conviction, speaking always with a profound dignity. Electrifying. The man was like a king. His lifelong struggle was to create a society in which all people were treated equally because he knew how awful the alternative was. Robeson was the first black actor in the twentieth century to play Othello, using the role to break down barriers against integration both on stage and off it. In the play, Othello is at the top of his profession. He is a key man in Venice, is wealthy, and has married into Venetian society. Despite all that, Othello feels insecure because he is an outsider, and his rivals use that insecurity to destroy him. Why wouldn’t such a play be relevant to “very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students?” Even if you share the majority’s skin pigmentation, why would Othello not have anything to say to the kid that never feels that he fits in, no matter his accomplishments? I was that kid. Let’s not hurry to dismiss Shakespeare just because he happens to be white and dead.
A recent event panel at the Brookings Institution looked at a number of possible policy solutions to improve social mobility for children across the nation. Take notice that most deal with on-the-ground local issues:
Target housing vouchers more effectively.
Build public housing in low-poverty areas, instead of high-poverty areas.
I saw this political cartoon making the rounds on Facebook a week or two ago. I didn’t think much of it until I finished reading The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad on Saturday. I picked it up on a whim at Audible because the description made it sound like an espionage book, and I’ve been meaning to read some of those. Well, it really wasn’t an espionage book in any conventional sense. But what it was a mind-blowing work of literature in which Conrad floored me again and again with his effortless supply of novel and forcefully evocative metaphors and his profligate characterization. It was stunning.
Here’s the thing: I read Joseph Conrad in high school, both Heart of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer.” I remember them as somewhat impressive and a bit dark, but the truth is that nothing much that I was required to read at the time really meant very much to me. How could they have? How much depth, really, does your average 14 year old have? Even the thought of 18 year olds sitting in a college classroom conducting “literary analysis” just reminds of the story of that poor old woman who tried to restore the famous painting of Jesus. The results aren’t pretty.
Call me a cynic, but my view is that your high school English teacher is probably not going to be able to expand your mind to the point where you fully appreciate Joseph Conrad because artistic appreciation is largely something that comes with age and experience. The older I get, the more powerful art is to me. Any attempt to try and cram that sense of wonder and power into a required curriculum strikes me as not only premature, but kind of perverse. Could there be a more apt application of the phrase “pearls before swine?” At 15, Kurt Vonnegut was bizarre, remote, and alien. At 33, I had to stop on several pages just to allow the power of his writing to sort of wash over me before I could keep going.
I’m not arguing against teaching the arts at all, but I do have two thoughts. First, I think we should be more worried about teaching economics, statistics, and basic computer literacy. Those are the skills we need to have an informed electorate and–yes–for people to be able to go out and get a job. They–in addition to basic math and basic literacy–ought to take priority in school because they are needed earlier in life and because, if we’re going to be honest, the ability to appreciate new art at 30 (or 40 or 50) is a lot more likely than the ability to take up calculus or physics. Art stays with you for life. Why rush it?
Second, I’d like to see a whole lot less emphasis on trying to teach kids how to analyze or critique art. In other words: teach the canon. When you invite students to spend their time on analysis you’re turning the whole thing into a farce. If the works are really monuments of intellectual and artistic greatness, than it’s stupid to think that a classroom of random kids will have anything particularly insightful to bring to the table. If the works are really amenable to analysis by a pack of high-schoolers who maybe read 1/2 and skimmed the rest, then obviously there is not really that much to them.
Instead, I’d like to see a whole lot more time on providing the history (and especially the intellectual history) that contextualizes those works. I think lots of folks are worried that the canon might be incorrect, but the reality is that teaching the canon is not primarily an exercise in indoctrination. What is important is not that the kids accept the framework, but that they recognize it and are therefore free to accept, amend, or reject it as informed readers. Ping-ponging around from Socratic dialogues to Herman Hesse to Kurt Vonnegut (just a sample of the high school reading I remember) and treating each one individually and critically is a recipe for disaster.
I’m not confident that this is an approach that would work across-the-board. I don’t think any approach does that. But I do think that the overall emphasis is sound. School should be primarily about learning the stuff that (1) you wouldn’t learn on your own and that (2) must be learned quickly and early on. Focus on skills that are relevant and that can’t be easily picked up alone. An appreciation for art is absolutely essential, but there isn’t as much need to rush the issue in that case.
Over at alternet, a liberal/progessive news source, there is an article about the demise of higher education. This author immediately set off my loony-toons indicator with her “big business is secretly subverting higher education” conspiracy, but even beyond that I think most of her points can be directly argued against. The problems she brings up (if they are problems at all) cannot simply be fixed by 1. remembering that higher education is about expanding our minds and 2. getting more funding for our schools (but no funding from corporations!) However, she does make a few reasonable observations.
We’re just here to expand our minds.
1. Defunding education:
“For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a loss of more than a third of its public funding.” (Lone quotation was original to text). Just because the percentage of the budget is decreased, does not mean the amount of money going to schools has decreased. For instance, if the funding for public education doubled from 1989 to 2011 (this is hypothetical), then that means funding to schools actually increased over that time period by 25%. (Statistics!!) But we should also seriously question where public education funds are going, if not to schools. I don’t believe Washington state, a known liberal state, is defunding its schools for “corporatism” if it is defunding its schools at all, it’s probably just wasting that extra money, which is on to the next point.
“Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for defunding of public education is racial, pro-corporate and anti-protest in nature.” This is a huge jump to conclusions. How many elite and liberal schools have to force racial diversity on their campuses? Higher education is, in general, an elite white man’s game (or with current statistics, white woman’s) and to claim that it’s different in that regard to corporate America, or that it’s the fault of conservative forces outside the institution, is ridiculous. To immediately claim a conservative racist reason may be easy, but it has no justification.
Also, it’s offensive that this author tries to claim that only humanities “train[s] and expand[s] the mind”. Nothing teaches you to think like mathematics and logic, which are also practical in the job market. As nice as it is to think about art, philosophy, and gender studies, those aren’t actually useful skills to most jobs. Trumpeting liberal arts education over any practical education is basically saying “higher education isn’t for getting a job, it’s for learning about culture.” That’s all well and good unless you’re in a suffering job market at graduation time. [ref]I have only attended liberal arts universities (except one very long semester at UM) and specifically went to a Humanities specialty high school program because I knew I would major in the math in college, and I wanted to be well-rounded. I like Humanities, but for most people it can never be more than a hobby. And it’s usually a rich person’s hobby.[/ref] And to deny the important ways science and mathematics teaches you to think is hurting our students, her acclaimed era of liberal arts education in the 50s and 60s would have required much more in science and math than universities require today.
2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s).
Oh, this gets me. Why are there a surplus of PhDs? Because people get PhDs in things like philosophy, art, and gender studies. Good luck finding a job in gender studies outside of lobbying. You know why there are PhDs, even in STEM, that will work for adjunct pay (and please note, adjuncts get paid less than graduate students because they have no unions)? Because people get PhDs and then refuse to work outside of academia [ref]This is my goal, so I feel for them.[/ref] (or have degrees in subjects where they can’t possibly get a job outside of academia).There is a limit to the number of professors we can have at our universities. And at most universities with graduate programs, the professors only have to teach 1 class a semester! We could solve the problem of adjunct pay, by getting rid of adjuncts all together and making professors teach at least 2 classes a semester. But then there would be even fewer jobs in academia for all those PhDs who refuse to get other jobs. It’s not a pretty picture, but corporatism/universities aren’t doing this on their own.
3. Move in a managerial/administrative class that takes over governance of the university.
“The money wasn’t saved [by hiring adjuncts], because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries.” OK, I’m totally with this lady here, and may I also add outrageous housing, athletic, and dining facilities. This point is spot on. This is a huge problem not just in higher education, but also in K-12. The problem is more complex though, it seems the more we pour into schools, the more bloated our administrations get. Consider, again a hypothetical, the example of doubling our school budgets. If we have 50% to administration and the rest to teaching, and then we double our budgets, but give our administration 62.5%, we have increased our teaching budgets by 50% (even though their share now is only 37.5% of the total), but those administrators are still making out even better. I don’t know if this is exactly how it happens, but more funding can easily lead to this. Frugality whenever it comes to non-teaching school projects and administration is the solution. Conservatives believe bloated administration is a reason to cut funding, but unfortunately the administration decides where those cuts actually take place None of the funding “problems” can begin to be fixed without first substantially fixing administration internally.
4. Move in corporate culture and corporate money.
“When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money.” I do find business school to be particularly insidious, but that’s probably because I’m an introvert in computer science who doesn’t understand the need to go to school for schmoozing. I digress. I’m not really sure the problem with businesses funding business schools? Business schools cost a lot (due to supply and demand in the market) and if corporate America takes up part of the tab, doesn’t that help with funding our schools – less to take away from the Arts and Sciences? But then the author moves directly into her point that anything that is non-Humanities is not mind-expanding and not important to higher education, so businesses should only be funding humanities?
“Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research.” Sure, this is a problem, if you view it in the most sinister way possible. But guess what, if corporate money isn’t funding our science research, the government is. Let’s not pretend that government has no self- or political-interests. I’m sure I could find a large swath of college-educated people across the country who would shudder at the idea of George W. Bush once upon a time being in charge of our university science research.[ref]Lots of research in the sciences continues to be funded by both the government and scary places like Google, Intel, and Microsoft. (sarcasm) [/ref] And again,this corporate money helps the funding problem. And all the research coming out of America’s universities (in the sciences) is highly peer-reviewed, even by people who are funded by other corporate or government interests.
5. Destroy the students.
“Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast-food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.” My liberal arts university had a lot of core curriculum. In fact, as a math major, it was because of this core curriculum that I got a “mind-expanding” experience in philosophy, literature, poetry, sociology, history, theatre, and dance. But even if we only consider big state schools, I’m really not going to cry over here about all the sociology majors who also have to take a science and calculus, or, heaven forbid, statistics. Yes, engineering departments may churn out a bunch of over-processed engineer-bots, but those kids are all getting jobs (I know, according to the author, getting a job is not the point. Unfortunately I did not, and I believe most other students did not (by the author’s next point, even), grow up in a family rich enough to allow me the freedom to not consider my job opportunities upon graduation).
“You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt-free.” Government subsidized loans are a form of government funding. It may put most of the burden on the student, but as someone who has unsubsidized loans, those interest rates can be substantial. I read a comment on an article somewhere that “if the government was giving out $500 loans for a loaf a bread, bread would start to cost $500.” And this all hearkens back to administrations building huge housing, athletic, dining, and lounge facilities. If college was just about class and a place to study, sleep, and keep our stuff, college could be a lot cheaper. With the loans and student expectations feeding off each other, it becomes a downward cycle of unaffordability.
So, yes, there are problems in bloated administration and student costs at universities. But this isn’t some kind of corporate take down of navel-gazing education. Administration is a problem with colleges, as organizations themselves, not because of conservative or corporate America. And the burden of cost is partially on all Americans – for raising kids who want the best and prettiest dorm rooms (private bathrooms, please), exercise facilities, dining experiences, and football teams to go along with expanding their minds. [ref]I’d really like to see a study of current college students ranking the importance of partying/getting drunk versus expanding their minds while at college.[/ref] However, more funding will not directly fix these problems, and may only make the problems worse. With good peer review, outside funding is not going to warp our research institutions. And telling kids that they should consider job prospects (and that PhDs in some subjects are nothing more than mind-expanding hobbies) will not pervert a good liberal arts institution.
Deresiewicz attended Columbia University, where he majored in biology-psychology and graduated in 1985. He received a Masters in journalism from the same school in 1987 and a Ph.D. in English in 1998.
Not that Deresiewicz was hiding his Ivy League creds in the article itself. He wrote:
It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
See, it’s not so much that his Wikipedia entry gives away some big secret that he went to an Ivy League school. Nope, the point is that he has a Wikipedia page. So right off the bat, we’re not talking about some Joe on the street. We’re talking a notable person. For someone to spend a quarter century in the Ivy League and then (after they have become a notable person) to decide that it’s a terrible, terrible stifling place after all is a little bit rich. Consider also the fact that Deresiewicz’s primary complaints about the Ivy League are the kind of complaints that only a person without real, pressing, economic concerns can have.
“Return on investment”: that’s the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?
Deresiewicz answers: “The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.” It’s all well and good for successful academics to talk about the supreme importance of the life of the mind. After all, that’s what they are paid to do, right? But not everyone is so lucky.
I love the life of the mind. If I won the lottery I would spend the rest of my life in college, earning degrees in one field after another. Math, physics, history, languages, linguistics, architecture, medicine, computer science: there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t love to spend a lifetime studying. But the fact is I haven’t won the lottery, and a great deal of my life therefore revolves around the struggle to keep from having to move my wife and children back into my parents house for a second time.
Those of us who aren’t looking backwards from the comfort of a secure and prosperous career, but are rather looking forward at the daunting prospect of navigating these troubled economic times with solvent households are very concerned with “return on investment.” But it’s not because we’re unenlightened barbarians with no appreciation for the life of the mind. It’s because bills don’t pay themselves. Has Deresiewicz forgotten that? Or did he simply never know?
I will give him credit for this, however: his excoriation of elite schools as propagators of social injustice is an argument that does ring true to me. I have never seriously considered that Yale or Harvard could give me or my kids a better education than a good state school. The point of elite education is not to learn more. It’s get access to a better network and a better brand. My concern about sending my kids to the Ivies (should that be a possibility) has always queasiness at the trade off between encouraging them to participate in morally noxious elitism vs. wanting them to have an easier time of it than I have.[ref]I wouldn’t feel bad if it was meritocratic, but it’s not.[/ref]
I also have to give him credit for having an appropriately expansive definition of “elite education”:
When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.
It’s not attendance at an Ivy that will turn your kid into a zombie. It’s the way parents must structure every aspect of their kids’ childhood (so called) in order to gain admittance into said school that does the damage. By the time the kids arrive, I’d argue they are about as zombified as can be.
But, it turns out, there is hope! Deresiewicz presumes–and so had I–that elite education has a significant monetary advantage. In researching this post, however, I learned that that assumption is not true at all. Alan Krueger at Princeton University and Stacy Dale at Mathematica Policy Research conducted a very clever study where they compared the earnings of kids who went to Ivy Leagues with kids who were accepted to the Ivy Leagues but opted to go to less-prestigious universities. Since both groups got in, arguably both groups are roughly commensurate in terms of ability. So if the Ivy Leagues really have a return on investment (whether its from better education, better networking, or any other factor at all) the cohort that attended should have gotten higher earnings. But they didn’t. The two groups–those who attended Ivy League schools and those who were accepted did not–earned the same over the next decades (the original cohort started school in 1976, but the findings hold for a new cohort that entered in 1989).
That, for me, is a real reason not to send your kids to the Ivies. It’s not that some intellectual who has reaped the rewards of elite education for decades patronizingly tells you to “do as I say, not as I did.” It’s because they probably aren’t worth it in most cases. There are probably exceptions, like going to Yale Law if you want to teach law, that might apply at the very top of certain fields, and data also suggests that poor kids have the most to benefit from elite education, but in general (and especially for undergrad) it looks like your kids will be better off, all things considered, going to a good state school. And hey, they might get a real childhood that way, too.
What the chart shows is that if a man gets a lower grade (a B instead of an A) in Econ 101 his chance of majoring in econ is basically unaffected. But for women, there is a very strong and obvious correlation between their grade in Econ 101 and their willingness to major in economics. Just going from an A to an A- (still an A!) drops the likelihood of majoring in econ by about 7 points, from 42% to 35%.
This is a really important finding because it could answer the question of why so few women graduate in STEM courses, despite the fact that more women start them than men. STEM courses are much harsher than humanities, and so if you’re highly responsive to grades, you’re going to abandon STEM to get a degree in something less intimidating. But STEM courses also pay more, so women are sacrificing earnings to avoid lower grades. This could have important relevance for the gender gap, because it is pretty strong evidence that it’s not just preferences that are leading women to lower-paying jobs. As Rampell writes: “If women were changing their majors because they discovered new intellectual appetites, you’d expect to see greater flows into STEM fields, too.”
For me the big question is why women react more to grades than men do. Rampell has ideas (maybe men are overconfident? maybe they just care more about future salary than about grades?) but no solid answers. My initial reaction was to think that women might be more concerned with achievement overall, but my wife pointed out that men may be perfectionists too, but in other areas. Like sports and video games. That really made me think. After all, one major reason I never did sports much in high school was that I knew I didn’t have any amazing athletic ability, so why bother? And to this day I don’t like playing StarCraft 2 online because I know I won’t have the time to get really good at it. On the other hand, I do play a lot of Call of Duty, and I’m only mediocre at that game.
So I’m curious: what do you think makes women more sensitive to grades? And what impact do you think it is having on things like the gender gap and the lack of women in STEM careers?
“Teachers and preachers and professors declare support for the bombings, and stay in their jobs, and then we wonder why youths go and join [IS],” laments a Twitter message from Ali al-Jifri, a popular Sufi leader in Abu Dhabi. Muhammad Habash, an exiled Syrian Islamic scholar, argues on the website All4Syria that IS is not a product of some conspiracy but the outcome of mainstream religious teaching: he notes that one of the group’s most effusive Facebook cheerleaders is a former professor at a Saudi university and the daughter of a noted Syrian preacher. Interviewed on SkyNews Arabia, Ibtihal al-Khatib, a Kuwaiti writer, contends that IS did not emerge from a void but from a heritage that Islamic thinkers refuse to re-examine: “We are paying a price for keeping silent for many years, but now that harm comes knocking on our doors we have to accept responsibility.”
Readers of Difficult Run likely know that family structure and child well-being is a subject that I have spent quite a bit of time 
