And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.
.. You can imagine a scenario in which college graduates would thrive regardless of whether they went to college, because of their own skills and drives. By this same logic, helping more people become college graduates might not necessarily benefit them. But the new findings are the latest, and maybe strongest, reason to believe that college matters.
.. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to calling grit.
Beyond Education Wars
A majority of American children in public schools are eligible for free or reduced price lunches, and they often get second-rate teachers in second-rate schools — even as privileged kids get superb teachers. This perpetuates class and racial inequity and arises in part from a failed system of local school financing.
.. Early education is where we have the greatest chance of progress because it’s not politically polarized. New York City liberals have embraced preschool, but so have Oklahoma conservatives. Teacher unions will flinch at some of what I say, but they have been great advocates for early education. Congress can’t agree on much, but Republicans and Democrats just approved new funding for home visitation for low-income toddlers.
Starving for Wisdom
“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Rick Scott, the Florida governor,once asked. A leader of a prominent Internet company once told me that the firm regards admission to Harvard as a useful heuristic of talent, but a college education itself as useless.
.. Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills — excellence at communicating and working with people — with technical skills.
“So I think a humanities major who also did a lot of computer science, economics, psychology, or other sciences can be quite valuable and have great career flexibility,” Katz said. “But you need both, in my view, to maximize your potential.
.. there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence.
Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction.
John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1780: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”
Smart Girls vs. Bombs
As I see it, after 9/11, we systematically overused military tools and underemployed two other kinds of tools — education and women’s empowerment. These work agonizingly slowly, but over time they help change societies.
.. Education is also a bargain. For the cost of deploying a single American soldier abroad for a year, we can start more than 20 schools.
.. So instead of pummeling each other on foreign policy, let’s look for lessons learned. Surely one of them is that to counter terrorists, sometimes a girl with a book is more powerful than a drone in the sky.