Is Your Degree Worth It? (BWOG)

http://bwog.com/2011/08/25/summer-reading-is-your-degree-worth-it/

In Academically Adrift, sociologists Josipa Rosksa and Richard Arum examine the current state of higher education using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test designed to measure critical reasoning administered to students as incoming freshmen and a second time after they’ve completed sophomore year. According to their results, 45% of students don’t learn anything in their first two years of college due to lack of rigor.

How to Fix Our Math Education

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade

New York Times

 She doesn’t conclude that students should study Photoshop instead of geometry, or Linux instead of Pax Romana. What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.