The four-year college degree has come to cost too much and prove too little. It’s now a bad deal for the average student, family, employer, professor and taxpayer.

A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, as I’ll show. The employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards, you’ll see, are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can’t truly profess; they don’t proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they’ve been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education.

It’s these types of articles that make PhD candidates like yours truly suffer heart palpitations…  The central thesis has been a concern of mine for some time.  The rising cost of college tuition, especially, has made it increasingly difficult for craduates to recover from the initial savings gap between those who start a career out of high school and those who delay work (and saving $$$) for four or more years while pursuing an education.  When I was young, it was always presented simply as a win-win — that by going to college, one’s higher earnings would quickly and definitively surpass that 4 year “savings gap,” and that college grads were virtually guaranteed higher lifetime earnings.  In principle, that remains the same, but the deeper the hole of debt that students dig for themselves before starting their careers, the more the resulting loss in savings starts to tip the playing field towards non-college grads.

I’ve certainly seen this “in miniature” amongst my peers.  Most of my non college-graduate friends are, at this state (early 30’s), doing much better financially than my college grad friends.  There are some lifestyle differences inherent, but the most obvious culprit is the crushing load of student debt.

Of course, it’s not all about the money…  In principle, one should be pursuing a career that one will enjoy, so as long as some of those employment options require a university education, it’s hard to declare college degrees to be “worthless.”  I have long supported educational policy choices to better public perception of vo-tech and specific field training institutions.  Part of the problem, as I see it, is that college has been devalued by the common perception that everyone needs to go there.  When state schools like mine suffer freshman attrition rates of 30-40%, clearly it is not the best place for all of these kids.  However, society has made college an almost default next step after high school, causing many students who would be much better served by community colleges or vocational training to be set up for failure (or at least frustration by not being able to play to their talents).

Just wait.  This will be spun as horrible/mean/racist by various groups within the week, but the legal reasoning is very sound.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Arizona officials who had challenged lower federal court decisions that the state must provide adequate funding for its English-language learners.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the majority opinion. In particular, Justice Alito said, the lower courts must revisit whether the federal district court made a mistake in seeking a statewide solution to the complaint that programs for ELLs in the Nogales school system were underfunded and inadequate.

“The record contains no factual findings or evidence that any school district other than Nogales failed (much less continues to fail) to provide equal educational opportunities to ELL students,” he wrote. “Nor have respondents explained how the [Equal Educational Opportunities Act] could justify a statewide injunction when the only violation claimed or proven was limited to a single district.”

The original issue was that English-language learners in Nogales, AZ (a border town wherein the majority of students come from Spanish-speaking homes) were being short-changed educationally.  One of the students’ mothers brought the issue to court under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (which maintains that states must provide “appropriate action” to overcome students’ language barriers) and won in 2000.  The Federal District Court found that the Nogales District schools in violation of the law because “the amount of funding the State allocated for the special needs ofELL students (ELL incremental funding) was arbitrary and not re-lated to the actual costs of ELL instruction in Nogales.”

So far, so good…

Where this case went wrong, needing appeal to the Supreme Court, was that the same District Court then later extended the ruling statewide, despite having had no evidence presented that the problem extended beyond the single school district.  In effect, then, the Supreme Court ruling was one to curtail judicial activism.  The District Court clearly exceeded their bounds in this case, and the Supremes called them on it…

Now, it could well be argued that there are other districts and schools in Arizona that suffered the same underfunding in ELL programs, but that is something that, at best, a court should be recommending an independent auditor to examine.  Instead, the court tried (successfully, initially) to legislate from the bench, and to determine allocation of educational funding itself — this is clearly a job that belongs to the legislative branch of government.

The school district (and some state officials) based their appeal as well on the fact that the facts on the ground had shifted considerably in the meanwhile, with the passage of  HB 2064 (which increased ELL funding in AZ) and No Child Left Behind statutes.  While one could probably still find individual cases of violation in any state, these are district (or individual school) problems, and clearly not indicative of education state-wide.

It’s amazing to me just how willing some are to play politics with such decisions.  While it’s laudable that the court wanted to help ELL students, still the state-wide injunction was legally indefensible.   Nevertheless, the Supreme Court split right down the middle, and the split in AZ politics has been worse. Arizona is in a strange place, politically, at the moment.  When Janet Napolitano left the role of governor to become the Homeland Security Chief in Pres. Obama’s new administration, Janice Brewer, a Republican, became the new governor amid a largely Democratic apparatus.  In one of the most striking shows of partisan rancor in the state, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard refused the request of the governor to file an brief in the case supporting the state, and instead filed a brief in favor of the parents who had originally sued the school district.

Fortunately, it seems that cooler heads have prevailed.  For now, we have the best of all possible worlds.  The kids in Nogales will receive more support, but such will not be conditioned on onerous expansion of educational expenses statewide without documented need…

Should one assume that English-only proponents know how to spell English words?  Maybe not…

It was a dramatic weekend in the relatively small city of Shishou in Hubei province.

Tens of thousands of rioters torched a hotel and overturned police cars, accusing the authorities of trying to cover up the murder of a 24-year-old man as a suicide.

The deceased, Tu Yuangao, was the chef of the Yong Long hotel. According to the cops, he committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the building and left a note.

However, witnesses said there was no blood on the scene and Tu’s body was already cold just after it hit the ground. His parents were surprised that he left a suicide note, since he was allegedly illiterate.

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I’ve been transfixed by the coverage of the protests in Iran over the last week.  I’ve had a strange fascination with the country ever since high school, although, mostly for the sake of my mother’s health, I haven’t yet acted on my impulses to go there.  My thoughts, prayers, and heartfelt sympathies go out to the protestors, as they attempt to make their voice heard by the ruling regime, and especially to those who lost family and friends in the brutal and cowardly crackdown ordered by the mullahs.  May the death of Neda and those like her not be in vain!  Please join me in prayers for the long-suffering Iranian people…

Nice!

It is not unusual for Katherine Russell Rich, an author and a former magazine editor, to break out into song in the back of a taxi, and not just any song, but a song in Hindi from one of her favorite Bollywood movies. “Yaara, sili sili,” she’ll croon when she has an Indian cabdriver. “Biraha ki raat ka jalana.” “Beloved, little by little — the separation of the night is beginning to burn.”

The drivers are apparently too shocked to contemplate whether this is a seduction attempt. “The cabdrivers do things like laugh in surprise,” said Ms. Rich, who is not Indian. “They say, ‘Oh my God. That is really good. You are really speaking Hindi. Where did you learn that?’ ”

I’m impressed!  I always am when I come across people who take a turn for the unusual when choosing to study a language. These days, it isn’t that unusual to find people studying Chinese and the like, but I think I’ve only known one guy who claimed any sort of proficiency with Hindi (excepting natives, of course).  I can only imagine that she blows a lot of people’s minds when she initiates conversation with natives in the language.  The closest equivalent I can attest to via my personal experience is when I speak Taiwanese.  It does elicit some shock (although not always — some in southern Taiwan barely batted an eyelash when I’d speak it), but not all that much (especially as, with most Taiwanese people at least, I’ll usually still largely converse in Mandarin instead).  I’ve also elicited shock from many an Iranian.  I don’t actually speak more than a few phrases of Farsi, but apparently my pronunciation is pretty good, because every time I launch into such, they nearly fall down in shock, and then I have to spend the next couple of minutes convincing them to stop speaking it to me as I don’t really understand

Hindi has a different cache to it.  As India was a British colony, my impression has always been that even long-term ex-pats in India often simply expected to be accommodated in English.  I’ve heard similar stories from Cantonese-speaking ex-pats in Hong Kong, although this seems to have gotten more common in the last 20 years or so (or so I’ve been told).

A word of warning from Ms. Rich on the sociolinguistic aspects of launching into Hindi:

When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.”

To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim.

via the product announcement:

From one of the leading language publishers, Penton Overseas announces free on its website, Say It Now!™ Spanish an enhanced voice recognition module for language learners. Visitors to the site can test their pronunciation of Spanish words and phrases using online software for Windows Internet Explorer.

“We want people to have fun while learning and get comfortable pronouncing Spanish,” Tom McGrew, Marketing Director stated. “Our goal is to help people begin to feel comfortable with speaking in a foreign language, and understand the small nuances which they hear with a native speaker. Knowing the written form of language is the easy part,” he continued, “however, speaking correctly is the part which frustrates most people. Similar to stage fright, speaking is usually avoided for fear of making a mistake. Practicing the language out loud builds confidence and is a key part of the learning process.”

Online learning resources are many and varied, but online testing resources are much more rare and random.  I’ve been pleased to see more and more level tests moving to online platforms.  It can be quite reassuring to be able to check your language level in the privacy of one’s home….

Flag under the “useless knowledge, but still notable” section of the blog…  I’m mainly just impressed to see that Chinese students are studying Urdu (or, really, anything other than English or Japanese!)…

The Department of Urdu and Pakistan Studies Centre at Peking University, a prestigious higher learning institution has arranged  the first ever inter-university debate contest on ‘Ma or Urdu’  (I and Urdu) here the other day. Besides Peking University, students from Foreign Language University also participated in large number.

“The purpose of organizing such debate was to hold a competition in a healthy environment among the students studying Urdu language in China”, said Dr Asmat Naz, Department of Urdu and Pakistan Studies, Pakistan’s Chair at Peking University while talking to APP on Monday.

And the take-away quote of the article: “A student Zhang Ming Qi belonged to Foreign Studies University told the gathering how she got attraction with Urdu language and pointed out that it was her grandfather who had the opportunity of living in Pakistan and he can also speak Urdu very well.”

hee hee…  Sadly, my English major students tend to write similar sentences…

On the more impressive side, most of the students participating in the debate apparently have been studying Urdu for only 18 months, yet they “speak Urdu fluently”! Nicely done!

Possibly…  Diverse experience would seem to correlate with more creative problem solving skills…

In the study, published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, students were presented with challenging construction tasks requiring them to think creatively—attach a candle to a wall without allowing wax to drip on the floor, for example. Researchers concluded that students who’d lived abroad tended to think up “the most creative solution,” according to Scientific American.

Via Jon Huer in the Korea times:

The Korean mind that refuses to accept help in English is legendary. I have heard it so often from those who advise Koreans on English ― as copy editors for newspapers, as English personnel at corporations, and as classroom teachers, and so on. Their difficulty is nothing technical, but all cultural. They say the Koreans who hire them to correct their English refuse to accept their recommended corrections.

Korea’s English writers are so stubborn and so proud that they refuse their own English advisors’ corrections. I had a long conversation once with the copy-editor at a major English-language newspaper in Korea. His on-the-job tale of woes was the very embodiment of English advice in Korea. He related that the Korean writers and editors so often refused his recommendations for change that he finally gave up on advising and let them go ahead with their inferior, if not wrong, English. This may explain why so much poor English is printed in the major English-language newspapers in Korea.

Korea’s proud mindset is one of the worst culprits of the English ineptitude that is the subject of constant public lamentation. National pride and learning a foreign language are natural enemies of each other only in Korea. Here, they are in constant conflict, as learners refuse to humble themselves while learning it. 

I have to officially chime in here as dissenting from Mr. Huer’s analysis.  In fact, I’ve heard variants of the same complaint in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and China.  First, every country in East Asia thinks that they have a monopoly on poor English learning.  Koreans, in fact, are quite typically praised in that respect by their neighbors.  However, Mr. Huer is responding to the results of the latest British English Test.  While such tests are a mere snapshot of learning over time, and one shouldn’t read to much into any one year’s results, it is understandable to feel some wound to national pride when one ranks towards the bottom.

The complaint itself is indicitave of a sense of national exceptionalism, which, admittedly, is pretty normal throughout the region.  All the countries I mentioned before often promote the idea that their language, culture, or some combination thereof makes foreign language learning particularly difficult for them.  Such complaints are cutout of the same cloth as comments such as Japanese being “especially” difficult (or “impossible”) for anyone else to learn.  While there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (i.e., there are plenty of non-natives who master these languages, as well as people in Korean, Japan, etc. who speak phenomenal English), these urban legends on language learning scratch a national itch of sorts, allowing the speaker to imagine himself to have been born into a kind of exceptional circumstance.

There are some linguistically defensible excuses which can effect English learning in some of these groups.  Korean and Japanese, for instance lack any similar languages, making any sort of foreign language learning difficult (compared to, say, an Italian learning Spanish), but this still isn’t to say that it makes English any more difficult for them than for any of the other national groups whose language bears no relation to English.

The more “academic” answer as to East Asian regional lack of facility in foreign language learning actually has more to do with the educational culture there.  Prior to the second world war, many across the region were learning western languages (largely in missions schools) to extremely high levels.  While, granted, at that time, education was mostly the domain of the “well-heeled,” one does not see anything in the literature to indicate any particular regional difficulty in learning and teaching foreign languages.  Such is not the case today.  The post-WWII educational systems made conscious decisions to stress national unity — often at the expense of quality in foreign language programs.  With the cold war heating up and dominating regional politics, the entire educational system was designed to instill ultra-nationalism, and even English study was conducted through that prism, leading to the prevalence of the grammar translation teaching methods, and classroom English teachers who teach entire classes without uttering a word of the target language, that we see throughout the region today.  The low quality of FL instruction in the public school systems led to the rise of the multi-billion dollar industry of private cram school and language school “supplementary” instruction that we see in all such countries today.

Sounds promising…

The absolute leader in portable electronic translation and language learning Ectaco, Inc. has just announced the release of their new Partner 900 series of devices. Promising to revolutionize foreign-language communication, they are already poised to become the top-selling electronic dictionary and phrasebook of the year.

With 45 languages to be available by the end of 2009, Ectaco has made a communication breakthrough with the new Human Voice function on all Partner 900 units. No more fuzzy robotic sounds, now every word in the dictionary will be pronounced fluently in all languages including English so users can hear, repeat, and learn everything from the tones to inflections of any language.