Myths about the value of college

ARGH, I’m seeing so much misinformation going around in twitter because of student loan forgiveness.  It’s driving me crazy.

Myth:  The value of a college degree is not worth it.
Reality (based on recent work of David Autor, but also many many other people): Even with the high costs of a degree and student loans, the additional earnings make it worth it for most college graduates.
Sub-Reality (I don’t remember a big name on this one, but lots of people are studying it with mixed results): The benefit of going to college and not finishing– we’re not as sure about that. Depending on the loans that you take out, it may not be worth it to spend a couple years in college and then not have a degree (though 2 years at community college with a degree is worth it). And lots of people go to college, take out loans, and don’t finish. That is a problem that lots of people are studying.
Sub-Reality (David Denning and several other papers): Even a degree from a for-profit college usually does result in higher earnings, but you are no better off with a for-profit degree than you would have been with a community college degree (worse given student loans, though the worst offenders have thankfully been addressed in the new Biden thing). They provide the same benefits, it’s just the for-profit degree is stupidly expensive by comparison.

Myth: It is better to go to a low tuition regional school (or community college) than to the best school that you can get into.
Reality (Hoxby and Turner in an amazing RCT, and other papers that are not experiments but use clever regression discontinuity designs): Schools with better endowments 1. Give more and better financial aid, meaning that for poor kids who can get into them, a state flagship or a highly endowed private prestige school will cost less. And 2. More prestigious schools do a better job of retaining low income kids– this seems to be through a variety of methods– better financial aid means working fewer hours, but also they just have a lot more resources devoted to keeping low SES kids, offices, sometimes mentorship programs, short-term loans etc. That means for low income kids, the more prestigious school means that they’re more likely to actually *graduate.* And, we also know among graduates (through a lot of different papers, though no RCT to my knowledge), prestigious schools help low SES kids make more money as grownups than do less prestigious schools.
Sub-Reality: For middle/upper middle/rich class kids, it doesn’t matter. They just need a degree.  (And the rich probably don’t need a degree.)

Myth:  The skyrocketing cost of college is caused by financial aid accessibility.
Reality: The skyrocketing cost of college is caused by decreased federal and especially state investment in state schools. (And to a much smaller extent: better quality education, gambling on fancy sports programs that don’t pay out, fancy dorms at private schools, etc. But this is like nothing compared to the effect of how much the government has stopped subsidizing higher education.)

And some stupid Republican propaganda:

Myth:  Non-college training is free.
Reality: Truck driving requires CDL training. Hairdressing requires training. Nursing requires training. Plumbing requires a TON of training. So many professions that don’t require a college degree still require technical training which still costs money.

Myth: Working class people don’t have student loans
Reality: A lot of people drop out of college and have student loans. A lot of people get student loans to pay for technical training.  Plenty of working class people have student loans.

It still boggles my mind that only 30-35% of US adults have college degrees.  But a big percent start but then drop out without an additional degree.  (You can get exact numbers from http://www.ipums.org)

Things I don’t know how to do without DH or the kids around

Because of flight prices, the rest of the family and I didn’t completely overlap on their family vacation/my summer conference.  So I ended up spending several days at home by myself while they were still in the midwest enjoying cooler summer weather.  It turns out there are some things that I have never had to do for myself since getting settled and I don’t actually know how.

• Making popcorn.  I grew up with an air popper.  DH prefers to make it on the stovetop.  My friend, hearing my plight, sent me instructions for how to make it in the microwave with a paper bag, but I haven’t tried it yet.
• Making coffee.  I grew up with instant or one of those regular drip coffee pots that uses already ground coffee.  We only have whole beans at home and my choice of french press/siphon/mochapot/whoknows.  I don’t even know where to start on DH’s burr grinder.
• Watching Netflix.  So… I haven’t had to set this up myself since before DC2 was born and that was at least a couple game systems ago (we use game systems to watch things on a projector).  Normally with DH home I would be able to just borrow his phone or get one of the kids to set it up for me on the projector.  Now we have two game systems and I’m not sure which one is connected to Netflix or how to get there.
• Taking out the trash/recycling.  Um… I haven’t had to do this since we lived in an apartment.  No clue what the days are and I only have sort of a foggy idea of where we keep the bins (there’s a mysterious door on the other side of the garage that I suspect leads to the dog run).  I suspect the blue one is recycling and the green (? brown?) one trash, but :shrug emoji:
• Picking up groceries from curbside.  For this one I know how to do it but I can’t actually do it.  I can order them but I can’t pick them up because the account is connected to DH’s phone.  I would have to make a new account connected to my phone.  This is not a problem with Target curbside where I can tell it which phone number to use and I think we can both login to the same app at the same time.

Are there things you ought to know how to do but don’t?

On back pillows and back pain

I do not recommend the purple back cushion.  It is $39 and only has one strap and is impossible to keep in place.

The purple seat cushion is better for what it does (though I also had a lot of trouble keeping it on my chair and it’s also expensive), but I wonder if some of the back pain I’ve been having this past week is attributable to it.

For lumbar support, I instead recommend this Everlasting comfort lumbar support pillow.  It is bigger and has TWO straps, and is $30.

I have just purchased a standing desk and an adjustable dual monitor holder.  After I’ve moved over and used them for a while, I will let you know how they’re doing!

I would like to get a new desk chair also (I have a middle sized aeron, bought second-hand five years ago in paradise, but just traded chairs with DC2 and am using an old two position chair that DH reupholstered 15 years ago), but I don’t feel like I can do that without actually sitting on them.

What do you do to prevent back pain?  Do you have a favorite home desk setup?

Middle-aged health problems open thread!

About a month ago I promised an open thread for (non-life-threatening) health problems!  Here it is.  Middle-aged folk, gather round and complain and share and provide obnoxious unsolicited suggestions for others!  Tell us about how your friend of a friend had something similar and what they did!  (Note, you do not have to be middle-aged to participate.  This is just something some of us do instead of talking about the weather for small talk once we get to a certain age.)

Here’s mine:

My right FOOT.  OMG.  So, about 3 months ago, I started waking up around 5:38 every morning with the bottom of my right foot itching like crazy.  It wouldn’t stop until I walked around or just got up.  Scratching didn’t help much but squishing it around did.  I tried two different athletes foot cremes but neither did anything.  When I went in for my well-woman visit, my gyn suggested it was a nerve issue and to see a podiatrist, but I don’t want to go in again with the students in town and new covid strains spreading etc.  I thought maybe because I’m walking around barefoot so much on our hard floors since that’s the easiest form of exercise.  Then about a month ago, I decided to try walking with my slippers that have arch support and oh boy that was such a bad idea. It felt like plantar fasciitis again but owie.  Again, only my right foot.  But… the 5:38am itching stopped.  So, there’s something wrong with my right leg and foot.

I also had a lot of sitting problems– a blocked gland (hot baths worked) and hemorrhoids and … a pimple (!) on my gluteal area.  For those I bought a purple pillow.  Which kept slipping off the aeron chair until DH found his velcro strap stash and now I have it velcroed in.  It helps somewhat, but I should probably be using the standing desk except, my right foot, you know?

So… mostly the foot thing.  I hate it because it’s so hard to exercise when you’re afraid of hurting your foot!  I dream about swimming sometime but the pool isn’t even open even if I weren’t worried about the trump supporting covid deniers in the neighborhood.

Share your health problems!

Link Love

I spent all of Thursday and Friday on zoom, from 9-5:30 each day with no breaks other than quick runs to the restroom often not during breaks.  So Saturday this introvert spent playing spelling games on the switch.  Which I should not play video games because now that’s all I want to do and DH had to gently drag it out of my lands last night in order to get me off the couch.  Anyhow, that’s why this is Sunday link love.  There’s not many links because during the week I kept seeing them and thinking I would remember them and of course I didn’t and by the time today rolled around all the twitter feeds had long-since moved on.  There’s important things happening out there but I can’t remember what they are.  I need to do less service.  Also I need to get off this grant proposal where the PI is completely disorganized and the senior white male Co-PI doesn’t believe in the existence of the very commonly used term that the granting agency is interested in and goes of on 20 min lectures without allowing interruption on how all social scientists believe X, when in fact, not even most sociologists believe X, just him and all of his indoctrinated students and former students.  The PI is going to be sad and she’s going to spend a lot of time trying to convince me to stay since I’m the only person on the team with any organizational skills apparently and she’s been trying to convince me to join a group on a tangentially related topic that sounds like a book club that meets 2x/week and also a support group for stuck at associate people.  Except I’m not really *stuck* at associate, I just did not *want* to go up for full even though I should have done it 3 years ago (I’m going up this year because none of the reasons I was putting it off for turned out to help because my department head decided to reward the person in my department who she believes is incapable of service and a lazy teacher because this person has slightly more citations on google scholar, which is a function of hir having been out longer even though zie got tenure later, and having most of hir papers coauthored with a big name in the field even if they’re at second-tier journals, thus breaking a long-standing tradition of rewarding the good citizen, whether research active or not, who has been in the department longest).  Anyway, I should get these two meager links posted.  FML.

You can play the original oregon trail on stata!  (But not the dying of dysentery version– this is a precursor).   I also added a few of these ado files to my stata.  I’m contemplating whether or not it is worth capture ssc install to some of my .do files so my RAs get a surprise at the end of a program.

Here’s a post on the topic of disability simulations that we were talking about the other week.  I did not google for it– I came across it organically!  Here’s a quote that better puts into words what I’d been thinking:

The difference will be because, without any of the coping skills and techniques people with disabilities create and master throughout their lives, the best you will be able to manage will be to emulate the experience of being the single most hapless, incompetent individual with that particular disability on the face of the planet.

which then has the possibility of limiting what kinds of jobs we think disabled people can do and decreases a focus on accommodations.

 

Spoiled rich white boys: Sophomore English hasn’t changed in 60 years

I was shocked when we got DC1’s reading list for this quarter.  They are reading:  Into the Wild, Dead Poet’s Society, and the book that I had partly moved DC1 into Honors from Pre-AP to AVOID:  A Separate Peace.

In other words, they are reading books from the 1960s that were outdated then about spoiled rich white boys who create their own problems and a somewhat newer book that is just like them.  Just like we did in Freshmen and Sophomore English so many years ago.

So we emailed hir English teacher to ask for the list of the rest of the books for the semester.  She said that first quarter was about the theme of “Coming of Age” so they had chosen books to fit that theme.  Here are the remaining “books”:

Fiction Choice (students choose from books that meet very loose requirements)

Nonfiction Choice

Serial (the podcast)

Antigone

12 Angry Men

Dystopia Choice

… and this is almost exactly like our Sophomore English class back in the early 90s.  Lots of books that don’t even have any women *in* them, much less as protagonists.  One Greek play where the woman in question comes to a tragic end through Destiny (we read Antigone in middle school, but Oedopus Rex has some soon-to-die women in it… I assume in the South they can’t handle the subject matter like they can in the midwest), and a thing about a young minority in jail for allegedly killing a woman (for us it was Native Son and the woman was white, for DC1 I guess it will be a Muslim man allegedly killing an Asian woman).  We also had a unit on depressing (white) Russian (men) and I guess it isn’t Gregor Samsa’s fault he woke up as a giant cockroach, but it sure as heck was the Crime and Punishment dude’s fault he decided to kill that pawn broker and then to just go on and on and on about it.

Readers, I complained about my sophomore year’s sausage fest.  I complained hard.  And one of the English teachers listened and asked for suggestions of classics that weren’t all men.  And they changed things up a bit.  I know they added Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston, though I don’t remember if they made other changes.  We didn’t get to benefit, but classes after us did.

DC1 is going to have to deal with a year in which 50% of the population doesn’t even show up in the books with a speaking role (TWO are set at boy’s prep boarding schoools!!!  TWO!)  But we also have a DC2.  So here’s what we responded:

Thank you for getting back to us.

Women and minorities also come of age.  Our high school back in the mid-1990s swapped out one of these standard rich white boys come of age books for Zora Neale Thurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God after complaints about lack of gender and race diversity.  We didn’t get to benefit from that change, but students after us did.  Today, of course, we have so many more excellent choices such as The Hate U Give or any number of books about the Hispanic-American coming of age experience (some of which we had thought were on the reading list for this class in the past, but we must have been mistaken).  Hopefully in time there will also be books about the Asian-American and Native American coming of age experience.  The #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement has so many suggestions complete with lesson plans that we didn’t have 25 years ago.

Please share this perspective with the other Honors English teachers.  We are hoping that by the time our [second child] gets to high school [they] will no longer have to believe that the only coming of age experience worthy of being taught in sophomore English is that of the already privileged.  Several of these books don’t have any female or minority characters at all.  It seems crazy that the only woman that sophomore honors students are studying is a woman from a Greek tragedy who meets a messy end.  And the only (religious) minority person being studied is someone in jail for murder.  Hopefully these are not people that female and minority teens are expected to identify with!  Women are over 50% of the population and the US and [our state] are rich in diversity.  Most kids aren’t wealthy.  Shouldn’t our English classes signal that everyone is worthy, not just white males?

(Also, as much as we love the Princess Bride… it doesn’t actually pass the Bechdel test.  A thought exercise:  How many of the movies shown in sophomore English do?)

That last line is because we had to give permission for a list of movies to be shown in class.  Most of them were movie versions of the above novels, but there were a couple in there that weren’t.

But seriously– in today’s world I want to see more of the teenage years of the Sotomayors and Ginsbergs and far less of the Kavanaughs and Trumps.  We’ve had enough of caring about their petty problems and not enough of showing the real problems that other teens and young adults face and what it takes to triumph in a society that’s set up against you (rather than what it takes to fail in a society that stacks the deck on your behalf).  Though perhaps contrasting those two types of coming of age novels makes the difference all too obvious.

Living in the South, I’m sure that part of the reason for these continued white sausage fests is that they’re afraid of tea-party complaints should they try to add any color.  They need to know that whitewashing also leads to parent concerns.  Even if it just means swapping out Into the Wild with The Joy Luck Club (which is taught in Sophomore Pre-AP this year), our teens deserve better.

I’m still really mad.  AND I have to actually buy copies of these @#$ing books.  My work friend offered to loan me A Separate Peace because pre-AP has to read it too, so I think I’m fine there (her son annotated the book for class, but DC1 can annotate with post-it notes instead of writing on the paper itself).

While I was writing this, DC1 walked in and complained that hir English teacher wants them to make presentations using worst practices– bright colors and animations that distract from the presentation itself.  *sigh*  I told hir to think of it as a chance to get all those bad practices out of hir system.

What was your high school English reading selection like in terms of diversity?  If you have kids, what are they being assigned?

Challenge update: In which I fail

So this month’s February challenge, I said I was going to do two things:

1. No devices in the morning.  (I added to this:  no social media in the morning, since getting up and going to my computer to check twitter isn’t great either)
2. Write every morning

I did really well on the first.  And I think it helped.  I ended up spending less time on social media overall, which is good during my busy times.  I didn’t do as many phonecalls to politicians, but I think I still got the big stuff from activist emails and the short times I was on social media.

I crashed and burned on the second.  I did fine the first week, but then I didn’t have things to write because other things had to be done first before I could write and then I’d end up writing all day because the thing was due.  I’d have days filled with just teaching and service.  Early in February I had a melt-down in the hallway when my department head, after PROMISING there would be no more service this year given how much I’m already doing (and how little my next closest substitute is doing) asked me to do something again.  While I was in a faculty meeting last week I got 2 referee report requests and about 5 more things requiring attention.  I just don’t have the time or space right now to do regular writing in a fashion that makes sense.  I need space and time to set that up and that’s just not my life right now, even though it means I’m being more scattered and less productive flitting from thing to thing.  I sent out two referee reports, submitted an IRB, handled 3 editing jobs, was part of a grant, and submitted to two conferences… but none of that was in an orderly fashion and very little writing got done on any actual papers.  I have nothing under review right now which I HATE.

I’d like to try #2 again for March, but it’s March and all of my problems from February are still there.  I’m going to see what Spring Break brings.  Everything is still a mess.

I’m not sure what to do, but all that seems to have worked for me for February is to take things one day at a time based on next deadline.  I know that’s not efficient, but everything is so scattered that having a master plan just isn’t working because when any part changes everything else goes to heck.

Rewards

Young house love has a podcast talked about how in the Hygge book, the guy who wrote the book rewarded himself with a chair.

For example, this guy who wrote the book had saved money for a new chair that he really wanted. But he waited until he published his first book to buy the chair. And so that way in buying the chair it reminds him of this accomplishment, and it feels like more than just the time I bought the chair. It’s like, “Remember when I wrote that book, and then I bought myself this chair to celebrate?”

I used to reward myself.  I’d read a part of an article for a referee report and then I’d get to watch a 4 min youtube video or read a section of a chapter of a novel.  If I got X done, I’d get to read a book.  And so on.

But… forcing myself to be productive via rewards has been harder to do lately… If there’s a reward I will just take it without actually doing the work.

I want it I got it.

I think I’ve been losing this ability since we got really comfortable with our finances and there’s really nothing reasonable that we can’t have (so long as we don’t want a house in Paradise).  I feel like no longer needing to deny myself monetarily has spilled over to other areas of my life as well.  Like, even if DH and I lost our jobs tomorrow we still wouldn’t be forced to live in a van by the river any time soon.  I’ve also been listening to my hunger a bit less… though my desire to not have to buy any new clothing helps a bit there.

Do rewards work for you?  How do you reward yourself?  If not, did they ever work?  How do you get yourself to get through unpleasant tasks?

 

Ask the grumpies: trends in police militarization

Rose asks:

How much is being spent by police departments to militarize police forces? What are the current trends with unarmed people shot by police.

Here’s an article on militarization of police from PNAS 2018.

By 2014, the military had given away $4.3 billion in free military equipment to policy departments.  So… to answer your question, police departments are spending nothing.  This is all free from the overfunded DOD.  (Though, to be fair, the overfunded DOD also does a lot of medical research with their excess money.)

Here’s the Washington Post database of unarmed police shootings through Jan 22, 2020.  Here’s their updated page going forward.  We do not have official numbers because the government does not require this information be collected and some parts of government are actively preventing this information from being collected (ex. NIH is not allowed to fund gun violence as a public health problem).  It’s frustrating for crime researchers.

February snuck up on me: February Challenge, gotta get some stuff out

I am so far behind on everything, Grumpy Nation.

But… for the first time since NOVEMBER, my computer desktop at work is finally fully functional.  Like, I can use dropbox and WinSCP and not get a BSOD 5 minutes after logging in.  So… that’s a miracle.

February is the best month for challenges, even if there’s an extra day this year.

I’m going to combine two previous annual challenges:

1. 2018’s No Devices In The Morning Challenge

and

2. 2017’s Write Every Morning Challenge

I will be taking one weekend day off for the write in the morning challenge, which is good since I didn’t realize February 1st was February 1st until Saturday afternoon.

Everything I said in that 2017 post is 100% true this February as well, up to and including the 8am office hours one day a week.