For all of us who work in colleges and universities, we might be doing fine with our students but we have a long way to go when it comes to educating the public. Data is at the very foundation of informed decision-making. Numbers do not lie. But when happens when people do not have data? Their guesses…
Author: David Potash
Stories and Histories: Journeys and Meaning
When I taught history, I sought conversations with students at the end of the semester about the course. What mattered to them? What would they remember, if anything, in the semester or years to come? Learning outcomes assessment evaluations and summary grades are valuable, but there’s nothing like an open-ended conversation with a student. It is often…
Making Sense of Signals in the Noise
Quick! Your favorite 18th century English philosopher is . . . David Hume? Edmund Burke? Adam Smith or Bishop Berkeley? Don’t worry if one one comes to mind – Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, has a provocative suggestion: Thomas Bayes. Silver is a terrific statistician and…
Partying Promises That Access Does Not Equal Success
Are our years in college the best one’s life? If so, is it because of the opportunities for personal growth, intellectual development, and lifelong friendships? Or does the myth of college rest on parties and Bacchanalian excess? The answer is probably a bit of both. One of the best places to answer that question are our…
Misbehaving and the Magic of Behavior Economics
My family and friends now roll their eyes when I try to get a conversation going about behavioral economics. I can’t figure out why – it really is fascinating material. Ever since I read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I have been intrigued. Who wouldn’t be? Richard Thaler, a friend of Kahneman and Amos Tversky,…
Casual Style and Harbinger Colleges
Picture college life in the 1920s – perhaps young women dressed as flappers and men in oversize raccoon coats? Or are they formal, in dresses, coats and ties? Fashion – what people wear and where they wear it – can be a fascinating source of inquiry. Grounded in deep desires for social capital and acceptance, fashion is…
Meaning and Vocational Programming
Indianapolis’s Lilly Endowment, one of the world’s wealthiest philanthropies, focuses its grants on community, education and religion. More than fifteen years ago it launched a huge multi-year and multi-school project called Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV), allocating $250 million. The aim was to work with colleges and universities to help students examine the relationship…