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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
MISGUIDED ANGLO-PHILIA
There is much to be said about the primacy of elite American universities in today’s world. Yet the attention that is paid to these schools in Brazil has surprised me a great deal.
Earlier in July, VEJA magazine interviewed University of Chicago college lecturer Allen Sanderson about the economic impact behind the Pan-American games in Rio de Janeiro. His contribution to the article? A one sentence remark concluding that the money that poured into the games would have been better spent, and yielded much higher returns, if it had gone into solving Rio’s actual problems. I find it inconceivable that this conclusion could not have been made by at least a couple hundred professors here in Brazil - or surely, a few million Brazilians.
Yet to the writer of the article, though, the quoting a Chicago economist obviously seemed important. Hurray for us, I guess. This is only one of the many encounters with the few elite American schools I had these last few weeks, though.
Just to mention a couple, two weeks ago The Estado de Sao Paulo devoted an entire page discussing Yale’s decision to more aggressively interview students in Sao Paulo bidding for a place in its college. The page, highlighted by a beautiful picture of one of the quads at Yale, was filled with admissions statistics of Yale and Harvard, a brief interview with the President of the Yale Club of Brazil, and a brief quote of a Brazilian professor analyzing the impact and the draw that these schools have on Brazilian students. Despite this huge focus on these schools, though, the article was flooded with misconceptions and downright mistakes. First off, it failed numerous times to distinguish between the statistics that solely dealt with the colleges at these universities and those that dealt with the universities at-large. It argued, for instance, that there was a significant disparity between the number of international students at Yale and those at Harvard; however, this distinction does not actually exist, and the discrepancy was due to the fact that for Yale, the writer considered the college statistic, while for Harvard she considered the number of international students for the entire university.
These mistakes are excusable, though, perhaps being simply due to poor research by an intern (I unfortunately know a thing or two about that…). The following mistakes, however, are downright awful: A paragraph was devoted to discussing the curricular options at these schools. It argued that the most difficult “careers” to be admitted to were law, business, and history. First, any college graduate in the United States will be able to tell you that law is only a professional field of study in the US, not offered at the undergraduate level. Second, Yale does not offer an undergraduate business major. Lastly, there is no mention of the fact that “careers” are not the modus operandi of most American colleges when it comes to course structure, and that a students' potential field of study, for the most part, has no bearing on his likelihood of admission.
The inspiration for the title of my blog entry does not come from these example, however. I recognize that the American system is incredibly different than the one in Brazil and much more complex, and that it would require many more pages in the newspaper to fully explain the discrepancies I have pointed out (book topic, perhaps?). To blame the author for having failed to properly account for these differences in an article which only sought to make the point that elite American schools are more actively seeking Brazilian students is a bit unfair - the gist of the piece came across just fine.
While I was made aware of the enamoring attitude towards these institutions, and the misdirection that it almost always took, the depth of these misconceptions was only made clear to me upon reading Jacques Markovitch’s “Universidade Impossivel.” Longtime dean of Brazil’s most famous university, the University of Sao Paulo, Markovitch explored some policies which could propel Brazilian institutions into greater success - both teaching and research success. The infiltration of American schools into the book is quickly felt - in the first line, in fact. While trying to make the point that no university is perfect, Markovitch says that “Grenoble, Harvard, or Tsukuba are only part of an unfinished dream.” While undoubtedly true, his choice of examples certainly convey the idea that - at least to him - these are the ones that have come the closest.
Three pages into it, he then devotes a paragraph to a few observations made by noted American astrophysicist Carl Sagan regarding modern scientific progress. Sagan, a University of Chicago graduate and longtime researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, became famous in the United States for a popular PBS series - much like the vein which popularized Friedman through “Free to Choose,” and by his efforts in creating the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) lab at Berkeley. Aside from a mention of a paper by a New York University professor - yet another famous US university - half-way into the work, no other citation of modern schools or modern researchers are included.
Again, however, despite this devotion to the name and reputation that these schools have cultivated, no attempt is made to actually investigate and learn from their success. His prescriptions are great in breadth, including admissions practices, criteria for hiring professors, relationship between the student body and faculty, social responsibility of universities, alumni relations, and many more. Yet in all these areas, however, much of the ideas completely fail to discuss the way schools like Harvard dealt with these issues, and most often his ideas run completely counter to those that were instituted in top US universities. While I certainly argue that analyzing US schools should in no way be an effort to completely emulating them, failing to give due attention to their practices is simply a superficial worship of the name of these schools without the labor to try to make something positive out of this adoration.
The example of college admissions serves to make my point; the rigid admission system in Brazil is downright inconducive to attracting the students which are most likely to cause great impact in society, and much less able to further social inclusion. American schools have for a longtime acknowledged the necessity to consider the applicant as an entire person, for there is much more about a students promise that can be learned if one abstracts from simply calculating the score on a, for the most part, meaningless test. In a country which suffers from incredibly vast socio-economic disparities, this holistic approach would be a fantastic tool to allow motivated and able kids to attend Brazil’s finest schools regardless of the social strata in which they find themselves in, without the aid of racial quotas which are only a regression in the fight for racial and social equality.
I can only conclude, therefore, that this attention towards American schools is a "misguided Anglo-philism." The unfortunate thing is that so much of the writings about the issue focus on how successful and widely known they have become, yet not a single one I have come across attempts to even scratch the surface of why that is so.
Just today a USP professor and MIT PhD wrote a two column editorial on the scientific achievements of MIT and Harvard. His conclusion? The endowment of these schools have done a great deal to impact scientific research, allowing for cutting-edge successes which subsequently contributed to more notoriety and more money for these schools, completing a never-ending money-making cycle. True. But, I ask, how is it that these schools first gained such an immense amount of wealth?
P.S.: In case you are wondering just how large these endowments are, the following is a list of the 15 wealthiest schools in the United States (2005 figures in 2006 dollars). A brief personal side note filled with bias (hehe): The University of Chicago just recently reached the goal of a $2bi dollar fund-raising campaign in less than two years - money not reflected on this list. It is now the sixth wealthiest university in the US.
1. Harvard University: $28.915 bi
2. Yale University: $18.03 bi
3. Stanford University: 14.084 bi
4. University of Texas System: $13.234bi
5. MIT: $8.368bi
6: Columbia University: $5.937bi
7: University of California: $5.733bi
8: University of Michigan: $5.652bi
9:Texas A&M: $5.642bi
10: University of Pennsylvania: $5.313bi
11: Northwestern University: $5.140bi
12: Emory University: $4.870 bi
13: Washington University in St. Louis: $4.685bi
14: University of Chicago: $4.867bi
15.: Cornell University: $4.321bi
Earlier in July, VEJA magazine interviewed University of Chicago college lecturer Allen Sanderson about the economic impact behind the Pan-American games in Rio de Janeiro. His contribution to the article? A one sentence remark concluding that the money that poured into the games would have been better spent, and yielded much higher returns, if it had gone into solving Rio’s actual problems. I find it inconceivable that this conclusion could not have been made by at least a couple hundred professors here in Brazil - or surely, a few million Brazilians.
Yet to the writer of the article, though, the quoting a Chicago economist obviously seemed important. Hurray for us, I guess. This is only one of the many encounters with the few elite American schools I had these last few weeks, though.
Just to mention a couple, two weeks ago The Estado de Sao Paulo devoted an entire page discussing Yale’s decision to more aggressively interview students in Sao Paulo bidding for a place in its college. The page, highlighted by a beautiful picture of one of the quads at Yale, was filled with admissions statistics of Yale and Harvard, a brief interview with the President of the Yale Club of Brazil, and a brief quote of a Brazilian professor analyzing the impact and the draw that these schools have on Brazilian students. Despite this huge focus on these schools, though, the article was flooded with misconceptions and downright mistakes. First off, it failed numerous times to distinguish between the statistics that solely dealt with the colleges at these universities and those that dealt with the universities at-large. It argued, for instance, that there was a significant disparity between the number of international students at Yale and those at Harvard; however, this distinction does not actually exist, and the discrepancy was due to the fact that for Yale, the writer considered the college statistic, while for Harvard she considered the number of international students for the entire university.
These mistakes are excusable, though, perhaps being simply due to poor research by an intern (I unfortunately know a thing or two about that…). The following mistakes, however, are downright awful: A paragraph was devoted to discussing the curricular options at these schools. It argued that the most difficult “careers” to be admitted to were law, business, and history. First, any college graduate in the United States will be able to tell you that law is only a professional field of study in the US, not offered at the undergraduate level. Second, Yale does not offer an undergraduate business major. Lastly, there is no mention of the fact that “careers” are not the modus operandi of most American colleges when it comes to course structure, and that a students' potential field of study, for the most part, has no bearing on his likelihood of admission.
The inspiration for the title of my blog entry does not come from these example, however. I recognize that the American system is incredibly different than the one in Brazil and much more complex, and that it would require many more pages in the newspaper to fully explain the discrepancies I have pointed out (book topic, perhaps?). To blame the author for having failed to properly account for these differences in an article which only sought to make the point that elite American schools are more actively seeking Brazilian students is a bit unfair - the gist of the piece came across just fine.
While I was made aware of the enamoring attitude towards these institutions, and the misdirection that it almost always took, the depth of these misconceptions was only made clear to me upon reading Jacques Markovitch’s “Universidade Impossivel.” Longtime dean of Brazil’s most famous university, the University of Sao Paulo, Markovitch explored some policies which could propel Brazilian institutions into greater success - both teaching and research success. The infiltration of American schools into the book is quickly felt - in the first line, in fact. While trying to make the point that no university is perfect, Markovitch says that “Grenoble, Harvard, or Tsukuba are only part of an unfinished dream.” While undoubtedly true, his choice of examples certainly convey the idea that - at least to him - these are the ones that have come the closest.
Three pages into it, he then devotes a paragraph to a few observations made by noted American astrophysicist Carl Sagan regarding modern scientific progress. Sagan, a University of Chicago graduate and longtime researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, became famous in the United States for a popular PBS series - much like the vein which popularized Friedman through “Free to Choose,” and by his efforts in creating the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) lab at Berkeley. Aside from a mention of a paper by a New York University professor - yet another famous US university - half-way into the work, no other citation of modern schools or modern researchers are included.
Again, however, despite this devotion to the name and reputation that these schools have cultivated, no attempt is made to actually investigate and learn from their success. His prescriptions are great in breadth, including admissions practices, criteria for hiring professors, relationship between the student body and faculty, social responsibility of universities, alumni relations, and many more. Yet in all these areas, however, much of the ideas completely fail to discuss the way schools like Harvard dealt with these issues, and most often his ideas run completely counter to those that were instituted in top US universities. While I certainly argue that analyzing US schools should in no way be an effort to completely emulating them, failing to give due attention to their practices is simply a superficial worship of the name of these schools without the labor to try to make something positive out of this adoration.
The example of college admissions serves to make my point; the rigid admission system in Brazil is downright inconducive to attracting the students which are most likely to cause great impact in society, and much less able to further social inclusion. American schools have for a longtime acknowledged the necessity to consider the applicant as an entire person, for there is much more about a students promise that can be learned if one abstracts from simply calculating the score on a, for the most part, meaningless test. In a country which suffers from incredibly vast socio-economic disparities, this holistic approach would be a fantastic tool to allow motivated and able kids to attend Brazil’s finest schools regardless of the social strata in which they find themselves in, without the aid of racial quotas which are only a regression in the fight for racial and social equality.
I can only conclude, therefore, that this attention towards American schools is a "misguided Anglo-philism." The unfortunate thing is that so much of the writings about the issue focus on how successful and widely known they have become, yet not a single one I have come across attempts to even scratch the surface of why that is so.
Just today a USP professor and MIT PhD wrote a two column editorial on the scientific achievements of MIT and Harvard. His conclusion? The endowment of these schools have done a great deal to impact scientific research, allowing for cutting-edge successes which subsequently contributed to more notoriety and more money for these schools, completing a never-ending money-making cycle. True. But, I ask, how is it that these schools first gained such an immense amount of wealth?
P.S.: In case you are wondering just how large these endowments are, the following is a list of the 15 wealthiest schools in the United States (2005 figures in 2006 dollars). A brief personal side note filled with bias (hehe): The University of Chicago just recently reached the goal of a $2bi dollar fund-raising campaign in less than two years - money not reflected on this list. It is now the sixth wealthiest university in the US.
1. Harvard University: $28.915 bi
2. Yale University: $18.03 bi
3. Stanford University: 14.084 bi
4. University of Texas System: $13.234bi
5. MIT: $8.368bi
6: Columbia University: $5.937bi
7: University of California: $5.733bi
8: University of Michigan: $5.652bi
9:Texas A&M: $5.642bi
10: University of Pennsylvania: $5.313bi
11: Northwestern University: $5.140bi
12: Emory University: $4.870 bi
13: Washington University in St. Louis: $4.685bi
14: University of Chicago: $4.867bi
15.: Cornell University: $4.321bi
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Essays in College Applications?!?! BLASPHEMY!!!
I must thank Victoria Goldman, contributor to the New York Times, for bringing attention to an important issue concerning college admissions in our American society in her piece "Common Application Supplments: Too Much Information?"
In true investigative fashion, Ms. Goldman tries to shed some light on the horrors that our youngsters are having to go through to gain entrance into our nations finest colleges. First, Goldman explains that college admissions before the COMMON APPLICATION led kids to "trauma" since they had to fill blanks over and over again. God forbid.
More striking, though, is the continued horrors that colleges nowadays put kids through, such as the additional essays many schools require along with those in the COMMON APPLICATION. Goldman appropriately notes that that trouble that applicants have to go through would warrant "course credit." To gain entrance into Northwestern University, one of the foremost research institutions in the world, applicants have to go as far as to write "an essay of up to 500 words, a personal statement of up to 300 words and two shorter statements." In a single application, this comes out roughly to 1000 words!!! In turn, this would mean that an applicant would write about 3 pages of essays and short answers in order to gain admission to the college of his choice.
Let us hope that we never again put another aspiring Wildcat, Beaver, Tiger, or Quaker through this torture.
----
All kidding aside, I personally feel that this article is quite disturbing. It has to be underscored that her article mentioned The University of Pennsylvania, CalTech, Princeton, and Northwestern, some of the best research universities and colleges in the world. For her to imply that the task of writing four pages in college application is a "trauma" is quite worrying, yet representative, of current views regarding college admissions. The standard of scholastic achievement at top universities - indeed all schools - ought to always be heightened, not lowered. Accordingly, there is no reason why schools shouldn't require more and more from the many students seeking admission; if for nothing else, as a means to gauge the student's interest in the school. Instead, most today feel that applying to college should be simple and painstaking, a process which would allow junior to apply to all schools that he wants without much trouble - certainly without writing 1000 pages for each!!!
In true investigative fashion, Ms. Goldman tries to shed some light on the horrors that our youngsters are having to go through to gain entrance into our nations finest colleges. First, Goldman explains that college admissions before the COMMON APPLICATION led kids to "trauma" since they had to fill blanks over and over again. God forbid.
More striking, though, is the continued horrors that colleges nowadays put kids through, such as the additional essays many schools require along with those in the COMMON APPLICATION. Goldman appropriately notes that that trouble that applicants have to go through would warrant "course credit." To gain entrance into Northwestern University, one of the foremost research institutions in the world, applicants have to go as far as to write "an essay of up to 500 words, a personal statement of up to 300 words and two shorter statements." In a single application, this comes out roughly to 1000 words!!! In turn, this would mean that an applicant would write about 3 pages of essays and short answers in order to gain admission to the college of his choice.
Let us hope that we never again put another aspiring Wildcat, Beaver, Tiger, or Quaker through this torture.
----
All kidding aside, I personally feel that this article is quite disturbing. It has to be underscored that her article mentioned The University of Pennsylvania, CalTech, Princeton, and Northwestern, some of the best research universities and colleges in the world. For her to imply that the task of writing four pages in college application is a "trauma" is quite worrying, yet representative, of current views regarding college admissions. The standard of scholastic achievement at top universities - indeed all schools - ought to always be heightened, not lowered. Accordingly, there is no reason why schools shouldn't require more and more from the many students seeking admission; if for nothing else, as a means to gauge the student's interest in the school. Instead, most today feel that applying to college should be simple and painstaking, a process which would allow junior to apply to all schools that he wants without much trouble - certainly without writing 1000 pages for each!!!
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