The Tipping Point?

According to a report by The American Council on Education, the U.S. may have reached the "tipping point" in terms of educational advancement of young people. For the first time, this generation is not better educated than the previous one. They speculate that this may be due to differences in educational attainment among different racial and ethnic groups. One group of note are Hispanic youth who appear to have acquired less education than their parents and grandparents, for example. These findings are concerning given that a two-year degree is a requirement for many jobs.

Not only is there no increase in general, but some fields have seen a decline. One example is computer science. The number of both Whites and minority groups has dropped in this field. Engineering, especially at the doctoral levels, has also seen fewer students gracing their programs. Other portions of the report examine college persistence (declined slightly), degrees conferred (minority women outpaced minority men at all degree levels), and employment in higher education (minorities have made gains but are still trailing Whites).

In addition to the ACE website, The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief summary of this report.

One question: What happened to our tech-savvy students are are learning anytime, anywhere 24/7/365?

A "new" generation?

RenGen, really?

Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter

Suzanne Vega blogs about "Tom's Diner" among other things in The New York Times. The timing of this post was perfect given that I've been putting together a few slides for Monday night. Why? Because in this post, Suzanne mentions that her mother is a computer systems analyst, her daughter is very techie (does HTML for fun on a Saturday afternoon), but she is not (or at least doesn't perceive herself to be techie, which is a very female thing, according to the literature). Some mothers nag their daughters about cleaning the house, Suzanne's mother nags her about cleaning out her computer applications.

Suzanne was born in 1959, which places her in the Baby Boomer generation (or in some cases, the Generation Jones generation). And even though she does not consider herself to be techie, she is known as the "Mother of the MP3 player." Because of "Tom's Diner," the sound quality of the MP3 player (created by Karl-Heinz Brandenberg - Suzanne's description of him is great) is what it is today.