In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Review, University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton authored an article, The Law School Crash, subtitled “What’s worse than a decade of financial turmoil? Not learning from it.” Barton’s news isn’t new. In fact, he mentions Brian Tamanaha’s 2012 book, Failing Law Schools, as an early critique of the disparity between the cost of law school and career and salary outcomes.
Dr. Mark Riccardi is dean of APUS’s School of Security & Global Studies. In addition to his service at APUS, Dr. Riccardi served for 21 years as a U.S. Army officer. When I learned that he and his family were traveling to Antarctica, I asked if he would write a reflective piece for my blog upon his return. I am grateful that he did and am still reflecting.
As an avid follower of information technology trends, I have read hundreds of articles and several dozen books about artificial intelligence (A.I.) over the past six years. A few of the books have been reviewed on this blog beginning in 2014 (see Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, RISE OF THE ROBOTS: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, and Review of The Second Machine Age: Work, Process, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee). Recently, two items triggered my Spidey sense (a term coined by Marvel Comics for the ability of superhero Spiderman to sense when something was about to happen).
In this week’s New York Times, Dana Goldstein and Anemona Hartocollis write about the difference in enrollments at the Ivy Plus (eight Ivy League universities plus Duke, Stanford, M.I.T., and the University of Chicago) institutions when students’ family incomes are considered. The source of the data for these reporters is a paper co-authored by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States. The paper follows their 2017 research paper, Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility.
