The only things you really miss out on are cynical, thought-killing professors and a mountain of debt.

You would rather invest those into a franchisee business and make better returns on your investment.

Mind you a 6 figure fee MBA at top institute does not guarantee a great job. If et al, you would be more stressed than before with the commitments you make at your corporation.

I do not see a misrepresentation here. The court itself determined the criteria for what was “biased in favor of white applicants” correct?

Even assuming it was blatantly biased in favor of white candidates how on earth would a company that goes through the work of developing such a test know a priori whether the test itself will screen out one race over another? It seems to me all one would have to do is show that one race passed/failed more than another and use that as evidence of inherent bias in the test.

The price signals for higher education are supremely screwed up by federal intervention so I would posit that looking at that metric produces incorrect conclusions also.

A test measuring skills and knowledge directly relevant to the job would be fine. Just don’t make any analogies involving regattas.

I think it would be better to ask the broader question, “Why do so many college students enter into courses of study that have little economic value?”

The answer, in part, is demand created for degrees by persons intending to work for the government and in government controlled industries.

The Princeton Review’s list of most popular college majors is as follows: 1) Business Administration and Management/Commerce, 2) Psychology, 3) Nursing, 4) Biology/Biological Sciences, 5) Education, 6) English Language and Literature, 7) Economics, 8 Communications Studies/Speech Communication and Rhetoric, 9) Political Science and Government, 10) Computer and Information Sciences

If you look at the list, it is easy to see that a large portion of college students intend to work for the government and are arming themselves with the appropriate degrees.

“For most academics though, the real ranking that matters is not that of how good a job one’s institution does in training undergraduates, but the ranking of the quality of research in one’s academic field. Where one’s department fits in this hierarchy is crucial, affecting one’s ability to get grants, how good one’s students are and whether they can get jobs, even one’s salary. The gold standard has been the National Research Council rankings, which were supposed to be revised about every ten years. It turns out though that the task of making these ranking has somehow become far more complex and difficult, with more than fifteen years elapsing since the last rankings in 1995. Since 2005 there has been a large and well-funded project to generate new rankings, with release date that keeps getting pushed back. Finally, last year a 200 page book was released entitled A Guide to the Methodology of the National Research Council Assessment of Doctorate Programs, but still no rankings.

Recently the announcement was made that all will be revealed tomorrow at a press conference to be held in Washington at 1pm EDT. I hear rumors that university administrations have been privately given some of the numbers in advance, to allow the preparation of appropriate press releases.

The data being used was gathered back in 2005-2006, and the five intervening years of processing mean that it is rather stale, since many departments have gained or lost academic stars and changed a lot during these years. So, no matter what happens, a good excuse for ignoring the results will be at hand.

Based on the confidential data provided to them last week, the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department has released a statement characterizing this data as having “significant flaws” …

The UW Dean of the College of Engineering has a statement here where he claims that, despite 5 years of massaging, the NRC data contained obvious nonsense, such as the statistic that 0% of their graduating CS Ph.D. students had plans for academic employment during 2001-5.”