Katy Dickinson

CAHSI and Diamond Age

This morning I had the honor of addressing the 2009 Annual Meeting of CAHSI - the Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions. CAHSI is a "consortium of universities that are committed to increasing the number of Hispanics who earn baccalaureate and advanced degrees in computing". I was part of a panel called "Mentoring Lessons Shared" which also featured speakers from IBM, Google, and MentorNet.

I arrived in time to hear the last part of a very interesting keynote address by Dr. Dan Atkins, Kellog Professor, Community Information, University of Michigan (and past Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation). Dan ended his talk with a Grand Challenge to the audience to help find a way to college educate the extraordinary number of qualified students worldwide for whom there are not enough university programs. He gave the number 100 million qualified students and said that it would take creating a major university (U.C. Berkeley, Stanford...) every 15 minutes to meet their need under the current educational structure.

Over lunch with Dan and other speakers, I recommended Neal Stephenson's superb 1995 book Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This book addresses a piece of the problem Dan challenged CAHSI to solve: it tells the story of what happens when an elite educational tool is hijacked for a vastly broader audience of little girls.

In 2007, during her senior year in High School, my daughter Jessica experienced firsthand the unmanageable glut of excellent university applicants. She is very happy at the school she accepted: Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, PA). However, at the time, it was very stressful. Princeton's 2007 rejection letter to Jessica said they had 18,900 applications for an entering undergraduate class of 1,245 students. Looking at the current Princeton Admissions Statistics, the situation has become even worse:

Total Applicants: 21,370
Total Admits: 2,122
Total Enrolled: 1,243
Admit Rate: 9.9%

I still like the suggestion made by Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore in the article "Why the best schools can’t pick the best kids – and vice versa" (Los Angeles Times, Opinion, 18 March 2007):

"The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. ... There is a simple way to dramatically reduce the pressure and competition that our most talented students now experience. When selective institutions get the students’ applications, the schools can scrutinize them using the same high standards they currently use and decide which of the applicants is good enough to be admitted. Then the names of all the “good enough” students could be placed in a metaphorical hat, with the “winners” drawn at random for admission."

Posted at 03:30PM Jan 16, 2009 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |