AKA Review- 01.13.2025

From The Wall Street Journal
The Bosses Who Don’t Care About Your Ivy League Degree
By Callum Borchers

Elite university degrees can work against job seekers in parts of the corporate world. Wide coverage of campus protests, DEI, and legacy admissions have increased the public’s view of top schools as woke or elitist. Worries about free speech and cancel culture leave some employers concerned whether graduates have solid critical-thinking skills. A silver lining: To identify talented people often overlooked in the past, some top employers have added problem-solving games or interviews that hide the candidate’s college to the hiring process. Read this article

From The New York Times
How Higher Education Can Win Back America
By Michael Roth

Our nation’s founders were deeply anti-elitist and saw education as a means to create leaders based on their talent rather than fortune. Countless immigrants agreed and have used education as a path to better lives. Wesleyan President Michael Roth shows how we can return to our founders’ vision of an education system from one today that has lost the public’s trust for how it reenforces the advantages of wealth. In doing so, he suggests, we can disrupt entrenched inequality, enable social mobility, and be anti-elitist without being anti-education. Read this article

From Quanta Magazine
Mathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It Is
By Kelsey Houston-Edwards

In this interview, mathematician David Bessis argues that the common view of math is wrong. Rather than the cryptic written symbols that most math teaching emphasizes, it is a dialogue between intuition and logic. We imagine new ideas and then use a logical external representation to test and refine them until we arrive at solid understanding. More radically, Bessis describes mathematical ability as a form of self-help that enhances creativity and personal growth—a means to align what our gut is telling us and what is rational. Read this article

From The Economist

Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all

While it’s no news that academic writing is seen as inaccessible, this article puts data behind the charge. Analyzing 347,000 PhD abstracts with a test that gauges readability, The Economist found them not only very difficult to read but becoming more so in every discipline over the past 80 years. The reasons bear further research. But at a moment when academia and science in general are facing widespread questions, doubt, and conspiracy mongering, it is incumbent on scholars to consider how to make their thinking more accessible. Read this article

25 Stats for 2025
By Ashley Mowreader

Although its title reads like social media clickbait, this article is a deceptively helpful way to look back on the state of higher ed in 2024 and prepare for 2025. Its charm (if statistics can be considered charming) is this. No one statistic is an epiphany in itself. Yet together—with their breadth of focus (on students, faculty, families, employers, and the public at large) and diversity of sources—they form a catalyst that surfaces contradictions, connections, causes, hypotheses, and potential solutions. In short, a picture greater than…well, you know. Read this article