Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Is The New York Times’ newsroom just a bunch of Ivy Leaguers? (Kinda, sorta.)

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

"They're not a majority, based on a new look at education data, but they are wildly overrepresented." Of course they are. It's easy to see this trend across journalism, and indeed, across any discipline where position, power and money intersect. And despite what the Yale graduate in this Harvard-owned newsletter says, the answer is not simply "hire more non-Ivy  Leaguers". No, no. The answer is to understand what it is that creates so much opportunity for graduates from these universities. It's not better professors. It's not smarter students. It's not content knowledge. No, it's all about marketing, networking and self-promotion - and even more, it's about how these are done at the schools. Harvard, for example, actually has a journalism newsletter, in which this article is located. MIT Media Lab has students work in real-world environments on real-world problems. Stanford graduates create their enterprises while they're still students. Understand all this and you're closer to understanding what 'success' in higher education amounts to. (That's why I say, people evaluating learning technology by looking at test scores aren't even asking the right questions.)

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Oct 05, 2024 2:54 p.m.

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