Phoenix: Slightly less dumber than last year?
Last year, the Daily Beast had Phoenix at number 49 of the 50 smartest metropolitan areas. Quelle embarrassment!
This year the Valley improved, slightly, to number 45.
The first page is here.
Phoenix’s, five later, is here.
Here’s the methodology:
This year’s methodology is similar to last year’s inaugural list, with a couple weighting refinements, and one major change: as our civic engagement quotient—a proxy of a city’s willingness, and ability, to invest in intellectual culture—we dropped voter turnout in favor of libraries per capita. Overall, we divided the criteria into two parts: Half for education, and half for intellectual environment. The education half encompassed the percentage of residents over age 25 that had bachelor’s degrees (25 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (25 percent), compared to the overall population over age 25. The intellectual environmental half had three subparts. First, we looked at year-to-date nonfiction book sales (16.7 percent), as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, the nation’s leading provider of accurate point-of-sale data, which tracks roughly 300,000 titles each week. We also measured the ratio of institutions of higher education (16.7 percent), as defined by the federal government—different than just measuring college degrees, this acknowledges that universities as driver of intellectual vigor of cities and rewards cities with college populations. Finally, libraries per capita (16.7 percent) measures how willing and able a city is to educate the general public, as well as the no-cost opportunities for the public to educate itself.
6:48 AM
In which we discover that the Exotic East isn't much different from the unexotic East Valley
When you read the hedline on this EVT story out of Mesa (“Parents sue to stop suspension for drinking on China band trip”), you probably think the same thing we do:
Jesus, aren’t these conservative Mesa types all about personal responsibility and strict rules?
Their high schoolers get caught drinking on a fields trip—to China, no less—get a lenient three days os suspension… and they sue the district to protect their little ones from having to take responsibility?
Read the story and … it’s true: These grimy parental units are suing the district after their kids got a measly three-day suspension for drinking on a band trip, to China no less.
But there’s a twist: The parents do have a case on a different aspect of what turns out to be an story with a twist or two.
The kids were drinking in China, according to the suit, but the circumstances were a little … rococo:
A Chinese tour guide provided beer while spending hours in a hotel room with the teens. The suit says the tour guide took his shirt off because he was hot, then watched the students play drinking games until they were wearing nothing but boxers.
Now that’s something the kids could have experienced back home in the good old U.S. of A., and in church, to boot.
The district’s side:
The district contends the parents threatened to generate bad publicity if administrators kept the suspensions in place. The parents' suit includes other allegations of sexual conduct and a Chinese sex worker groping a boy in the hotel.
“In any event, Plantiffs' arguments are baseless and meant to do nothing more than embarrass and discredit the school and its staff in an effort to win a tactical advantage,” the suit states.
7:55 AM
The state of the state . . .
… in one simple paragraph:
“Arizona doesn’t aspire to compete in the new economy in an organized, nonpartisan, strategic way. We lack ambition. We lack aspiration. We’re satisfied with the mix we have, leading the nation in call centers. There’s no urgency about that.”
The speaker is Fred DuVal, vice president of the state Board of Regents.
The story is about how the state provides a trivial amount of financial aid for students.
6:46 AM
How did Arizona fare in US News' grad-school rankings?
As we know, the state fared mighty poorly in the undergraduate arena when U.S. News unveiled its undergraduate college rankings last August.
It’s slightly better news on the graduate level, but this is tempered by the fact that the reporting on the rankings locally were wrong or incomplete.
Not a good example to set for the kids!
Anyway, the Thunderbird business school retained its place as the best international business school—for the fifteenth year in a row.
The ASU Carey Business School came in 27th on the MBA list, and UofA’s Eller 55th.
But neither the Republic nor the PBJ noticed that both ASU and UofA’s law schools made the top fifty as well—38th and 42nd, respectively. I did some other selectively checking and also found:
In English both came in in the 50s; in history, ASU was 71st and UofA 42nd.
They came in 30th and 45th in fine arts, respectively, and 25th and 36th in public affairs. They tied for 39th in economics.
Now, given that there are fifty states, Arizona did not fare embarrassingly. Having two schools in the top fifty, in most cases, in those categories is a decent showing.
The papers should have noticed that.
That said, the state’s ranking in the undergraduate sphere — detailed here —remain shocking and a big problem for the state’s national image.
7:57 AM
The University of Phoenix makes another cameo in the NYT today
The long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.
If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:
The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.
A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.
Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.
7:51 PM
PHXations, Thursday, January 28
Overheard in Borders. Our cast is a man and a woman, both fiftyish:
Man: Hon?
Woman: Mmmm?
Man: They got a book here about the iPod. [O’Reilly’s The Missing Manual
Woman: Really?
Man: Let’s get it and read it and then we can decide if we’ll get one.
Woman: Okay
[ Exeunt, pursued by a bear. ]
The Democratic Diva writes about a recent talk by ASU prez Michael Crow. One passage:
He clicked on a graph of state funding of ASU per student since 1990. Back then the state contributed roughly $11K per student. Today it’s around $5K.
Sounds like it’s time to introduce a bill to put the Ten Commandments on the state capitol.
The Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner holds a press conference conference tomorrow. Most papers quote his agent saying that Warner will announce “whether” he will retire; this Chicago Tribune report says he will.
Warner, 38, is expected to retire after 12 seasons, including the past five with the Cardinals. A friend who talked with Warner after the Cardinals lost to the New Orleans Saints in the playoffs said “it sounded like he was done.”
2:25 PM
Arizona: C- in education
A report by the group that publishes Education Week magazine has rated the 50 states and Washington D.C. on education. Arizona comes in 46th—and dropped three places since the last report.
According to the Republic, however, there is some good news:
The good news is that for the second year in a row, Arizona earned an A- for the quality of its learning goals, tests and accountability. It is 18th in the nation with that grade, although last year it was eighth.
OK, so the good news isn’t really good. The bad news?
The bad news is the state lags in all other categories. In the “chance for success category,” Arizona sank from 42nd in the nation to 45th, although its grade was the same, C-.
7:00 AM