Hi, everyone! Before jumping into the three topics for this week's edition of SemperViernes, I actually do need to recommend the second half of this episode (starting at 32:00 til the end) that I shared last week. The conversation about A.I. between Tristan Harris and Kara Swisher gets, in my opinion, even better than the first half—which, if you remember, was good enough for me to recommend it without making it past that 32:00 point. Let me know what you think if you listen. This week's three topics are all pretty different, and are all pretty dense, so I'll keep the rest of this intro short and hop to it! I'm glad you're here—thanks for reading, and I hope you're well. Happy weekend.
First
As a person for whom 'love of learning for its own sake/dopamine reward' is a core personality trait, I'm not sure the term "underperforming majors" is really helping my beloved College of Arts & CraftsLetters retain students, but I do understand why Matt Sigelman of the Burning Glass Institute uses it in this video that I'm featuring first here this week. In my work advising students and families, I wouldn't be doing my job if I pretended like earnings potential wasn't a major consideration, so ever since the Wall Street Journal started posting articles referencing the Burning Glass Institute in mid-April saying that BGI (my abbreviation, not theirs) was a research nonprofit dedicated to exploring the future of work and learning, I've been paying attention. In those first articles back in April, WSJ shared that BGI had used machine learning to devise a system of college rankings based on salary outcomes using data harvested from IPEDS (which I use to get quick college stats when I don't need a nice UI), Glassdoor (company reviews), and Lightcast (labor market analytics). The BGI rankings, WSJ reported, sorted schools in a novel way. Some previous go-to college stats depots, like College Scorecard (which I use when my day needs IPEDS data with prettier UI), focus on the average earnings of colleges' graduates from certain majors. BGI, by contrast, ranks schools based on how much their grads earn in specific fields, regardless of what their undergrad majors were (and also, interestingly, regardless of where/if the people went to grad school). The BGI rankings just focus on where people went for undergrad, and what they're making now in different professions. Doesn't matter what they studied in college. Cool, right? On LinkedIn this week, Matt Sigelman, BGI's President, posted this video (same link as above) of an interview he did recently where he discusses BGI's new system of rankings in detail. Although it's a video, there aren't any slides or data visualizations, so I'd recommend just listening to the audio content, and doing so on 1.25x speed. I found that the parts that were most helpful occurred between the 4:15 mark and the 27:00 mark. One quick correction: when speaking about high-earning folks in the software industry, Matt says he doesn't think that Mount Holyoke College, a school whose alumnae earn top salaries in software development, has a Computer Science department. They do, actually, have a CS department, but I still like his point about being glad to have data showing that top-earning graduates in software went to places for undergrad that are slightly less selective. This week, the WSJ [finally] ended up releasing BGI's Top 20 college rankings for alumni salaries in nine professional fields (Tech, Law, Management Consulting, Finance, Software, Engineering, Accounting, Marketing, and Data Science), separated out for both private and public institutions. Yay! I went ahead and typed up all those lists in a simple format here. I plan to share the rankings with every family I work with—not because they're definitive, or can stand alone, but because I want to add them to the mosaic of resources we use as we talk together, over time, and come to more fully understand the variety of ways families define success for students in this process.
Second
I've listened to both Part 1 and Part 2 of Ezra Klein's Teen Mental Health episodes, and although I'm neither a parent nor a guidance counselor—just a college counselor!—I do think that there are enough universally-applicable nuggets of wisdom, insight, and practical advice contained within Part 2 that I'd recommend listening to the whole thing (at least until minute 41:00, when the conversation shifts a bit to being more focused on practical advice than societal analysis; again, I thought both portions were immensely useful). I don't find the intro music soothing, though, so I'd start listening at 0:57. Ezra starts by saying that he thinks Part 1 is a necessary prereq for listening to Part 2; if you're interested in psychology to the level I am, then I'd say go for it, but honestly I really thought Ezra represented the views of psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge (Part 1's guest) quite well in his follow-up questions for Part 2's guest, psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour, so I'd say you're all set with just the second episode. One thing I love about listening to Dr. Damour speak is that on topics including interpersonal connection, distinctions between stages of human development, ideal measures of emotional well-being, and even the causes of the teen mental health crisis itself, Dr. Damour brings a calm, calming, balanced, thoughtful, and compassionate patience and reminds us that issues usually have a cluster of causes, as opposed to just one. I loved two quotes in particular. The first was a praise of paradox: "I think what's hard is that the conversation that is the most accurate is probably also going to be the most detailed and nuanced and hard to pin down at times." The second was a new definition of wellness I would imagine many might find freeing. Dr. Damour says that we have "this strange equation that has evolved in the discourse where being mentally healthy is equated with feeling good or calm or relaxed, and those are all lovely things, but those are not how we as psychologists assess mental health. We're looking for two things: do the feelings fit the situation, even if they are negative, unwanted, unpleasant? And then second, and perhaps more important: are they managed effectively?"
Third
In working with over 700 individual college applicants over the past eight years, I've worked with athletes who were recruited to play pretty much every varsity and club sport offered at U.S. universities. None of those student-athletes thus far, though, have applied to college or been recruited in a world where athletics revenue is shared with college athletes in the way that the California State Assembly is proposing right now with the College Athlete Protection Act. I don't think this proposal is news to many people, at least in this area, but I find this topic intellectually fascinating on many levels and think it is likely to have a greater effect on the college application process than legislators are perhaps currently anticipating (can you imagine the app volume that would funnel to schools whose recruitment classes and revenue would benefit from self-perpetuating cycles of athletic and financial success?). First, I hadn't realized (and was simultaneously not too surprised) that California had blatantly ignored the NCAA's threat of exclusion from competitions when passing the 2019 bill establishing players' rights to profit from commercial usage of their name, image, and likeness. Wow. This article also helped me realize what the "NIL" thing was that some people were talking about semi-heatedly at a dinner the other day, so that was nice. Thanks, WSJ. Second, the conversations around proper revenue allocation are sure to be complex, political, and publicly debated, and especially with UCLA and USC joining the Big Ten in 2024 (with a $7.5 billion media rights deal?!), I'd have to think that a law like this, especially if implemented at a national level, would have a lot of domino effects on the motivation of players [and parents] of all ages to pursue athletic skill development and eventual athletic recruitment. Third, especially after watching almost every U.S. college and university go test-optional once the UCs and CSUs did so in Fall 2020, the idea that "as California goes, so goes the nation" really seems to apply here; it also sounds like that's why folks at universities nationwide and at the NCAA are so concerned about this bill—they know California is more than happy to go first.
