There is a great article in the New York Times about how colleges use tax-exempt endowments.  It features Berea College, which actually uses its endowment to provide a free education to Berea students.  The usual questions are raised about rising tuition and increased spending while endowments continue to grow huge. 

I would support a requirement that encourages expenditures to provide wider access to education.  If the standard is not met, then the endowment becomes taxable.

In January, the Senate Finance Committee requested detailed endowment
and spending data from 136 colleges and universities with endowments of
at least $500 million, with a possible eye to forcing them to spend at
least 5 percent of their assets each year, as foundations are required
to do. Large, tax-free endowments “should mean affordable education for
more students, not just a security blanket for colleges,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is reviewing the data.

Read the whole thing.

I am in Amarillo for a family gathering.  My daughter and I had planned to attend a night time hike at Palo Duro Canyon State Park last night, but it was canceled due to heavy rain.  Tonight we will return to the canyon to see a show in the ampitheater there.  We hope that will not be rained out.

Palo Duro is the second largest canyon in the U.S., although I believe it is a pretty distant second.  It is still a beautiful and awe-inspiring place:

One thought that I had as we drove here (420 miles) that is related to T. Boone Pickens’ plan to add more wind turbines to west Texas - There is still PLENTY of room and wind!

Related to that, the Texas Public Utility Commission has voted to build nearly $5 billion worth of transmission lines from west Texas to urban areas in the east of the state.  The plan will increase capacity from the current 5000 MW to 18,000 MW.  This is half of what was requested, but Pickens’ 4000 MW farm should have it made.

UPDATE:

If you want to see more of the canyon, you can view this video I found on YouTube.

We have a great Avionics program at TSTC.  Unfortunately, most people don’t know what an avionics technician is or does.  The following video from Collegegrad.com is a brief overview.

If you would like to see a video about our FAA certified program, follow this link.

Chris Doessler over at one of the ACTE blogs posts about an Associated Press poll on education.  He points out interesting and even contradictory answers.  I think it these result from uncritical acceptance of the media narrative.  Read it and see what you think.

I have a lot of respect for the accomplishments of the University of Phoenix.  Although I regularly take for-profit schools to task, those are usually the non-accredited technical
schools which I believe provide an inferior education at a superior price. University of Phoenix falls into a different category for me - an accredited university with more diverse offerings.

Some would argue that UofP also provides an inferior education at prices that are too high.  The cost is not far out of line for a private university.I have had colleagues who were continuing their educations through UofP that eventually changed to lower-cost public college online programs. They all seemed happy with their classes and learning but they could not pay private university prices

What I admire about UofP is their focus on customer service and access to education. Many universities seem to believe that these values are inimical to a university education. It is the focus on making a profit and expanding market share that causes UofP to act the way it does. Institutions of higher education that are insulated from the market by large endowments and public funding have no motivation to change.

I recently noticed a UofP ad campaign that I think is brilliant. You can view an example below from YouTube:

Thinking ahead ad (you have to go to YouTube to view - embedding is disabled)

I went through these ads to record the messages being delivered:
University of …

• boundaries are nothing
• next level, here I come
• I don’t want to miss a thing
• classes that escape the classroom
• where I am is not where I am going to be
• class is in session when I so choose
• I am not a hamster and life is not a wheel

Every ad ends with the confident statement, “One university understands how you live today, and where you want to go tomorrow.” Emphasis is very heavy on the word, “One.” The ads aim right at the needs, desires, and fears of the audience UofP is addressing. Is the message fair and not misleading? Certainly the idea that only one university can deliver this kind of program is incorrect, but I think the message is dead on for helping UofP capture more market share. Other colleges and universities tend to focus on prestige in their commercials aired around NCAA sporting events.

Will other universities start to focus on these kinds of customer needs? I think it all depends on whether or not they are exposed to the market forces that UofP faces.

If you have thoughts or experience with UofP, please share them in the comments section.

TSTC Waco, with help from a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) grant*, is hosting a Summer Bridge program for Waco ISD rising 11th and 12th graders.  The students are raising their placement test scores, eating well, having fun, and getting their hands on some cool technology.  They are also receiving some survey class college credit.

These students will be academically prepared for college.  The video indicates that they will be enthusiastic about continuing past high school, as well.  I can’t think of a better way for them to spend a summer.

*The grant did not cover the cost.  TSTC and WISD had to help.

I blogged before about the plan of T. Boone Pickens to build a 4000 MW wind farm in west Texas.  Now he has a website that shows his plan for weaning America off of foreign oil.  Whether you believe all of the global warming claims or not, using something besides fossil fuels makes sense (as I pointed out in my least politically correct post).

Watch the Pickens video.  Does it make sense to you?

Our friends in Sweetwater are mentioned again.  Pickens also says his new wind farm will be located near Pampa.  That will make Rep. Chisum from that district happy.  He is a big supporter of alternative fuels that help the country leave dependency behind.

With the Pampa farm planned to be twice as big as Sweetwater (which is still growing), TSTC West Texas folks will need to train a lot of wind turbine technicians!

I know - I have never been that long without a blog post.  I will be starting again soon.

HONEST!

Last week we had a new video of the TSTC Gear Up Summer Welding Camp.  This week it is the Gear Up Summer Game Design Camp.

This stuff is going on all summer.  Since we also have nearly 2,600 students in summer classes, faculty and staff are awfully busy this summer.

Not always, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal by Alan Charles Kors.  A lot of Kors’ lament is aimed at the erosion of higher education in the cause of political correctness.  This quote, though, seems to crystallize a group of related ideas I have been considering:

The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his “Going Broke by Degree,” they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

Will the perceived value of an Ivy League education decline as the cost continues to rise?  There are better ways to determine a person’s IQ and ability to do complex tasks.

The real value in education is in the technical fields.  Technical training adds value to the student.

NO! I’m not talking about our legendary propensity for ‘big talk.’  “Forecast Earth” has a great video on wind power in Sweetwater - the location of the main campus of TSTC West Texas.  TSTC, the big growth in jobs, the economics of wind power, and the earlier referenced T. Boone Pickens plan for a massive wind farm are all discussed.

Video of high school students at the Gear Up Welding Camp at TSTC Waco:

Now OTHER people at TSTC have Flip Ultra video cameras.  I’m a trendsetter!

Over at the BBC, there is an article and a related video about the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine which was nicknamed Baby.  Wikipedia has an article here with more information.

You will find conflicting claims about who was first with what, but it is important to remember that these pioneers laid the foundation for everything that came later in computing.   It was the pioneers who first designed input and output systems.  They figured out that binary would work better than decimal systems.  Babe’s distinction was that it could store a program - i.e., it had a memory (128 bytes!).

According to Wikipedia:

The first program consisted of 17 instructions. Written by Kilburn, it was designed to find the highest proper factor of 2¹⁸ (262,144) by trying every integer from 2¹⁸ - 1 downwards. It took 3.5 million operations and 52 minutes to produce the answer.

How will people sixty years from now describe the primitve and slow nature of our computers?

TSTC Waco was featured on this local news story about increasing numbers of distance learning students.  The cost of gasoline was suggested as one explanation.  The video (here) notes that we had 713 students enrolled in DL courses this summer, up around 300 from last summer.

The reporter interviewed a student named Elisabeth Sandifar out on the campus mall.   She is a dual credit student.  Karen Norman, an instructor in Computer Networking & Systems Administration who is continuing her education online from UT Tyler, was also interviewed for the piece.

TechYes Blog has a post on an addition to the TechYES Student Literacy Certification Program. Science is the new module. The whole set is available on the website and looks like it is reasonably priced. As I have said before, we should not assume they know how to use technology wisely and efficiently just because they are called ‘digital natives’.

My daughter ran across this at a recent conference. I remember the commercial from 2000 Superbowl. See if it doesn’t remind you of your job.

Great stuff from the dawn of computerized graphics for TV commercials. It was even more amazing at the time.

My daughter “The Escribitionist” has a great post at her blog on companies that hide ‘bad environmental behavior’ behind a green front created by ads and PR.

Our last video of the day featured a creative safety video made by Mr. Jones of the Morrisville, PA high school shop class. The same class and teacher showed up on local television news because of a project to make toys for needy kids at Christmas.

As I pointed out in my post on technical students with social concerns, CTE students aren’t only interested in technology. They also want to make a difference. That’s cool because while most of us whine and wait for others to make the change, they actually have the skills to build a better world.

There is a good post at the blog for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity that asks that very question. It makes the argument that money is not being used where it should be:

The game is this: “we are moving to a more knowledge based economy, so nearly everyone should go to college,” or so says the Educational Establishment. Then, the legislators appropriate more money. Then colleges take that money –and use it on virtually everything but expanding access.

As I blogged here, putting more tax dollars into higher education often does not result in improved education. Instead, the money is used for “prestige-building” activities like hiring non-teaching Nobel laureates.

Excellent essay at The Atlantic.

The common ambivalence about balancing college and career education is well-identified:

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work…

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal.

Read the whole thing.

You knew it was coming, and now the NYT says it is here.

Take a look at this very cool Cray 2 (with liquid cooling “waterfall”) from 1985:

This machine which went for millions of dollars did about 824 MIPS (million instructions per second). Your average PC today does something around 20,000 MIPS. A top performer does closer to 60,000 MIPS

The Cray 2 could do about 3.9 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS or billions of FLoating point Operations Per Second). The IBM supercomputer referenced above broke through the petaFLOP barrier. That would be a quadrillion FLOPS.

I blogged earlier about our supercomputing program at TSTC Waco. These students are doing some really fun stuff that they can get paid for in the real world.

After reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I am more convinced than ever that humans are pathetic predictors of “Things to Come“. That conviction conspires with my love for technology to produce a fascination with past visions of the future. I am intrigued by where they came close and where their blind spots were.

This video of a “future car” from 1963 is a good example. It has voice activated electronic controls (in 1963!), but there is no emphasis on greater economy, safety, or environmental friendliness. Then there is that cocktail bar (with extra ashtrays). They did as well as anyone could imagine with the technology in 1963, but the economic and social trends could have never been predicted.

It is unusual to find technology predictions like that - accurately predicting voice control nearly forty years before it became common in cars (I’m still waiting for delivery of my flying car). That is where technical education comes into this discussion. Knowing what to teach and when means trying to predict what technologies are coming and how they will be used in a changing culture. I think that our technology forecasts do that as well as humanly possible.  We have to make program decisions and our industry partners are the best place to start. After all, their futures rely on guessing right, too.

UPDATE:

What is the relationship between “retro futurism” and “futuristic retroism” like this steampunk computer?

One of the difficult issues in alternative energy is storage. A conventional power plant can ramp up production for peak times and then throttle back. Wind and sun aren’t so controllable. Batteries are expensive and can be dangerous

This article at LiveScience discusses progress being made in using compressed air to store energy. It is fascinating stuff. Studying fluid power could pay big future benefits for your CTE students.

Blogging has been slow lately for a variety of reasons. In the mean time, please enjoy this video. It is an extremely creative safety video for a high school CTE class done with action figures and stop-motion. It  provides some laughs while teaching a serious subject that all CTE teachers and students are concerned with. Give it some time. It starts out slowly and gets better all along.