Everyone's an R1, Subway Baby Names, Disney Transit, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Feb. 6 - Feb. 14.
Note: This is Around the College Town, my links round-up article for the week. I missed last week, as I posted two original articles to catch the Super Bowl wave. Congrats to the Philadelphia Eagles, by the way. They’re led by a coach from a small liberal arts college! This week, I have some higher ed news and urbanism news from around the internet, along with some from right here on Substack.
More Universities are R1s Under New Classification
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced a change to how it distinguishes and categorizes universities, notably the R1 label. For those not in higher ed, this is a label that is coveted by many universities. It has meant that your institution is among the Big Dogs, the elite, the best research universities in the country. Of course, this status chase set off an arms race to achieve this status.
Some universities merely get this distinction but do not meaningfully change their operations, jokingly known on the r/professor subreddit as R1NO (pronounced Rhino), as is R1 in Name Only (like the old republican joke). This concern has led the foundation to laudably change its metrics to cut down on fueling the arms race. Colleagues and institutions are celebrating this change, but I am more mum.
Now that the distinction is no longer prestigious, yes, universities will stop chasing it with so much vigor. If everyone’s an R1, it loses its cachet. Although, many institutions are celebrating the label right now, despite the changes.
Because institutions are constantly chasing prestige, something else will come that will keep the arms race flowing. At least the Foundation is getting out of that game. Good on them. I just don’t see much change in higher ed in terms of these kinds of prestige games.
Dorms News
Napa Valley College has a new $114 million dorm that sits half empty. Why?
A UMass student who was disqualified from a half-court shot promotion will get the $10K after all.
Didn’t get into Harvard? Don’t feel too bad. Their dorms have rats.
Speaking of Harvard, Cambridge rezoned its entire town to allow multi-family housing. Kudos!
Are universities more likely to be great if they are next to other great universities? Some researchers say ‘yes’.
Duke Kunshan just received a record-breaking number of applicants (there is an appetite for people-to-people exchange with China)
But a US congressman has called for a ban on Chinese students from US universities.
Savannah Chrisley, an influencer who I must confess I do not know, says, “We need to make dorms great again.” I don’t care who it is, if you are trying to improve dorm life, I am on board. So let’s do it, let’s Make Dorms Great Again (MDGA).
Transport News
A new report finds that Waymos are 12x safer than human drivers.
California’s high speed rail faces more delays and budget short falls. Will it ever happen?
Some are wondering if California’s high speed rail project should just be put out of its misery by Trump.
In completely opposite news from California’s incompetence on public transport, Seoul had a ‘major’ delay on a subway line of… 10 minutes. We can only dream of 10 minutes as a ‘major’ delay here.
Finally, a woman gave birth on the NYC subway this week. See, it’s so safe that it’s fine to have a baby on the train! In celebration, how about some Subway-related names for the newborn?
Brooklyn
Chelsea
Bronx
Roosevelt
York
Astoria
Trax (if you want to get a bit wild)
Hudson
Hoyt
Bowery
Jane (as in Jacobs)
Seven (my favorite, in honor of the great NYC TV show Seinfeld and the 7 Train).
Around the College Town of Other Substacks
Note: I am trying something new here with a rundown of higher ed or urbanism posts from right here in the Substack community. Right now, the platform isn’t great about these topics, as it is full of writing about how to get bigger on Substack. Too much navel-gazing. But there are some interesting writers who are covering topics of interests, which I will try to feature on my Around the College Towns link round-up each week.
at covers how dropping the SAT may have actually hurt kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. We might call this the Cobra Effect. It’s why some schools are bringing back high stakes testing.
The study concludes that the “the data suggest that a test score optional policy leads large numbers of disadvantaged students to not submit scores when it would benefit them to do so.”
Ideas like cutting standardized tests in admissions may have faced a bit more pushback from a professoriate that wasn’t so intellectually homogeneous. Professor Taylor's Two Ditches Substack by the namesake wonders how the academy can find more conservative professors in an interview piece. The profession leans heavily left, and has only become more so in recent decades.
The problem is not the mix of ideology of the faculty, but in the commitment of the faculty to exposing students to ‘the other team’s first string’ in hearing new ideas and learning and practicing how to think critically and to make arguments. And just as it is a basic fact that faculty are more liberal than average, it is also the case that conservative students are not getting PhDs at a high rate—they want to do other things.
In more metric news over at , and have a strong critique of university rankings. As I have long criticized the limitations of rankings in my own work, these economists’ thoughts here are welcomed.
An especially troublesome issue is that few consumers of rankings know what is actually being ranked. Someone who cares a lot about undergraduate education might be appalled to learn that the ranking they are following is actually based on research reputation and that marginal investments taken away from undergraduate education to boost research standing will improve the ranking.
Forget the metrics, The Substack wonders if the entire higher ed system has just been replaced by credentialism. Given some of the developments in the sector over the last few decades, it does seem to be the direction we are heading, especially with the advent of online degrees coupled with AI.
Instead, they chase textbook material, relying on publisher-provided PowerPoints and quiz questions that primarily test definitions rather than the application of those concepts… While safer for professors, this method facilitates cheating as students access online resources that offer the same question-answer set the professor uses.
These questions are just happening in the US, at offers some stories of Chinese unemployment, connecting to degree inflation. Indeed, while we often marvel at innovations coming from the elite end of the Chinese higher ed sector (I’m guilty of this), there is a much bigger part of the spectrum that struggles under the immense pressures.
This simplification of standards leads to highly similar choices, resulting in extreme congestion and fierce competition in certain fields (e.g. finance and internet industries in the past decade). When companies receive far more applications than needed, the simplest and most efficient way to screen candidates is by educational level. Graduates who rank in the middle or lower positions may lose their competitive edge in the first stage.
Finally, in a fun one on urbanism, , known as the , writes how Disney is now one of the largest transit operators in the country. Since I live near Disneyland, I always find it ironic that the park is a walkable, transit-rich paradise while the surrounding area is a car sewer.
Cities like Atlanta, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas, and the Twin Cities all have lower transit ridership than Disney World. Even Orlando’s entire metro area sees only one-fifth of Disney’s transit ridership— 20%!'
I’ve seen a number of colleges/universities celebrating their newly attained R1 status in press releases recently. In the college admissions trenches, Carnegie classification isn’t something high school students or their families are explicitly looking for. If anything, they’re more interested in undergraduate research opportunities, which can often be more plentiful at non-R1s. And I can’t help but wonder how long any R1 will retain their categorization, given the current battle over federal agencies’ research funding.