I’ve been spending a lot of time in hotel rooms and airports lately, with not much better to do than sit and surf the web. The consolation is that I’ve come across a number of very interesting small gems from south of the border which are worth a gander:

1. Matt Yglesias had an interesting recent post on how the economics of Arts faculties differ from the economics of STEM faculties. Basically, because graduate students in the sciences are so valuable in the lab, professors don’t like wasting their time doing what arts graduate students do – teaching, marking etc. As a result, they have a lot of incentive to fail marginal students and discourage students from taking science electives. Hence, the emphasis on STEM research may actually be a hindrance to pumping out STEM graduates. Thought-provoking.

2. In a related story, the Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece a couple of months ago on why students are avoiding STEM subjects. The upshot is that Yglesias is right, plus STEM careers don’t pay as well as managerial ones.

3. Education Sector’s Kevin Carey – who is bar none the most consistently right-on policy analyst in America and also a great writer – had a wonderful post in December about the notion of excellence in community colleges. We often argue about which university is the best, but we don’t do the same for community colleges: why not? Newbie ministers looking for a cheap but potentially quite important and far-reaching initiative could do worse than copy the Aspen Prize.

4. Former Harvard President Larry Summers had a noteworthy piece about the future of the university curriculum in the NYT a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be returning to a couple of his arguments in more detail soon, but I think two of his points are really worth noting. The first is that as the world of work grows more collaborative, the emphasis on individual work in college probably needs to go – as he puts it, “school is the last time (most people) will be evaluated on individual effort.” The second is that there needs to be an increasing emphasis in all fields on data literacy, probability statistics and decision analysis. Summers’s conclusion that there will be more change in higher ed in the next quarter-century than in the last three combined seems unlikely to me, but the points he raises about curriculum are worth pondering.

5. For those of you (like me), who just like books on shelves, take a look at this slideshow of the world’s 25 most beautiful college libraries. Sweet.