First cell phone

Our family just got our first cell phone (we’re late adopters of most technology, though we were early adopters of Macintoshes—I had one of the first model with 128k RAM).  The cell phone is not for my wife or me (neither of us likes talking on the phone), but for our son, who needs it to be a “prefect” on the school trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  The prefects have to keep tabs on a group of about 4 other kids who share the same hotel room and serve as a node in a phone tree if plans change. Last year there was a last-minute change of schedule moving one workshop 2 hours earlier, and the phone tree worked well for alerting all the students.

Because this is our first cell phone, we wanted one with low initial cost and no long-term contracts.  What we ended up with was a $30 phone and an AT&T $2/day plan, that offers unlimited minutes and texts and no monthly charges, but charges $2 for each day that the phone is actually used. Since he does not expect to use the phone much, we’re more worried about time we’ve paid for expiring (the $25 we prepaid will expire in 3 months, unless we remember to add more money before then). One nice feature of the AT&T plan is the lack of roaming charges in the US, especially as he will be using the phone mainly while traveling.

Since he is planning to use the phone only for the school trip and for emergency calls (like letting us know that he’ll be late because of a flat tire on his bike), we are paying for the plan.  If his use changes and he starts using the phone recreationally, he’ll be responsible for paying for the plan (and he’d likely change to a different plan, since $2/day is expensive if you use the phone every day, though cheap if you use it rarely).

Data transfer is very expensive at 1¢/5KB ($2/MB, $2000/GB), but we got a cheap phone (with a keyboard) which will not tempt him into much downloading (we hope). This plan cannot have a data plan added to it—we’d have to switch to a $25/month with an extra $15/200MB or $25/GB. At those prices it might be worth looking for a cheaper phone company.

If he goes to college with this phone (possible, but not very likely), he’ll probably take an iPod Touch with WiFi as well, so that he can do web browsing—most college campuses have pretty good WiFi coverage for students, though the coverage off campus would be poor to non-existent.  It’s possible that by then he’d want a smartphone, even if the contracts cost $70/month ($30 for 3GB, $40 for voice).

At lot of parents of college students on the homeschool-to-college email list have been recommending that college students take a phone with texting capability to college with them, even if they haven’t been using one in high school.  Not only are emergency alerts used on many campuses sent more quickly with text messages, but a lot of social organization seems to happen by text messages, as students don’t seem to rely on face-to-face meeting to arrange their lives any more. Now that my son has a texting phone, we’ll see if it makes any difference in how he does things.

 

College tours around LA

Sorry I’ve not been posting this week, but I’ve been on the road with my 11th-grade son around Los Angeles for science fair and college campus tours.

On Monday and Tuesday, we had the California State Science Fair, where he had a project in the math and software high school division, and I was judging in the math and software middle-school division.  He did not expect to win anything this year, as he had a fairly straightforward engineering project—the Arduino data logger that he wrote for my circuits class to use.  The project was well done for a high school student (comparable to some senior projects I’ve seen by college students), but not flashy in the way that science fair judges like. Indeed he did not win anything at state this year, but he was one of only 11 students who had been to state science fair 6 or more times—so he shows consistent quality and perseverance, even if he never wins the lottery that science fair judging often is.  The top math and software award at the high-school level this year went to a math project (not a software project), which is a bit unusual.  I did not read the poster for it in any detail, which I now regret, as it must have been pretty good to overcome the usual judging bias in favor of software.

The middle-school math and software category had a unanimous vote for the first-place project: an ambitious image-processing project with an interesting application and pretty good code (properly commented—a rarity at the middle-school level or even the high-school level).   The order of the next few projects was more strongly debated, but all of them were very good projects, and the order ended up depending more on the tastes and persuasive abilities of the judges than on the inherent merits of the projects.

Since we were down in Los Angeles for the science fair, we decided to extend the trip by 3 days to visit three colleges in the area: Caltech, UCLA, and Harvey Mudd.  [The science fair is right by USC, but that was not our list of colleges to visit—we've seen the campus often enough, and the academic program did not appeal.] Originally we had planned a west-to-east sweep (UCLA, Caltech, Harvey Mudd) to minimize the transit time, but Caltech was not doing tours on Thursday and Friday (preparing for their admitted-students yield event this weekend), so we changed the order to Caltech, UCLA, Harvey Mudd. To get from the science fair to Pasadena, we took a DASH bus, the red line (subway), and the gold line (light rail).  That used 2 different transit systems (LA DOT runs the DASH buses, and Metro runs the subway, the light rail, and all the other buses that we took on this trip).

I couldn’t find any reasonably priced motels or hotels near UCLA in my on-line searches, so we stayed one night in Pasadena and two nights in Claremont, with the UCLA tour sandwiched in between the 2-hour, 2-bus Pasadena-Westwood and 3-hour (bus, subway, train) Westwood-Claremont transits.  I had originally planned to take a taxi from UCLA to Claremont (a pretty expensive ride across Los Angeles), but my son wanted to include a Metrolink commuter rail link in the trip somewhere in our trip, so we ended up taking the Metro number 2 bus from UCLA to the red line, the red line to Union Station, and Metrolink to Claremont.  The subway and commuter rail portions were fairly pleasant, but the number 2 bus was so full that we felt guilty for having luggage—Metro probably needs to run more buses on that route during rush hour.

The LA transit system is usually maligned by the locals, who claim that it is so bad that they have to drive everywhere, but it seemed pretty reasonable to us—under-utilized, perhaps, but reasonably quick and with decent connections.  Of course, just about any local bus system will only provide about 10-mile-per-hour transportation, so bicycling is almost always faster, but that is an option that is seems very , very few people choose in Los Angeles.

OK, enough on transit, what about the 3 colleges?

At Caltech we had a very small tour group (just 3 prospective students) and a friendly, barefoot tour guide.  We were shown the Caltech “houses” and the guide talked a lot about Caltech traditions.  Some of the traditions (like the honor code) seem great, but a lot of the other traditions seemed to be based mainly on rivalry, competition, and mean-spirited pranks. The social activities mentioned (like the interhouse parties) seemed to be mainly competitive events also (which house could build the most elaborate set for their party).  We saw almost no students while on the tour, no classrooms, no professors—very little other than the houses and the outsides of buildings.  The campus seemed strangely deserted for a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the term.

The Caltech campus does have some nice-looking buildings, and there are supposedly a lot of Nobel prize winners around, but we didn’t hear much about students actually interacting with the professors—the impression was that the professors mainly kept their heads down and did research with their postdocs and grad students. My son had tried to arrange meetings with a computer science faculty member by e-mail, but the first one he contacted suggested he talk to someone else, and that person said he was too busy, but that my son should just wander down the hall and stick his head in an open door.  We ended up not talking to any Caltech faculty or even seeing any from a distance.

The one academic message that we got from Caltech was “physics”.  They teach physics at Caltech—occasionally they give it a different name (math, chemistry, computer science, engineering, … ), but when you look at the research interests of the faculty, it is almost all physics in different flavors.  My son likes physics, and would probably do ok at Caltech, but he has other interests as well, and Caltech does not seem to provide instruction or opportunities in them.  He also likes doing applied work more than theory, and Caltech (according to the student tour guide and what we could glean from the web) is very theory-oriented.  Caltech does have some theater that he could participate in, but their entire “theater and visual arts” program apparently fits in a small 2-story house and a shed at the corner of campus, and there was no one around on a Wednesday afternoon to get any information from.

UCLA was in many ways the opposite of Caltech.  It is a large, bustling campus, crowded with students the whole time we were there. Students walked or hung out in groups (very little wheeled transportation, because of the number of hills and stairs).  There did not seem to be many quiet places on campus (unlike Caltech, where the entire campus seemed to be silent).

The tour group we were with for a 2-hour walking tour was large—probably 15 students plus accompanying family members.  The tour guide showed us many buildings (including the insides of a nice library), but no residences (which are a 20-minute walk away from the academic buildings), and she told us about admissions and other generic information.  The campus tours seem to be entirely student run (the campus tours office is in the student government building and staffed entirely by students), rather than part of the admissions office.  The tour was pretty good, for a large, generic tour, and UCLA does have some nice-looking buildings (and nice-looking students, but I’m not supposed to notice that).

We had arranged a meeting with a CS faculty member, who told us about his classes and research. Undergrad computer science at UCLA has huge classes (60–80 in upper-division courses, and three times that in lower-division courses). The faculty member told us that he does not allow undergrads into his grad courses and that few undergrads get research opportunities.  He did not have numbers, but estimating from what he said, it sounds like only about 5% of CS majors at UCLA get involved in faculty research—an appallingly small number.  It sounds like it is hard for an undergrad at UCLA to get a first-rate computer science education, because they are so focused on pumping through huge numbers of OK students.

UCLA does have a great reputation in theater, so we went over to the opposite side of campus to find out whether a non-theater major could ever get roles.  We did not talk to a theater faculty member nor an administrator, but to a friendly group of theater majors.  They basically said that non-majors had essentially no chance of getting a role (or even tech work) in any theater department production—even the theater minors only got theater-appreciation classes, not acting classes.  They did say that there were some non-departmental theater productions, but that they knew almost nothing about them.  In short, it sounded like what my son wants (a really advanced computer science education with the ability to do a fair amount of acting on the side) is not available at UCLA.

I had expected Harvey Mudd to be similar to Caltech.  They both have reputations for being very techie schools with impossibly high workloads, and Harvey Mudd was started by someone with close ties to Caltech.  They both have a similar-sounding common core requirement and both have a very pure form of honor code (tests are unproctored take-home exams, with students responsible for timing themselves as well as following directions about whether notes and books are permitted).  There were a number of observable differences, though, even on a one-day visit:

• Harvey Mudd has some of the ugliest buildings I’ve seen on any college campus.  The concrete block buildings with “warts” make UCSC’s cast concrete bunkers look stylish in contrast.  It is clear that Mudd has not been investing in the amenities wars—there is no luxury here.  The interior of the dorms look a lot like the concrete-block dorms I lived in back in the early 70s at Michigan State, but perhaps even more crowded.
• The campus is small.  Our walking tour showed us every building on campus, including a walk through the main academic building, showing us classrooms, faculty offices, and even the wood shop and machine shop (which Mudders can use 24/7 once they have passed the safety training). The class in which students have to make a hammer to specifications from a chunk of wood and a chunk of metal seems like a good, practical course.
• The campus is flat, so wheeled transportation is common (bikes, unicycles, skateboards, long boards, and freeline skates seemed the most popular).
• The density of students was between that of Caltech and UCLA.  There were plenty of students around, but it was never so crowded or so loud as to be claustrophobic. A lot of the students were wearing geek T-shirts and seemed likely to be the sorts of kids my son would get along well with.
• Faculty were clearly visible—one physics professor even kibbitzed the tour guide as he was giving the explanation of the physics core courses.
• The admissions office gave my son a ticket for a free meal at the dining hall (and a reduced-price ticket for me).  We had lunch there, and the food was pretty good for a dining hall—more important it included several things that my son would eat on a regular basis.  We also noticed that several of the faculty ate there.  I don’t know if Harvey Mudd encourages the faculty to eat with the students (free lunch might do the trick, or the unavailability of other options), but it was good to see faculty and students in the same hall, even if at different tables.  I also noticed that none of the students were eating alone—almost everyone was in a group of 2 to 10 students. For a group of geeks, that is a rather astonishing bit of social engineering—I wonder how they accomplished it.
• My son was also given a list of all the classes meeting at Harvey Mudd this semester and invited to sit in on any of them.  Unfortunately, we were there on a Friday, so few classes were meeting (mostly long labs).  We sat in on one of the “choice” labs for a while, and saw mainly one-on-one mentoring by the faculty member, which was good to know about, but not very exciting to watch.
• Harvey Mudd does have an 11-course humanities, social science, and arts (HSA) requirement, about half of which has to be done at Harvey Mudd, with the rest usually being done at the other Claremont colleges.  It would be possible for him to do a theater concentration (5 theater-related courses), by taking the one Harvey Mudd theater course (simply titled “Shakespeare”) and 4 courses at Pomona.  Most of the Mudders take a fair number of courses at the other Claremont colleges—usually PE courses and courses in their HSA concentration, and cross-registration seems to be fairly straight-forward, since the Claremont colleges share a common registration system.
• There is an aikido course at Scripps that my son could take for PE—he’s not done aikido since he was quite young, but thinks that he would enjoy picking it up again more than most PE options.
• My son had made an appointment with a computer science faculty member and we had a good conversation with him about the Harvey Mudd requirements and opportunities in computer science.  All the computer science students have to do research or development projects and most do more than one (the senior clinic plus one or more summer research projects).  There seems to be enough depth in courses and research in the fields my son is interested in that the lack of grad courses is not really important.  Even the required common-core first course in computer science has an option for students sufficiently advanced in CS, so that he would not have to repeat stuff he’s already done.
• The tour guide talked a lot about coöperation, mentoring, and group projects—concepts that were independently brought up by the admissions officer and by the CS faculty member.  The group projects don’t seem to be the one-person project forced on a group that most middle-school and high-school projects are, but projects big enough to benefit from multiple people working on them.  They do practice pair programming in most CS classes, which will be a new experience for my son.

Although I had expected Caltech and Harvey Mudd to be very similar schools from what I knew before the visits, I ended up with very different impressions of them.  Caltech seems to be a competitive school with a physics-centric, theoretical focus, while Harvey Mudd is a cooperative school with an applied engineering focus.  My son will probably apply to both, since getting in is largely a lottery (they both have about a 10% acceptance rate and his test scores are only average for either school), but I think that he’d end up much happier at Harvey Mudd.  UCLA looks much less attractive (other than financially), but he’ll probably apply to several of the UC schools as he is much more likely to get into them.

We need low-cost colleges

In an opinion piece for the NY Times, My Valuable, Cheap College Degree, Arthur C. Brooks relates an anecdote of his own education: failing out of college his first year, taking a gap decade, going back to school through low-cost correspondence courses from various state universities,  eventually getting a PhD, and becoming a professor and president of a “Washington research organization”.  (I’d be more impressed if I thought he meant a biotech or computer research job in Seattle, but I fear he means a political hack job in DC.)

His anecdote sounds like a classic “self-made man” story, but is actually about the substantial state subsidies for college education that were available 40 years ago, and that are fast disappearing under the current political belief that government should pay for nothing but guns and people to use them (the state budget in California is heavily weighted toward prison guards and police).

I’m in basic agreement that college has gotten ridiculously expensive—I would welcome a low-cost college education for my son like the one I got back in the 1970s.  Unfortunately, I don’t expect to see state governments coming to their senses in time, and I may have to send my son to a private college to get an adequate education.  (Currently his short list of about 20 schools is almost equally divided between public and private colleges and universities, but most of the public universities are out of state, raising their costs to the same level as the private ones.)

I expect that my son’s education is likely to cost me 2 or 3 years of my salary as a full professor (and that’s pre-tax salary). I’ve been saving 10% of my salary each year for the past 16 years in order to be able to pay for that education for my son, so we should be able to do it without his going into debt, which is good, since I’ll probably be retiring while he’s still in grad school.

The fact that the ratio of college tuition and fees to professorial salary is so high tells me that the cost is not due to high salaries for faculty (and I’m one of the lucky tenured faculty—most colleges are dominantly hiring “contingent” faculty now, who have no job security, low pay, and no voice in the running of the institution).  Other studies have show that the cost of public universities has not changed much—it’s just been shifted from the state to the student. In particular, the socially desirable subsidy of tuition for low-income students is almost entirely born by “return to aid” funding from other students, not from endowments or state subsidies.

Private colleges have had enormous increases in costs: largely related to the debt acquired in the amenities wars and the obscene salaries they pay their administrators and football coaches (though not their professors, who are only slightly better paid than public-university professors like me).

I don’t see online education as being a major cost saver in providing decent quality education.  Massive lecture classes are the least effective courses at the university (though relatively cheap to offer) and MOOCs just amplify the problem.  Those completing MOOCs are mostly the older, highly motivated students who have always been fairly easy to teach—there’s not much evidence that MOOCs are at all effective at educating the run-of-the-mill students who are the current main target of college education efforts.

Where you get your BS in CS matters

I used to be a firm believer that only your final degree matters—if you get a PhD from a prestigious department, it doesn’t matter where you did your undergrad work.  My own history has lead me to believe this, as my Stanford PhD has been useful in opening doors that I don’t believe a Michigan State degree (my BS institution) would have.  But recently I’ve had cause to rethink this a little—where you do your BS does affect whether you go on to grad school, your chance of getting into a prestigious grad school, your chance of getting a fellowship to stay there, and maybe even your probability of finishing the PhD in a timely fashion. I got lucky in that my non-prestigious BS did not interfere with my getting into Stanford or getting graduate fellowships, but if I’d known then what I know now …

The Computing Research Association has recently released a report about where the CS PhDs in the US did their undergraduate work (thanks to Mark Guzdial for pointing me to it), and it is more lopsided than I thought:

Only one institution (MIT) had an annual average production of 15 or more undergraduates. Three other institutions (Berkeley, CMU, and Cornell) had an average production of more than 10 but less than 15. Together, these four baccalaureate institutions accounted for over 10% of all Ph.D.’s awarded to domestic students. The next 10% of all Ph.D.’s in that period came from only eight other baccalaureate institutions (Harvard, Brigham Young, Stanford, UT Austin, UIUC, Princeton, University of Michigan, and UCLA). In total, 54 (6.7%) of the 801 baccalaureate institutions accounted for 50% of the total Ph.D. production.

Of course, the top three institutions are the top three institutions in computer science by almost any measure (including size), so it is not too surprising that they produce a large number of BS students who go on to get PhDs.  Unfortunately, the report does not provide the rate of alumni going on to get PhDs in computer science by institution, but only in aggregate:

Fraction of bachelor’s graduates getting PhDs in computer science within 6 years, by type of baccalaureate institution. [figure copied from http://cra.org/resources/crn-online-view/exploring_the_baccalaureate_origin_of_domestic_ph.d._students_in_compu/]

It is clear that the research institutions send far more of their graduates on to get PhDs, but whether this reflects a difference in the goals of their students, the advising they get, or the quality of the education is unknown.

The report tries to get a proxy for quality by looking at how many students from an institution got NSF fellowships or honorable mentions in computer science.  Of course, this may reflect advising as much as it does educational quality, as many eligible students never apply for NSF fellowships.  The tilt towards research institutions is even stronger by this measure:

Approximately 80-90% of all awards were made to students who completed their undergraduate studies at research universities, which is somewhat higher than their representation (76%) in graduate programs overall.  Over the last ten years, students from four-year colleges received 10% of the GRF fellowships (they represent about 11% of students receiving a Ph.D.).  Students from master’s institutions received fewer than 6% even though they represent about 15% of the Ph.D.’s and 40% of all undergraduate degrees.

The report lists the top 22 institutions by number of NSF fellowships their alumni got in computer science (covering 51% of awardees).  Not surprisingly, the top 4 are MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and UC Berkeley (Cornell which was 4th in number going on to get PhDs was 11th in number getting NSF Fellowships—is that bad advising about applying for fellowships, or too theoretical an orientation for NSF?).   Interestingly, there is one 4-year school that makes it into the top 22 list for NSF Fellowships: Harvey Mudd, which beats out bigger schools like UC San Diego and UC Irvine (the only other UCs besides Berkeley to make it onto the top 22 list—UCLA doesn’t make the list).  A few other 4-year schools do respectably (Olin College of Engineering, Swarthmore, and Williams College), but most get just one or two students going on to get NSF fellowships in CS.

My son is currently a junior in high school and has expressed a desire to go to grad school in computer science, so we need to choose colleges to visit.  I don’t think we’ll have the time or energy to visit 22 colleges, but I think we should probably concentrate our visits on the colleges and universities that are sending kids on to grad school in large numbers and getting NSF fellowships for them—he is more likely to have the peer groups and advising he needs at such institutions.  Looking at the named institutions in the top 12 for production and in the top 22 for NSF, I get a pretty short list—only 10: MIT, Berkeley, CMU,  Cornell, Harvard,  Stanford, UT Austin, UIUC, Princeton, and University of Michigan.  We might want to add in some more West Coast institutions from the top 22: University of Washington, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, UCSD.

I don’t think we’ll visit all 14 campuses (Cornell is damned hard to get to—even worse than when I taught there 26 years ago, and UIUC is not much better), but at least this list is shorter than the other ones we’ve tried to compile, and we have prior evidence that these schools are good at getting many students on the path that he currently wants.  Harvey Mudd is the only small school on the list, and I wonder if we should add a couple of other small schools—Olin College of Engineering and Swarthmore, for example.  Of course, I don’t know when he or I will have time to visit colleges—we both have pretty full schedules this year.  He may have to apply to some without visiting them, and only visit if they accept him.

Guiding gifted kids in selecting career paths

I read Laura Vanderkam’s blog post, What to do if your kid wants to be an artist, about the difficulty of guiding gifted kids.  When kids have talents that could lead them to success in fields where success is very unlikely, how much do you encourage them?  The problem is not unique to gifted kids, of course.  Lots of parents see their kids as being particularly good at something (often sports or music) and wonder how much to encourage their child to pursue a career in the field, versus encouraging them to find a day job and pursue their talent recreationally.

For a kid with multiple talents, the parent’s job is even harder.  Which talents to do you support whole-heartedly, which do you encourage subtly, which do you subtly discourage?  (I’m assuming that there are no talents displayed that you want to forbid, though I could see that happening if a child showed talent for illegal or immoral activities.)

My son and I have discussed some (though not all) of his talents and interests.  The two that come up most often are his talent in computer science and in acting.  I’ve encouraged both, but favored the professional computer scientist/recreational actor combination, for purely practical reasons, as there are relatively few full-time actors supporting themselves purely by acting.  Since his interest is mainly in stage acting rather than movies, there is a lot more opportunity for amateur (unpaid) acting than professional.  He certainly has a love of acting, he’s maintained that interest for a long time (at least 11 years now), and he’s gotten pretty good at it.  But I don’t know that he has the singleness of purpose that would be needed for a professional actor.  Given free choice of nonfiction reading material, he’s more likely to read something about physics or computer science or linguistics than about acting or the theater.  He does not read scripts for pleasure or to analyze them, but just to learn his lines.  His knowledge of plays is pretty much limited to ones he has seen or acted in.

His computer science interest has appeared much deeper: in addition to programming classes and programming for fun, he also does a lot of reading about language features and computer science concepts.  He knows more about Python that I do, and has even explored modifying the Python byte code string produced by the compiler to do some tricky decorators. He’s also designed a few “esolangs“, esoteric computer languages whose main intent is to amuse computer scientists by their bizzareness.

Undoubtedly, when he goes off to college in a year and a half he will discover many other things to be interested in, and his interests may shift in unexpected directions.  But computer science is a good base to move to other subjects from, so I’m comfortable with advising him to start there as a good fit to his current interests, and use electives to explore other things that might interest him.

I think that he’ll be in a good position to make reasonable decisions while he’s in college, because home-schooling high school has been more like college than high school in many ways.  He has relatively few class hours a week (2 hours for Java, 3.5 for math, 2 for US history, 1.5 for writing, 1-2 for physics, 4 for theater, 1.5 for being a TA in a Python class), with most of his learning happening between classes.  His classes are scattered (4 different locations, with 4.6 miles between the most distant pair), and he sees different people in each class (except that his 2 theater classes overlap considerably in participants).

He is on his own for most of the day and has to manage his own schedule and transportation; there are no bells to signal class changes and synchronize students.  His courses are each taught in a different style, with some being almost pure group work (theater), some being almost entirely individual (Java), and others being a mix.  None of the classes is large (which is different from both high school and college experience for most students).  If he wants clean clothes, he has to do his own laundry, but food is provided for him without effort on his part (like being on a dorm meal plan, except that the cook is well aware of his idiosyncratic food preferences). Some aspects of college life will come as a bit of shock to him (like sharing a room), but the differences between what he now does and what he’ll do in college is less than for many students.