Friday Round Up 5/18/2012
It’s a beautiful day in New York and it should be a nice weekend as well. I hope everyone else is experiencing good weather for the weekend!
Is the Master’s Degree the New Bachelor’s Degree?
This article highlights how many careers that previously required only a bachelors degree are now seeking out applicants that have an MA as well. Why is this? Some believe that with so many students going to undergraduate school we now have a “glut” of what were previously thought to be qualified workers. One can debate, does an increase employees holding a Master’s Degree mean that we now have a more competitive workforce, or instead, that the undergraduate degree has become “dumbed down”? Another issue to consider is the fact that the average MA student has a debt of $30,000 by the time they receive their degree.
Degrees of Debt: A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College
Speaking of debt, last Friday the New York Times published an interesting and comprehensive series that explores the experiences of recent college undergraduates faced with student loan debt. I found the most interesting part to be the interactive graphic showing the rapid increase in college tuitions and student loans since 2004.
A Focus on Brain Development, Relationships Pays Off
This article shares studies done by Dr. Charles Zeneah, who collaborated on Neurons and Neighborhoods, a seminal book that studies the importance of a mothering figure for the development of an infants brain function. An infant actually needs to be “the apple of someones eye” in order to develop the healthiest form of brain function. The study uses a 15 month old infant, pseudo-named “Harold” who is put into an overcrowded home with a busy foster mother. He is unresponsive to most interactions and only moves at a slow crawl. At 18 months old Harlod had been put into a new foster home with a caring foster mother for only 6 weeks. In that short time he began to verbalize, walk and smile. Good mothering (by father, mother or another loving figure) can reduce the population of people in special education programs and even prison. I found this article incredibly fascinating.
A Way Up for Women in Business
Different MBA programs across the globe are working to mentor women to apply, complete and succeed after business school through women lead support networks. The Rotterdam School of Management offers an intense Mount Kilimanjaro MBA leadership course for women only, designed to help bring female leaders to learn and rely on one another as they hike rigorously for 9 days. The Fordham Graduate School of Business informally pairs female applicants to follow a female MBA student from a similar background on a day of classes. The Global Society of Women in Business provides links to all different resources and services for women looking for mentoring or partnerships in business. The GMAT entrance test estimated that 34% of their 2011 global applicants to a 1 year full time MBA program were female. Hopefully we will begin to see an increase in incoming years.
