Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Daily Wisdom: The Perils of Voluntourism

Rafia Zakaria argues that affluent Westerners who travel to the developing world to combine tourism and volunteer experiences need to rethink their approach–as well as the potential harm they’re doing. He writes:

If designer clothes and fancy cars signal material status, his story of a deliberate embrace of poverty and its discomforts signals superiority of character. As summer looms, many Americans — college students, retirees and others who stand at the cusp of life changes — will make similar choices in search of transformational experiences. An industry exists to make these easier to make: the voluntourism business.

A voluntourist is someone like Jack, who wishes to combine exotic vacation travel with volunteer work. For anyone interested in being one, a dizzying array of choices awaits, from building schools in Uganda or houses in Haiti to hugging orphans in Bali. In all of them, the operational equation is the same: wealthy Westerners can do a little good, experience something that their affluent lives do not offer, and, as in Jack’s case, have a story to tell that places them in the ranks of the kindhearted and worldly wise.

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Daily Wisdom: Is Segregation Reemerging in the South?

Sixty years after the landmark Brown v. Board decision, are segregated schools making a comeback in the United States? Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones from ProPublica argues that it is:

Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore—the city’s white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

 

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Daily Wisdom: The Confidence Gap

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman argue that there is a profound gap between men and women when it comes to confidence, a gap that leads women to play fewer sports, get fewer promotions, and stop themselves from achieving at the highest levels. They write:

“When people are confident, when they think they are good at something, regardless of how good they actually are, they display a lot of confident nonverbal and verbal behavior,” Anderson said. He mentioned expansive body language, a lower vocal tone, and a tendency to speak early and often in a calm, relaxed manner. “They do a lot of things that make them look very confident in the eyes of others,” he added. “Whether they are good or not is kind of irrelevant.” Kind of irrelevant. Infuriatingly, a lack of competence doesn’t necessarily have negative consequences. Among Anderson’s students, those who displayed more confidence than competence were admired by the rest of the group and awarded a high social status. “The most confident people were just considered the most beloved in the group,” he said. “Their overconfidence did not come across as narcissistic.”

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Daily Wisdom: Are the ACT and SAT Useless?

Former tutor John Katzman makes the case that they are:

Since then, I’ve assumed that the SAT and ACT would simply disappear as people realized just how useless they were. Yet 30 years later, we still rely on them. The College Board and ACT add over $500 million a year to the cost of applying to college. They pay their CEOs high, six-figure sums and generate $100 million in profits annually. Since the utility of the tests is largely limited to the 800,000 high-achieving students headed to selective schools, these organizations are costing each one of those students a $1,200 fee—and that’s before the additional expense of test prep.

These organizations continue to exist because they themselves are not held accountable for good college matches (32% of college freshmen will end up transferring and 41% will drop out) or for the expense and stress they manufacture. And because there is no way to judge them, people are inclined to believe The College Board when it makes breathless announcements about changes to the SAT that will supposedly make them more relevant and useful.

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Daily Wisdom: Think College is Expensive? Try Day Care

According to the Washington Post, the annual cost for day care in 31 states is higher than the cost of a year of tuition and fees at in-state college:

A report last fall by Child Care Aware America, a national organization of child-care resource and referral agencies, found that the annual cost of day care for an infant exceeds the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states. The biggest gap is in New York, where day care will set you back nearly 15 grand, but in-state college tuition is only $6,500 — a difference of over $8,000. Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado and Oregon also have large gaps, driven primarily by the high cost of day care in those states. At the other end of the spectrum is South Carolina, where in-state tuition is higher than the cost of day care by about $4,000 a year.

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