Feminist Friday: Why Are Women’s Colleges Disappearing?

In March, all-women’s Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced that it was no longer financially viable and would close its doors in August. The Class of 2015 would be the last to receive a Sweet Briar diploma. After a long legal battle, Sweet Briar will remain open, and some arrangements have been made to help the school’s finances.…

Sex and Reading

Goodreads recently published an infographic entitled “Sex and Reading: A Look at Who’s Reading Whom” with stats collected by 20,000 male users and 20,000 female users of the site. The takeaway is this: men and women each primarily lean towards reading their own gender. Yet those first two circles are troubling–only 20% of a female’s…

The Better Way To Learn

“It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -Albert Einstein Some people absorb a lot of information from reading textbooks and listening to lectures. And I’ll admit, I’m capable of learning using those methods. But hands-on application is my JAM.  For my audiology class, we’re learning about hearing screenings and audiometry to diagnose hearing loss. The…

Television’s Teachers

You can earn college credit by watching The History Channel? Well, sort of. A partnership between the History Channel and the University of Oklahoma has developed a 16-week, 3-credit college online course called “United States, 1865 to the Present.” It emphasizes the History Channel’s multimedia archives so that students can visualize U.S. history rather than…

Changing The Channel

Is YouTube the solution to the sex ed controversy? Every minute 100 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube. A likely majority of these videos are sneezing pandas and laughing babies, but a new trend is also emerging: using YouTube as a platform for sex education. Video genres on the site range from music…

The Trouble With Bright Girls

Women face a variety of external struggles in the workplace–undermining comments from chauvinistic bosses, dress codes based on women’s modesty, sexual harassment, fighting for equal pay and maternity leave, the “mommy track,” underrepresentation in STEM fields–but bright women face an additional internal struggle that starts from a young age. Psychologist Carol Dweck conducted a study of…

Prospective

I love prospective students. From my dorm window I can see the soon-to-be college freshmen huddling in small tour groups, listening to the obscure facts rapidly spewing from their guide’s mouth and trying to discern which slivers of information makes my college more special than any other medium-sized liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region.…

College as a Concept

My second semester of college has just started, and being back on campus has made me think about the college experience as a concept. I’m sorry, who decided that throwing together a bunch of confused sort-of adults into living, working, going to school, and partying in the same small space was the best recipe for…