iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

To be clear, this is mostly a question. I know this sounds paranoid. But part of my brain also thinks it might be true, at least among the tech accelerationists.

000

Clearly there is also the “war on woke” that is driving this as well, and I think that is forefront for most of the administration. But the tech world clearly has a lot to gain here as well by destroying HE as it exists.

100

There is a fair amount of animosity against HE in the tech world for this reason. The notion that colleges are illegitimately occupying market space that should be open for digital badging and the like.

100

Carey’s so-called “university of everywhere” (really a University of Big Tech) hasn’t manifested as quickly as foretold. HE is potentially a big profit source, but you have to get the established institutions out of the way.

100

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

I just finished Kevin Carey’s The End of College (always trying to keep current!), and the juxtaposition with current events is jarring. This is probably paranoid, but do folks think the current assault on HE is partly Silicon Valley trying to strip it for parts?

100

I would love to watch Trump try to windsurf. I’m not even sure he can swim.

010

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Best way to boost educational attainment and reduce disparities in same: free college, or universal Pre-K?

000

I think the failing is that is keeps trying to return to the realist model that dominates sociology as a whole. The “hard world” of structure and interest and power and “action”. But the central insights about human intersubjectivity are inconsistent with this model, so they end up being ditched.

000

My experience reading sociology’s contributions to culture is simply that it is less valuable, nearly uniformly, than these other fields. It makes advances mostly when it imports insights - from anthropology, semiotics, cognitive science. It mulches these for a time and then spins its wheels.

100

The study of “culture” is, I think, the most difficult area of social research conceptually. It is also the most central. So many fields contribute - linguistics, anthro, biology, psych, philosophy. It is hard to get a handle on all. I have sympathy.

100

Reading McDonnell’s 2023 ARS article on cultural materiality. The lack of reference to Geertz, and the absence of engagement with anthropology in general, is deafening.

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

The most serious conceptual failing of cultural sociology is insisting that “action” and “meaning” are distinct.

000

Is there a good reason not to move to using the 12th grade NAEP as a college entrance exam?

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

a) because Musk’s target audience won’t see the fact checks, just the lies. We aren’t the target.

030

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

This would be funny if it wasn’t true. Or maybe it is still funny?

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I am taking a risk by saying this. But this whole thing was foreseeable, and the Left broadly failed to counter it. You can argue about what the mistake was, but it was ours. Not theirs. They don’t care if they are right. We do care if we are dead. And being right don’t matter if you’re dead.

000

I am suggesting that 1) we have some skepticism regarding the value of such aspirations, and 2) social media makes this temptation more universal. It is our version of becoming an “influencer”. But what happens when disciplines are led by aspiring influencers?

000

I don’t want to over-write the contrast. Being a public intellectual has long been a temptation for scientists. It involves personal appropriation of scientific credibility, and the turning it to the service of one’s moral goals. There have been such people since the late 1800s.

100

This can redound upon older channels of influence, as such people become editors of lead journals, and as journals seek to compete too for attention through social media.

100

If SM elevates certain kinds of performances, and the sorts of personalities likely to produce them, disciplines may increasingly value such actions and individuals positively. E.g. those able to self-position as charismatic “public intellectuals” whose authority is moral, not technical.

100

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I wonder to what degree our disciplines, and leadership within them, has been impacted by social media. Has social media become a parallel means of building influence alongside standard processes (like publishing in top blind-review journals)?

100

Thanks for such a thorough and generous reply! This has been something I have wondered about off and on for years. This will give me a good orientation to begin learning more systematically

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I am genuinely interested! Is the super population concept then only compatible with Bayesian practices? I see it used with frequentist methods quite frequently. I’m also not fully sold that Bayesian methods solves the convenience sampling problem. Can you suggest a good source discussing this?

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Thanks! Isn’t the existing world, then, a convenience sample (n=1) from a population of limitless size and unknowable features? If so, it is nonprobability sampling and inference isn’t allowable using standard reasoning. We yell at qual researchers when they do this sort of thing.

210

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I know that “superpopulations” let us use inferential tools with what are essentially big convenience samples (and even if you have one full population, it is a convenient sample relative to a larger population). Is this the only reason the concept has validity - because it lets us use our tools?

100

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Martin Trow’s “Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education” remains a gold mine of essential and prescient insights. Every time I reread it I am impressed anew.

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Editors: if an article doesn’t have the proper section - lit review, methods, results, etc - DESK REJECT. It isn’t your or reviewers’ job to explain such things. It wastes everyone’s time, including the authors.

000

Reposted by David Monaghan

Paul Bruno @paul-bruno.com · 18/01/2025

Firm-Specific Pay Premia and the Returns to Higher Education:Evidence from Community Colleges www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Completing an associate degree boosts earnings by 21%...Over a quarter of the returns to associate degrees stem from employment at higher-paying firms."

sciencedirect.com

Firm-Specific Pay Premia and the Returns to Higher Education:Evidence from Community Colleges

There is an increasing consensus that firm-specific premia are an important determinant of wages, but there is little evidence regarding their roles i…

032

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Tuition inflation occurred throughout higher ed sectors, and likely sectoral shifts influence each other. Price hikes among elite privates likely influence later actions of publics, and vice versa.

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

The book doesn’t present enough data to convince on either score, but that is a statement, not a critique. These are valuable enough as hypotheses. Both require long and detailed time series from across higher ed sectors. I would love to see such if they exist.

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Chris Newfield’s The Great Mistake makes two interesting and provocative arguments. 1) there is a feedback loop between tuition hikes and state disinvestment, but tuition hikes are causally primary, and 2) rising tuition is driven by a “rising standard of care” in pubic research universities.

100

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Imagine a world in which there were just a few formats, all accepted by all journals, with the choice of style being the author’s. Why not?

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

If anyone is a sociologist on the board of a non-ASA journal, PLEASE advise switching to APA formatting, or at least APA citation. ASA is redundant.

120

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Everyone should get vaccinated, for sure. But the Y axis scale is tiny. The decline is around 3pp.

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

If economists are in the wilderness, we sociologists are… exiled to another planet? I our case, my suspicion is that persistent radical posturing undermined our credibility and therefore our use

000

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Augustine is dialoguing with both Greek philosophers and scripture, because there was no science/religion dichotomy. When Augustine cites scripture, it isn’t to determine what Christians should believe, but as authoritative information on what is.

010

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

What is interesting is that of course no Christians today believe this, because we know today what is in the sky. Heaven is now assumed to be in another plane of existence. But that this was a major transformation of Christian cosmology in reaction to advances in knowledge doesn’t seem to be known

David Monaghan @dmonaghan.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

I’ve been reading Augustine’s City of God because I like to keep up on the latest research. Fascinating to be reminded that “heaven” at that time was literally the sky. There is a whole discussion about why resurrected bodies of saints wouldn’t fall to earth like other heavy bodies.