Prestigious Schools Research Articles

Priscilla Maltby Mayden, AHIP, FMLA, 1918–2011

Priscilla Maltby Mayden, AHIP, FMLA, 1918–2011

Does the Lack of a Profit Motive Affect Hiring in Academe? Evidence from the Market for Lawyers

AbstractThe comparative performance of academic and economic markets continues to be debated. One factor potentially distinguishing academic markets is the profit motive. Profit and competition have been shown to curb discrimination in markets, and the absence of profit discipline could result in myriad forms of prejudice in academic hiring. We explore the role of the profit motive in the performance of academic markets by comparing the pedigree of employees of top law schools and top law firms. Top law schools are much more likely to employ graduates of top ranked law schools than elite law firms, and the difference exists at both the junior and senior levels. We find no evidence that the graduates of top 5 law schools outperform grads of less prestigious schools in publications or citations. In the absence of a profit motive, academic hiring appears more likely to indulge a preference for pedigree, and by implication, this may explain other scholarly prejudices in the academy.

Generalist or specific studies for engineering entrepreneurs?

PurposeFrench engineering students are traditionally reluctant to envisage entrepreneurship. Can a new engineering school aimed at fostering entrepreneurship reverse this trend? The purpose of this paper is to compare the development of engineering students' entrepreneurial intentions and perceived career orientation of the prestigious engineering training schools (Ecole Centrale de Lille) and ITEEM, whose curriculum is dual (engineering+management), new and based on active pedagogies.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on qualitative analysis of 12 in‐depth interviews and quantitative longitudinal analysis of data obtained from a questionnaire administered each year to all students from both schools.FindingsResults show that ITEEM fosters students' entrepreneurial and project management careers, whereas Centrale promotes the traditional technical model of an engineer. Family background of students is close in both schools. Level of entrepreneurial intention at enrolling is higher at ITEEM than Centrale but cannot fully explain why entrepreneurial career orientations decrease at Centrale while they increase at ITEEM. On the other hand, perception of school culture is weak at Centrale and strong at ITEEM and this difference is significantly with regard to the development of students' career orientation. Qualitative interviews indicate that both cultures highlight different elements.Research limitations/implicationsThe cultural element can then be proposed as a new factor to take into account when studying the impact of entrepreneurship education. However, this result is based here on a simple measure of school culture perception and qualitative interviews. It should be confirmed by a more detailed quantitative analysis of cultural and organizational characteristics of educational institutions.Practical implicationsEngineering schools can foster entrepreneurial orientations if their educational culture is perceived as new and innovative by students. This can be achieved through a new curriculum based on a wider set of courses (management, entrepreneurship and engineering) and the systematic deployment of active pedagogies such as project work and internships. A new question arises: can such a perception of innovation be maintained over time?Originality/valueIn the theoretical literature, culture is considered to be an essential element that can have an impact on entrepreneurial career aspirations and intentions. But as yet, no empirically based study had been carried out to prove it.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934)—her life and discoveries

Maria Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7 November 1867, the fifth and youngest child of well-known teachers Bronislawa and Wladyslaw Sklodowski. Maria’s older siblings were Zofia (born 1862), Jozef (1863), Bronislawa (1865), and Helena (1866). Maria’s grandfather Jozef Sklodowski had been a respected teacher in Lublin [4]. Her father Wladyslaw Sklodowski taught Mathematics and Physics, subjects that Maria was to pursue, and he also was the director of two Warsaw high schools for boys, in addition to lodging boys in the family home [28]. Her mother, Bronislawa, operated a prestigious Warsaw boarding school for girls. She suffered from tuberculosis and died when Maria was twelve. Maria’s father was an atheist and her mother a devout Catholic [15]. Two years earlier, Maria’s oldest sibling, Zofia, had died of typhus. The deaths of her mother and sister caused Maria to give up Catholicism and become agnostic [30]. When she was ten years old, Maria began attending the boarding school that her mother had operated when she had been well; next Maria attended a junior high school for girls, from which she graduated with the gold medal on 12 June 1883 [7]. She spent the following year in the countryside with her father’s relatives, and later with her father in Warsaw, where she did some tutoring. On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes because of their patriotic involvement in the Polish national uprisings. This condemned each subsequent generation, including Maria’s and her siblings’ to a difficult struggle to get ahead in life [4]. At Published in the special issue Radioanalytics—Dedicated to Marie Sklodowska-Curie with Guest Editors Boguslaw Buszewski and Philippe Garrigues.

Dentalisation as regional indicator in General South African English: An acoustic analysis of /z/, /d/ and /t/

Drawing on Bekker's (2007) study on the dentalisation of /s/ among young middle-class females from Johannesburg, this research aims to test whether the other traditionally alveolar oral obstruents, namely /z/, /d/ and /t/, are similarly fronted. The speech of two groups, one consisting of five females from prestigious private schools in Johannesburg and the other consisting of five females from similar schools in Cape Town, was recorded and the data analysed acoustically. For /z/, a spectral moments analysis was employed (Jongman, Wayland & Wong, 2000), which examined four parameters: centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. For /d/ and /t/, a metric established by Jongman, Blumstein and Lahiri (1984) was used, one which involves calculating the ratio of the root mean square (rms) amplitude at the onset of voicing against the rms amplitude of the stop burst. Results support the hypothesis that /z/ is dentalised by Johannesburg speakers, but do not support a similar hypothesis for /d/ and /t/.

Cognitive Enhancement: Promises and Perils

The potential use of drugs to enhance cognition, emotion, and executive function has engendered controversy despite the fact that few such agents exist today. Here, I provide a context for discussions based on medical, regulatory, and ethical concerns that have been raised by the possibility that enhancers will emerge from current efforts to discover drugs for neuropsychiatric disorders.

Letter to the editor

I agree with Raymond E. Floyd (“The way I see it: Lecturers versus research professors,” IEEE Potentials, November/ December 2010) that the idea of learning under a research professor is amazing. It seems as though you'll be contributing to the field as his/her underling before you even graduate. Oftentimes the more prestigious school are the universities where professors are advancing the field. However, the reality of being an undergraduate at a research school might not entail all the experiences it appears to offer. Undergrads are taught a professor-approved lesson by the graduate students and have little to no contact with the actual professor or his/her research.

Max Ascoli and Italian intellectuals in exile in the United States before the Second World War

Max Ascoli, an Italian Jew from Ferrara, came to the United States in 1931 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and soon became one of the most important figures among the Italian intellectuals in exile in America at that time. The author of numerous books on the philosophy of law, from the early 1920s he was in contact with the principal antifascist groups in Italy and wrote for many antifascist journals. After reaching the United States, Ascoli was offered a position at the prestigious new School in New York where he joined many of the leading social scientists and economists who had been forced to flee from Europe. Ascoli went on to hold important positions at the New School, where his own intellectual interests shifted towards the political sciences. In addition to his new intellectual pursuits, Ascoli was very active in assisting other Italian Jewish intellectuals and scholars, and he played a leading role in the antifascist movement in the United States.

French opera, ballet and cantata

As 17th-century school operas go, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas may be the best known but it is certainly not the only one. In France, for example, Jesuit educators had already latched on to the popular appeal of opera. Within little more than a decade of Lully's establishment of the tragédie en musique in the 1670s they had adapted the genre to their own ends. Why, after all, should the Opéra have all the best tunes? It was for the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand, the most prestigious school in Paris, that Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote his ‘tragédie biblique’ David et Jonathas. The work was performed there in 1688, one year before Purcell's little masterpiece at Josias Priest's rather less august institution. Apart from its sacred theme, Charpentier's opera differs most strikingly from Dido in its extraordinary structure. Sandwiched between the prologue and each of the five acts was a five-act Latin tragedy...

Racial Desegregation and Schooling in South Africa: Contested Geographies of Class Formation

Much research on racial desegregation in South Africa uses residential data to track how richer black South Africans are moving from apartheid spaces to higher income suburbs; how racial privilege is giving way to class privilege. Drawing on geographers' relational conception of space and anthropologist Sherry Ortner's notion of a ‘class project’, in this paper I show the importance of geographies of schooling to class formation. The study tracks how schools and two groups—township residents and poorer shack residents—affect and navigate access to schools in Durban. Of importance to class formation, the study finds that children of relatively poor, but not the poorest, township dwellers can commute very long distances to attend prestigious schools. Consequently, racial mixing is more evident in South Africa's schools than in its residential areas—the opposite scenario to that found in many other countries. Yet children born to very poor residents of urban informal settlements face considerable barriers when trying to access well-resourced schools: although they are legally entitled to attend prestigious schools located close to informal settlements, they can often live with extended families hundreds of miles away in rural areas. This new geography of schooling leads to the marginalization of some children but the perception of, and potential for, intergenerational class mobility among a quite significant group of black South Africans.

Sweden Asks: Should Convicted Murderers Practice Medicine?

Most reasonable people acknowledge that Karl Helge Hampus Hellekant has committed a grave moral offense: the 33-year-old Swede, also known as Karl Svensson, was convicted of killing trade unionist Björn Söderberg in 1999 at the behest of the Swedish neo-Nazi movement. What is not so clear is whether Hellekant, who is currently free on parole, should be permitted to become a physician. The former extremist was admitted to the medical school at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute in 2007, but later expelled—following considerable public debate—after school officials discovered that he was temporarily unable to verify his academic records. Sweden’s most prestigious medical school, Uppsala, subsequently confirmed these records and matricatulated him in 2008.

Ashes (review)

Reviewed by: Ashes Hope Morrison Lasky, Kathryn. Ashes. Viking, 2010 318p. ISBN 978-0-670-01157-5 $16.99 Ad Gr. 7-10 Set in Berlin in the years 1932 and 1933, Lasky's latest historical novel follows Hitler's rise to power through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Gabrielle Schramm. The daughter of an astrophysicist (her father is in the same university department as Albert Einstein, who is a supporting character in the novel) and a pianist, Gaby leads a comfortable privileged life, attending a prestigious school and spending summers in the countryside. As the political climate begins to shift, Gaby, like the majority of those close to her, believes that Hitler is simply a passing fad, and that in a few months he will be forgotten and things will return to "normal," yet it gradually becomes clear that some of the people around her, even those dear to her, have become supporters of Hitler's message. It is a perspective not often presented in literature of the era, and Lasky does it deftly and with great historical precision. Additional appeal comes from occasional elements of mystery, most notably Gaby's sense that something is not quite right about her sister's boyfriend, and a colorful [End Page 342] cast of side characters. The novel is bogged down, however, by Gaby's somewhat abstract voice and considerable introspection; this in combination with the extensive historical detailing and lengthy descriptions of events makes for a weighty and emotionally distanced read that's likeliest to reward readers already possessed of a serious interest in this period in history. A lengthy author's note opens the novel, providing much-needed context for the story, and a list of key historical figures is appended. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Are they just lazy? Student teachers' attitudes about dyslexia

It is highly likely that teachers' abilities in dealing with different forms of learning difficulties will be affected by their knowledge about and attitudes towards those difficulties. Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) provides a useful framework within which to explore such attitudes and was used as the starting point for investigating trainee teachers' attitudes towards aspects of dyslexia. It is assumed that new teachers will enter the profession with a set of intentions according to personal beliefs, normative views within the teaching profession and the sense of competence and power they feel in dealing with dyslexic difficulties. The purpose of this study was to probe student teachers' attitudes at a prestigious School of Education in the Southwest of England. Four hundred and eight primary and secondary Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students responded to a survey asking about their attitudes toward dyslexia. The student teachers expressed strongly positive attitudes toward the construct of dyslexia, with the majority expressing confidence in their ability to support dyslexic pupils. Females held significantly more positive attitudes toward dyslexia than males, but there were no significant differences according to PGCE course subject. Students who took the survey before and after teaching practice demonstrated some small but significant changes in attitude scores over that time. It is proposed that a new breed of teachers may be entering the teaching profession with positive beliefs about their ability to help dyslexic pupils, but who remain unclear as to how this can be accomplished. Some implications for action and suggestions for future research are provided.

Looking at the Walter Rodney Papers: Atlanta, Georgetown and London

Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23,1942. Raised in a middle class family, he won a scholarship to enter the most prestigious local school, Queen's College in Georgetown. In 1960, he went to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica. After his undergraduate degree, he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London where, at the age of 24, he received his PhD with honours in African History. Rodney's thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.During his studies at SOAS, he travelled to Spain, Italy and Portugal in order to access archives about Guinea coast. In these countries, he made contact with anticolonialist movements, especially the Portuguese one headed by Amilcar Cabral.

The tail wagging the dog

The tail wagging the dog

Believing in yourself

Charlie Dark was one of only three black students attending the prestigious Alleyn's School in London. Nick Smurthwaite finds out about his schooldays

Social Inequality in Educational Participation in the German School System in a Longitudinal Perspective: Pathways into and out of the most Prestigious School Track

According to the selection hypothesis as well as the life course hypothesis, as children get older, the influences of social origins decrease progressively at educational branching points. Other approaches discuss the idea that some parental characteristics lose their impact during the educational career, while others gain importance like financial resources because of the increasing opportunity costs. This empirical analysis concentrates on Germany and especially on the drop-out process in ‘Gymnasium’, as this school track starts at a very early age and opens the way to an academic career. The database is the German Socio Economic Panel study (SOEP). First, we estimate the probability that a child will attend the ‘Gymnasium’ immediately after primary school. In a second step, we model dropping-out of ‘Gymnasium’ in the following years. Students are more likely to quit if their previous probability of entering the ‘Gymnasium’ was low. In accordance with the selection hypothesis, the influence of social origins seems to be weaker here than during the decision to enter this school type. We also find some evidence that parents become less important for the drop-out process as children come of age, while the rising educational costs do not seem to be a relevant factor.

JMG first symposium on emerging issues in management and governance

As announced in the previous Editorial, in this second issue of 2008 we are particularly proud to publish the papers and the respective discussions presented during the First Symposium organised by the Journal of Management and Governance and held at the Catholic University of Milan on 17th October 2007. This First Symposium was entitled ‘‘Emerging Issues in Management and Governance’’. The Symposium was organised as an additional event at the Annual Conference of the Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA). Many authoritative colleagues from prestigious schools and research institutions took part in the Symposium, including invited speakers Prof. Alnoor Bhimani (London School of Economics), Prof. Henry Tosi (University of Florida) and Prof. Randal Morck (University of Alberta). For each paper, the discussants were respectively Prof. Thomas Ahrens (Warwick University), Prof. Igor Filatotchev (City University of London), and Prof. Lorenzo Caprio (Catholic University, Milan). The first JMG Symposium was aimed at offering the participants the time and place to discuss emerging opportunities and the current challenges in the field of management and governance studies. We used the multi-disciplinary approach, which typically characterises our Journal, to develop the discussion. The invited speakers and discussants proposed their own considerations according to their own specific disciplinary perspective. This edition of the Journal is dedicated to the papers, the presentations of the discussants, the debate which emerged during the Symposium, and the reflections which followed during the 6 months of preparations for this issue of the Journal, in which we are pleased to publish the articles of these well reputed scholars and the respective commentaries. We are also proud to offer a greater arena of scientific debate, or rather that of our readers, including the following articles:

SEG—striving to serve interpreters

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with one of the most capable young geophysicists in my company, who mentioned that he was just getting around to joining SEG. This man has been actively working as a geophysicist since receiving his graduate degree in 2001, and had not been a student member of SEG. As our conversation explored the merits of SEG membership, it became clear to me that belonging to SEG had only recently become professionally and personally interesting (and advantageous) to him. I couldn't help but wonder why this might be so, especially since he had received his degree from one of the most prestigious technical schools in the U.S., and had spent time with other geophysicists who are SEG members and are very well known throughout our industry.

Transfer Access from Community Colleges and the Distribution of Elite Higher Education

admissions practices of the most highly selective colleges and universities of the United States are under scrutiny for their failure to enroll poor and working-class students (Douthat, 2005; Karabel, 2005; Klein, 2005). This negative attention has been spearheaded by findings reported in two important books examining the shortage of low-income students at the pinnacle of American higher education, Equity and Excellence in Higher Education by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin (2005) and America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, edited by Richard Kahlenberg (2004), as well as by research articles (e.g. Winston & Hill, 2005). In a chapter in the Kahlenberg text, for example, Carnevale andRose reported that only 3% of freshmen entering 146 highly selective institutions in 1992 came from the lowest quartile of a socioeconomic status (SES) index and about 10% came from the entire bottom half of the SES distribution (2004, p. 106). Demonstrating a highly skewed distribution of access, nearly three fourths (74%) of students enrolled at these institutions come from the highest SES quartile. Contributing further attention to the lack of socioeconomic diversity at elites, Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education began ranking prestigious schools according to their success or failure in enrolling financially needy students, as indicated by the proportion of the student body receiving federal Pell grants (Fischer, 2006a). findings of these studies have been widely reported (see, for example, Fischer, 2006a; Gose, 2005; Hong, 2005; Selingo & Brainard, 2006), inspiring headlines such as The chorus grows louder for class-based affirmative action (Gose, 2005). controversy raises substantial questions about the way in which valuable educational resources are distributed and the definitions of merit that prevail when elite institutions choose among numerous qualified candidates. Family affluence clearly affects what type of college a student attends or whether they go to college at all. This is shown, for example, by differences in college participation by high-and low-income students with medium-high preparedness--in other words, those who are not at the top of their class but are well qualified for college. Only 3% of wellqualified students from high-income families did not attend college, in comparison to 13% of those from low-income families. Well-qualified students from high-income families were also much more likely to attend a high-priced college than were their low-income peers (52% vs. 20%) (Hoxby, 2000, cited in Bowen et al., 2005, p. 87). Socioeconomic inequalities in college enrollments raise troubling issues for education in a democratic society. Providing students with the opportunity to enroll at a college appropriate for their level of academic ability, regardless of family circumstances, is a cornerstone of higher education policy (Bowen et al., 2005; Kahlenberg, 2004; St. John, 2003). Maintaining this commitment has become more challenging as per capita government funding for college operating subsidies and low-income student aid has declined (Archibald & Feldman, 2006; Trends in Student Aid, 2006; Weerts & Ronca, 2006). As the returns to a college degree have increased, so has demand (Education Pays, 2006), particularly for spots at highly selective colleges, whose graduates enjoy an even higher earnings premium than others (Eide, Brewer, & Ehrenberg, 1998). Students at elite colleges enjoy additional benefits as well, including a greater likelihood of degree completion and greater access tograduate and professional study (Carnevale & Rose, 2004). These benefits have spawned intense competition for enrollment at highly selective colleges, and the recent increases in socioeconomic inequities in access (Astin & Oseguera, 2004) suggest that upper-income students have successfully utilized their numerous advantages to win this competition. …