Fun Fact Friday: October 6th 2017

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KBIC Higher Education Practice is dedicated to providing you breaking news, industry data, resume and cover letter help, job search tips, and interview prep throughout the week. As we look towards the weekend, we’d like to help you wind down your week with fun facts about education, universities, and schools.

 

  • Black children are much more likely than white children to be enrolled in low-quality day care. High-quality day care facilities have been shown to have long-lasting effects on a child’s education.[14]
  • Black students entering kindergarten for the first time score lower than their white peers in every category tested. The gap persists throughout their schooling.[9]
  • Regarding the SAT, black students had a mean score of 428 for critical reading and 428 for math. In contrast, white students had a mean score of 527 for critical reading and 536 for math.[9]
  • Black students make up 16% of U.S. school enrollment, but make up 32% of students who receive in-school suspensions, 42% of students who receive multiple out-of-school suspensions, and 34% of students who are expelled.[9]
  • The University of California at Santa Cruz has as its mascot a banana slug. The slimy mascot is named Sammy the Slug.[2]
  • According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only 53% of children ages 3 to 5 were read to daily by a family member. Children living below the poverty line were less likely to be read aloud to every day. Children who are read to frequently are more likely to count to 20 or higher, write their own names, and read or pretend to read.[11]
  • There are over 4 million 18-year-olds in the United States. About 3.5 million of them will go to college. Just 100,000–150,000 of those (3%) will go to selective schools that admit fewer than half of their applicants.[20]
  • Approximately 44% of billionaires, 55.9% of Forbes’ most powerful women, and 85.2% of Forbes’ most powerful men attended elite colleges.[24]
  • Studies show that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. In other words, getting into Princeton isn’t as important as being the type of person who could get into Princeton.[20]
  • Poor students with practically the same grades as their wealthier classmates are 75% less likely to apply to selective colleges. However, 40% of the top-performing students come from the poorer half of the country.[29]
  • Uneducated girls are four times more likely to have child before their 19th birthday than those with a secondary education.[28]
  • More than 1/2 of the global low-literate population can be found in the regions of South and West Asia.[28]
  • Researchers note that a graduating Japanese high school senior has the education equivalent to an American second-year college student.[13]
  • An American curriculum offers almost equal importance to mathematics, science, English, humanities, and other forms of the arts. A Japanese curriculum, on the other hand, specializes more in mathematics, science, and technology.[13]
  • Harvard and Stanford turn away about half of their applicants who score 800 (a perfect score) on the SAT.[20]
  • American students who are in the top 10% in the United States still perform worse than the top student performers in 15 other countries, including Germany and the Republic of Korea.[8]
  • The United States has the widest gap of any country between the achievement of those in the top 10% and those in the bottom 10% of performance.[8]
  • Though a higher proportion of U.S. millennials earned a college degree than those in other countries, those with a 4-year degree in the U.S. still had lower math skills than any other country except Poland and Spain.[25]
  • Former Apple, Inc., founder and CEO Steve Jobs criticized the National Education Association (NEA) and other teacher unions. He believed that their reluctance to remove “bad” teachers and their lack of support for voucher programs stifled education.[7]
  • While these lists are always in dispute, the top 10 best-selling books of all time are 1) the Bible, 2) the Qur’an, 3) Xinhau Dictionary (Chinese Dictionary), 4) The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 5) The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, 6) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling, 7) And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, 8) The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown, 9) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling, and 10) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling.[26]
  • Books that have been repeatedly banned in the United States include 1) 1984, George Orwell, 2) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 3) The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 4) The Color Purple, Alice Walker, 5) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 6) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, 7) Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 8) Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, 9) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, and 10) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.[6]
     
  • Black students make up 16% of U.S. school enrollment, but make up 32% of students who receive in-school suspensions
  • About 12% of black students are held back in 9th grade, while just 4% of white students are. Black students are nearly three times more likely to be held back as their white peers.[9]
  • Kermit the Frog received an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters on May 19, 1996, from Southampton College, New York. He also gave the commencement speech.[15]
  • The countries in the world that have the most people with a tertiary degree include 1) Russian Federation, 2) Canada, 3) Japan, 4) Israel, 5) United States, 6) Korea, 7) Australia, 8) United Kingdom, 9) New Zealand, and 10) Ireland.[12]
  • Countries that have 100% literacy rates include Finland, Greenland, North Korea, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, and Vatican City.[18]
  • Stephen Colbert noted that Common Core testing “is preparing students for what they’ll face as adults: pointless stress and confusion.” Common Core is the largest-ever attempt in the U.S to set unified expectations in education.[27]
  • “Vellichor” is  the strange wistfulness of used bookstores.[1]

Author:  Karin Lehnardt

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