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A2A: Why did John Hopkins personally send me a letter to apply there but not my brother who has a higher SAT score?Some possibilities:When you were taking the SAT, you checked off the box to use the Student Search Service and your brother didn’t. According to the College Board (CB): “Student Search Service is a free, optional service that helps students start a conversation with colleges and scholarship organizations. If students choose to participate in Student Search Service, they agree to share their name, address, college interest, and Student Data Questionnaire responses with colleges, universities, and nonprofit scholarship and educational programs.” The CB charges a licensing fee (most people other than CB refer to this as “selling your information”, which CB denies, but that’s a whole other topic to discuss) to organizations who want to buy lists of student names they have compiled using various data. Thus, it’s possible your brother just didn’t check off the box giving CB permission to share his information and you did.Both you and your brother used the Student Search Service through CB, but you are making an incorrect assumption that the lists universities are provided are only based on SAT scores. Perhaps, your intended major, self-reported GPA, or interests on that Student Data Questionnaire were a better match for the data used to create the list John Hopkins purchased.The U.S. mail service has been a little bit questionable lately. For example, both my oldest daughter and I requested an absentee ballot to vote on the same day, records show that request was processed on the same day, but her ballot took three weeks longer than mine did to arrive via U.S. mail. Thus, one other possibility is that your brother was also sent marketing materials from John Hopkins and his just hasn’t made it to your house yet.

Too late — it already exists. All the scientific data show that homework has zero positive effect on academic achievement.But even if it helped, it would still be obnoxious. By requiring homework, teachers force parents into homeschooling their kids at night, instead of having a family life. Students need downtime as part of their day, every day, just as workers do.Besides, child labor laws should absolutely apply. School is a 7-hour-a-day job as it is, plus commute. If you lengthen that work day by three or four hours a night, you have a labor situation no union would stand for with adults — but bad educators think it's acceptable for children?There are good books about the evils of homework. Get copies for teachers and enlist them in the anti-homework movement — teachers hate homework almost as much as families do. If your parents are part of the lunatic group that thinks that their kids won't get in a good college without human-sacrifice levels of homework, make them read those books and let you have a life.You can individually go on a homework strike — but try to involve other students (and their parents), along with a short statement to local media. Wear a sign declaring that you are a no-homework zone. (Make sure everything is spelled correctly.) Make a short video and post it on social media. If a particular teacher or school is notorious for piling on the homework, name them.Post a sign on your lawn declaring your home to be a no-homework zone. You have a better chance of media coverage if there's a visual prop for a reporter's standup.Of course, if your school has a minimum homework requirement, enlist your parents in requesting a policy change: a zero homework maximum, or a rule that all assignments must be accompanied by a requirement that teachers provide enough class time for most to complete the assignment at school, where the teacher can provide help to those who are struggling —instead of expecting parents to do such tutoring.Once provided with the real data instead of the ludicrous ten minutes a night per grade “rule” that has spread without support of data, most teachers and schools gladly change the policy — with the exception of those who say, “but we have parents who demand more homework so they know their unloved children are working hard enough.” Those parents should be shown the data — and be told that they're free to hire tutors, if they dislike their children so much they want them to have no time off from their day jobs.All of this will be way more effective if you happen to be an A student.

It is absolutely not an easy job. I was a professor at two large public universities one of which is a Carnegie Level 1 Research Institution (the highest level) and is annually ranked among the top 5 public universities and among the top 20 public and private universities in the USA and my wife taught at a large community college, so I have seen a broad spectrum of college teaching situations. In my experience as a professor for 25 years at research universities, I found that it is an extremely demanding and stressful job (even after tenure). I usually taught 2 classes a semester, supervised a research group of graduate students and a post-doc, wrote research papers for publication, gave presentations at professional conferences, wrote proposals for research funding, organized the logistics for and was chief scientist and expedition leader during Research expeditions to the seas around Antarctica, the western Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Appalachian Mountains and Rocky Mountains, taught field courses in remote locations, was responsible for managing the financial accounts and making sure that multiple people were paid their salaries.I summarize it as saying that professors have the following jobs (with 2 to 3 of them consuming the equivalent of a half-time job or more at the same time), rather than the professor having just one job:During any semester I did most of the jobs listed below:Teacher,Scientist- Formulate new research questions and convert these into testable hypotheses, design experiments to generate data to test hypotheses, write proposals to obtain funding to actually conduct the experiments, conduct the experiments and collect data in the field and/or lab, analyze the data, report results of experiments orally at conferences and in written form via reports to funding agencies and professional papers published in peer-reviewed journals, repeatProfessional Writer,Editor- Serve as reviewer of manuscripts for various professional societies as well as review research proposals for various government and public funding agencies,Professional Public SpeakerLogistics Expert -Procure equipment and supplies for field and lab research, organize freight transfer by ship, truck, train, ship and air of research equipment and personnel to field research sites, handle complicated customs paperwork associated with shipping equipment,Manager and Mentor of people,Entrepreneur and Salesman- Procure research funding for field, lab and equipment expenses by writing proposals to grant agencies and corporations and recruiting new students,Admssions Officer - Annually review graduate applicationsAdministrator- Serve on a wide range of Department and University Committees.In addition to being woefully underpaid for the level of effort, time and expertise that is required to perform all of these tasks successfully, my colleagues and I also endured the insult of having our Masters graduates immediately take jobs that paid them 2 to 3 times as much per year in salary as we were paid for our decades worth of experience and knowledge. We are quite happy that are students are compensated well for their work and knowledge, but it is distressing that the public does not value the work that we do for the state. Our children do not even get a discount to attend the states public higher education institutions, so you would think that we would be compensated so that we could afford to send our children to college without having to take out loans. I enjoyed the job, but grew resentful of these inequities as anti-intellectualism grew in recent years and I experienced a decline in respect for authority and professors.I understand that the public is unhappy about the growing cost of tuition and education, but faculty are not the cause of this. Increasing cost cost are driven by universities feeling that they need to provide all types of unnecessary amenities and luxuries on campus in order to compete with peers for students. Fancy gyms, gourmet-style dining options and new student union building etc. are not critical to university function, but they are being implemented and are very expensive. During this same time period, the public has grown more selfish and is only willing to pay for items that they feel will benefit them directly and personally. Altruistic ideas like paying higher taxes so that our society benefits from having well-educated populace is unpopular. Consequently, there has been a steady decline in the amount of funding provided by state legislatures to fund higher education.At the same time, funds from another important revenue source for universities have also declined. The public and most students do not know that a huge proportion of the budget of many universities comes from the overhead that is paid to universities to support research grants. Unfortunately, there has been steady erosion in the size of the budgets of the various federal research funding agencies that are the sources of this research overhead. The reduction occurred as the cost of living increased and budgets did not keep pace and in some instances because of outright budget reductions. As a simple example of how this money gets to universities, a faculty member writes a proposal to a funding agency and earns a grant that requires $100,000 to complete the research, the faculty member must add between an additional 40 and 70% of that %100,000 to the budget of that grant proposal to cover the cost of access to buildings, lights etc. that are indirect costs to the university for hosting the research effort. The percentage that is added to the budget in indirect costs is negotiated between each institution and funding agency. The reality is that the once the indirect costs for the grant are received by the university, that money can be used to pay for any expense in its budget and it is. So what really happens is the 40–70% received in indirect costs is used to operate the university and becomes part of its annual budget. These indirect costs can account for as much as 60%+ of the university’s annual budget, with the contribution from the legislature being as low as 5% in some states, tuition accounting for 20–25% and gifts covering the remaining 10–15% of university operating cost. To put these numbers in perspective, during the first 12 years of my career as a professor, I was very successful in obtaining grant funding, and the amount of money that the university received in indirect costs off of my grants was quite a bit larger than my annual salary. Those grants also paid salaries to 4 to 6 graduate students each year (along with their tuition expenses), a post-doc’s annual salary and part-time income to several undergraduate students. During that that period I taught the same number of courses as all of the other faculty. In effect, during that period, I taught a full course load for free for the state, because my salary was compensated for by the research overhead that my grants brought into the university.Perhaps now some of you can understand why Research is so important at universities. Like everything else in the world, it’s all about money. Ironically, it was during this same period that legislators began cutting the state contributions to university budgets. Since funding was also declining at the research funding agencies, universities only had tuition increases and increased requests for gifts to use as a means to cover the budget short-fall created by reductions in the state contribution to university budgets. The increases in tuition angered the public and lead them to demand for more from universities. People began to focus on how many courses we teach and to criticize faculty for not working very hard (because the public does not understand how universities work). In response to the public outcry , the legislature put pressure on universities to focus more on teaching. Of course that pressure trickled down to faculty who are already stretched far too thin. Ultimately I feel that it all lead to reduced respect for faculty by the public and students.Is being a professor easy? Hell no, and not only is it not easy, faculty often are poorly compensated for it and do not receive the respect that their hard work should earn for them in the USA.