QTRS Feb 20, 2025

Graphs and interesting content for the curious

As I see it…

Title VI states, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This seems easy enough to agree with and fairly clear, yet the “dear colleague” letter from the Department of Education this past week is all the buzz because apparently Title VI is not clear.

If you don’t live in the higher ed ecosystem, you may not be aware of this letter, and so here is the second paragraph to get a sense of it.

In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families. These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia. For example, colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming. In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.

This, not surprisingly, has created a bit of a stir in higher ed this week. For example, Inside Higher Ed published After Sweeping Anti-DEI Guidance, What Should Colleges Do? (2/18/2025) and the Chronicle of Higher Education published Ed. Dept.’s Broad DEI Warning Puts College Leaders in ‘Enormously Complicated Situation’ (2/18/2025).

As I see it, much of higher education lives in such a bubble that they can’t critically reflect on their actions, despite all their claims about teaching critical thinking skills. In the Insider Higher Education article, you’ll find quotes such as “the letter was ‘truly dystopian.’” and “the letter itself sets out legal principles well beyond established legal precedent.” Then there is this paragraph:

Coleman said that some of the letter’s targets, like race-based scholarships, could be subject to OCR investigations that might hold up in court depending on the details of a case. But he believes other targets, like cultural centers and DEI programming, are more securely protected by established precedent.

What you won’t find in the article is an argument that the targets of the dear colleague letter are legal. There is plenty of bluster and generally opinions but little in the way of legal argument. At the same time, you wonder if any of the folks have heard of Mark Perry, who has been challenging exactly what the letter is addressing (7/11/2023) and winning in many cases. Mark Perry isn’t the only person doing this, as we have a Cornell law professor doing the same, including a case against our local school system (2/7/2024).

The Chronicle article is a little less one-sided, but consider this quote (bold mine):

To Scott Schneider, a higher-education lawyer, that could put college presidents in a difficult dilemma: get rid of anything that hints at DEI and spare their federal funding, or align with their campus community that may want leaders to support initiatives they perceive as creating a healthy, inclusive environment.

The perception here goes back to higher education living in a bubble. So, is it ok for higher education to ignore Title VI because of a perception? I might say ok if there were facts to back up the perception, but for the most part they don’t really exist. For a primer on this, listen to the College Matters podcast Unwinding DEI: Part II (2/11/2025).

In a deeply reported article for The New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Confessore cast doubt on the effectiveness of one of the nation’s best-funded DEI programs. Titled “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong?,” Confessore’s article added fuel to a debate over whether DEI programs are meeting their stated goals or actually making campus climates worse.

At the same time, much of higher education is anything but inclusive, as it is clearly antagonistic against about half the country that doesn’t have the “correct viewpoints.” This is hurting higher education in many ways, but generally they are telling half the country we don’t like you, so don’t come here. Of course, they don’t see it from their bubble.

What makes this worse is that it is largely unnecessary. All they really need to do is shift the focus to socio-economic class instead of race. It would not run afoul of Title VI and would still disproportionately help minority students, which is largely their goal. It would also be far more inclusive and would be viewed more positively across the country. What I think holds them back is a blind hatred of the right and a religious devotion to DEI.

Meanwhile, if they are going to hold their current path, they need to start making legal arguments supporting their actions, which I would like to hear, because their values may be illegal, as well as provide evidence their programs are having a significant positive impact. I’ll be making lots of friends with my colleagues today.

Love to hear your thoughts on this (before you unsubscribe). Now let’s get to some data.

Correlation isn’t causation

The BLS article Unemployment 4.5 percent for high school grads with no college in January 2025 (2/19/2025) with the graph below can be easily misconstrued. Is getting a degree causing lower unemployment, or might there be a confounding variable (take that stats course)? This is not a random sample, as those who choose to go to college overall likely have different attributes, such as motivation, organizational skills, discipline, etc. The better comparisons would be between people that invest in their futures, of which college is only one path, and those that don’t. Right now I think too many high school grads are going to college under the assumption that just getting the piece of paper is a guarantee for more income. The activist wanting student loan forgiveness exists because it didn’t work out so well for many students.

Liberal women are more lonely

Here is another study (2/13/2025) with a result that liberal women are, in some ways, worse off. There are two graphs. The first report presents these results:

Young liberal women are markedly less satisfied with life than their conservative peers. Specifically, we found that 37% of conservative women reported being “completely satisfied” with life, whereas only 12% of liberal women did. Young conservative women are three times as likely to report being very satisfied with life compared to young liberal women.

The second is this graph. Who knows what is causing this, but given what goes on in higher education, I wouldn’t be surprised if that plays a role here. Yeah, I’m making lots of friends with my colleagues today.

Nuclear on the rise

The IEA has a lengthy report, The Path to a New Era for Nuclear Energy (Jan 2025), from which I’ll post this one graph and consider it encouraging, as well as this quote:

Demand for electricity is rising fast, not only for conventional uses such as light industry or air conditioning, but also in new areas such as electric vehicles, data centres and artificial intelligence. Electricity use has increased at twice the rate of total energy demand over the past decade and is set to extend this lead as the world enters a new Age of Electricity. Nuclear is a clean and dispatchable source of electricity and heat that can be deployed at scale with round-the-clock availability. It brings proven energy security benefits to electricity markets as well as reductions in emissions, complementing renewable energy. Interest in nuclear energy is at its highest level since the oil crises in the 1970s: support for expanding the use of nuclear power is now in place in more than 40 countries. Moreover, innovation is changing the nuclear technology landscape, including many small modular reactor (SMR) designs under development; the first commercial SMR projects are set to start operation around 2030.

On the cause for concern side, I’ll note from the eia (1/30/2025) that the U.S. imports nearly all of the uranium we use but

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently received $2.7 billion in congressional funding to help revive domestic fuel production for commercial nuclear power plants.

NASA video

The NASA Visualization Studio produces some neat stuff. Here are all 2024 hurricane tracks in under 4 minutes. I didn’t realize how far east many of them start.

Graph of the week

This one is from the paper Global water gaps under future warming levels (1/30/2025) and is both interesting and terribly done. The goal is straightforward, and that is to quantify water gaps, “the shortfall where water demand exceeds supply, resulting in scarcity.” They do this for current water use and under future warming climate scenarios. Before looking at the graph, a few notes. A positive water gap is bad in that a country’s water use is exceeding supply. For example, by draining an aquifer. The x-axis on the graph is reversed. The more to the left, the bigger the gap. Why? I don’t know, but it is bad form. The x-axis is also a log scale, meaning that as you read from right to left, the gap grows much faster.

In general, the water gap gets worse with more warming, but because of the log scale, it is hard to tell how much. In many cases, it is very little, which I found surprising. In fact, some places, like Nigeria, are better off. In other cases, the range is so big, Indonesia; it could go either way. All worth noting, and please don’t ever reverse the x-axis.

Data center update

Amazon aims to develop a data center in "each county between Northern Virginia and Richmond" (2/18/2025)

The spinning CD

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Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations. I welcome any collaborations.