QTRS Jan 16, 2025

Graphs and interesting content for the curious

As I see it…

Higher education gets accused of being heavily left biased and indoctrinating students more than educating them. When I see courses advertised with

How should we interpret and resist abortion bans and anti-LGBTQ legislation? What does intersectional politics look like? How do gender-, sexual orientation-, race-, class-, ethnicity- related power relations impact our day-to-day life? Should we seek police and prison reform or abolish these institutions?

I cringe as there is nothing balanced here, and it is hard to argue against these accusations. I come to the same conclusions when reading articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Consider the article Private-College Presidents Brace for a Year of ‘Conflict’. Here are some highlights.

Many of the presidents feel their sector is deeply misunderstood and under pressure from constituents across the political spectrum whose demands are conflicting or impossible to satisfy, such as cracking down on protests while allowing free speech or attracting new students at the same time as cutting programs and faculty.

Ok, fair enough.

“We’re all trying to figure out how we can speak to one another in ways that kind of lower the volume and try to find some common ground so that we can move forward,” said Lori S. White, president of DePauw University.

I’m still good.

A set of more immediate challenges to higher education could come from the incoming Trump administration and Congress, where Republicans have a narrow majority in both the House and Senate.

Make sure you get in some anti-Trump rhetoric. Check.

Among the list of possible executive, regulatory, or legislative actions are efforts to ban DEI on campus, restrictions on international students, bills or new rules to bar transgender athletes in intercollegiate athletics, steep increases in the endowment tax, and cuts to federal work-study programs,…

What you get is one viewpoint. No humility that maybe DEI has overstepped. To my knowledge, there are no rules baring transgenered athletes from athletics, just baring biological males from female sports, and that’s very different from baring them altogether from athletics. From the perspective of higher education, there is only one correct viewpoint here. One last quote:

More than half of states have considered measures to prohibit such program offices or staff; ban diversity training or diversity statements in hiring; or prohibit consideration of race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment. A dozen states have passed such a measure.

So, more than half of states think something is wrong, yet higher education can’t step back and think that maybe they got something wrong.

As I see it, higher education is tone deaf right now. There are clearly “correct” ways of thinking about certain topics; the left way, and they aren’t going to “lower the volume” on any of this. In the end, the accusations of indoctrination stick because there is at least some truth to it. At a time when higher education needs to attract students, maybe blatently alienating half the country isn’t a good business strategy. Worse, this isn’t good education.

Gender gaps in grades

These are two really interesting graphs from the article Boys, Girls, and Grades: Examining GPA and SAT Trends (1/14/2025). The first one isn’t surprising. Boys don’t earn the grades that girls do. They are less than half in the top 50% of grades and barely a third of the top 20%. Going back to my intro, if this were the other way around, educators would be having fits, and we’d be hearing about this endlessly. Boys doing poorly from a DEI perspective isn’t a problem, but the other way around would be.

Given this, the second graph is surprising. Despite not getting good grades in high school. Boys are in more than half the top 20% of SAT scores.

What’s going on here? It appears that high school grades don’t mean much. My take is that high school and, to a large extent, college grades are more about compliance. Behave. Hand in your work where points are given out for trying. Grades are increasingly based more on participation than on exams. Boys are more likely to say this is stupid; I’m not doing it.

The article breaks the SAT into math and verbal sections, and boys are still half in the top decile of verbal while 61% of the top decile in math.

I write things periodically that I know will get me one or two people canceling their free subscription. Here we go. This disconnect between high school grades and SAT scores is a problem. They should be so different. Along the way, we need to come to grips with the fact that boys and girls are different and balance education for both sexes. Meanwhile, higher education needs to think about what it isn’t offering boys. If for no other reason with about 40% of enrollment male, there are opportunities to shore up enrollment by attracting boys.

How women vote

Trump did better with women than one would have expected. The American Communities Project clusters the counties in the country into different types. They provide the data of the percentage of women (1/13/2025) that voted for each candidate by community type. They had it in a table, so I made you this nice graph.

The narrative that suburban and city women vote for Harris while working-class and rural counties women went for Trump holds. We have communities with very different views of the world. It is worth trying to understand this better.

Homelessness

Yes, it has increased a lot, as the AEI shows (12/30/2024) in this chart.

One reason they give is this:

The main reason homelessness grew so quickly over the past two years is the influx of migrants into the United States who have overwhelmed homeless shelters in a handful of areas. Sheltered homelessness grew by just under 150,000 people over the past two years. That represents a 43% increase, which is approximately 10 times as large as the second largest two-year increase on record, when sheltered homelessness grew by 4% from 2008–2010.

Electricity consumption forecast

Here is the EIA electricity consumption forecast (1/15/2025) for the U.S.

If you are a regular reader, this won’t surprise you.

After almost two decades of relatively little change, electricity consumption grew by 2% in 2024, and we forecast it will continue growing by 2% in both 2025 and 2026, mostly as a result of demand from new semiconductor and battery manufacturing factories and from data centers.

Speaking of data centers.

Data center update

President Biden signs executive order to open up federal lands for gigawatt-scale data center campus development (1/14/2025)

Macquarie invests up to $5 billion in Applied Digital's AI data center business (1/14/2025)

Aligned secures $12 billion in funding for 5GW data center build out (1/15/2025)

AWS launches $5bn cloud region in Mexico (1/15/2025)

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 disagreements. 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.