The water was turquoise. The sand was white. Ceviche was everywhere. We rented broken-down bikes nearby to explore the farther reaches of the five-mile long island. A mishmash of iguana hunting grounds, poor stretches of hovels that reminded me of an earlier trip through Tijuana, and hurricane-battered mansions.

An expat from California was running the Casa el Pio boutique hotel where we stayed. A wonderful hotel with whitewashed walls and within walking distance to beaches and town. A municipal square nearby hosted pickup soccer games and piped in Christmas carols which still seem out of place to me in the tropical sun. Throughout the island (we think), flushing toilet paper down the toilets was prohibited. A bummer, but if you leave the used paper in the trash, the [Mayan] girls will take care of it. A sort of Mexican apartheid.

On Isla, I tried the Spanish that I’d become comfortable with living in Madrid during college. But my family protested that I was confusing our conversations with locals. Ironically, when we traveled through Italy a few years earlier, Italians listening to a few words of my bad Italian asked if I was Spanish.

No Spanish, good or bad, was necessary to buy souvenirs, good and bad, and plentiful. I bought a Viva Mexico t-shirt with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Which may be dangerous throughout North America.

Explore the college listings and you’ll get a taste of New England’s smorgasbord of postsecondary institutions. Not just the world-famous Harvards and Yales, but unsung
institutions like the Bar Harbor, Maine–based College of the Atlantic, with its single degree in Human Ecology; the Newton, Massachusetts–based New England School
of Acupuncture, with its master’s degrees in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine; and
the New Haven, Connecticut–based Gateway Community College, with its associate in Aviation Maintenance Technology.

You’ll also see the long way women have come since the 1950s, when females represented
just 35% of college students. They are now the majority at most colleges.

You’ll see the relatively low percentage of minorities at most New England campuses, though their numbers have grown as New England’s demography overall has become more diverse.

You’ll be tempted to play with the math in the listings, calculating the share of applicants
who are admitted and the share of admitted applicants who enroll. But that’s tricky. Some colleges attract applicants based on outsized reputations reinforced by the ranking systems sprouting up everywhere. Some attract fewer applicants because their images suggest they’re impossible to get into or, conversely, somehow subpar.

You might look at the student-to-faculty ratios and buy the conventional wisdom that the lower it is, the more likely you’ll get to know the professor. (That’s if there is a professor. You may be taught by a graduate teaching assistant or by a smart phone.) Also be advised: Some of the best inspiration comes in a 200-seat lecture hall in a university that is more like a vibrant city than an ivy-covered village.

Because New England is saturated with topnotch colleges, you might consider a consortium of star players. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, along with Mount Holyoke, Smith, Amherst, and Hampshire colleges, form the Five College Consortium, an innovative arrangement allowing students at the five institutions to share everything from local shuttle bus services to cross-registration.

Some NE campuses are among the world’s most prestigious. Some are focused like
lasers on job skills. Some are leaders in LGBTQA. Some are buttoned-up, straight
as arrows. Some colleges are even beyond the purview of this Guide—like the unaccredited Corvid College, which offers classes in Boston-area bookstores on everything from cyberpunk to authoritarianism vs. anarchism in Lord of the Rings.

Interest in categorizing, grading, and rating U.S. colleges has been surging in the past 20 years or so for two main reasons.

First, policy leaders feel pressure to protect “student-consumers” and their families from
the double whammy of sky-high college costs and shrinking student aid. They also want colleges to be more “transparent” about what they provide students for the money.

Second, the explosion in college rankings means everybody from college trustees to
parents of high school students is obsessed with an institution’s latest ranking: Is Old
Ivy really the “third-best liberal arts college in the Northeast”? And how is that different
from the “second-best” ranking that State U captured one year earlier?

Many are skeptical of the oversimplification of college cost and accountability, and cynical about the perverse incentives encouraged by the rankings. So much so that much college marketing today focuses on curb appeal—extras like climbing walls and fancy dorms.

As the late University of Maine System Chancellor and New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) chair Robert L. Woodbury argued, U.S. News & World Report’s popular college ratings issue encourages colleges to produce an application deluge, reject as many students as possible, avoid nontraditional students, and favor quick fixes over long-term improvement.

Among other tips
Some experts suggest applying to three tiers of colleges: 1) so-called “reaches,” 2) high-quality middle-tier institutions, and 3) what were once thought of as “safety” schools.

Many suggest visiting colleges as often as you can to see what characteristics appeal or don’t appeal to you. Consider traits like ratio of women to men, student diversity, and religious affiliation.

Look for opportunities to study abroad and to get a taste of the highs and lows of work through internships. Maybe do both at once through programs such as Engineers Without Borders, in which students build water-distribution systems in undeveloped countries.

High hopes
In The Princeton Review’s most recent “College Hopes & Worries Survey,” more than two-thirds of college applicants and parents of applicants reported their stress levels were “high” or “very high” due to college application pressures.

The survey also found the most looked-at statistic when researching a college was average SAT scores. Yet many colleges have stopped requiring applicants to submit the scores, judging the tests to be unimaginative, too stressful, and even biased against certain groups.

The biggest worry students and parents cited  was that a student would get into a first choice college, but not be able to afford it.

Location, location, location!
As for ideal distance from home, 50% of parents answering the Princeton Review survey indicated “0 to 250 miles,” while 66% of students selected ranges over 250 miles.

More than 40% of respondents to The Princeton Review survey said the main benefit of a college degree was “a potentially better job and income.” (Never mind the sheer joy of learning.)

Former Connecticut commissioner of higher education and NEBHE chair, Andrew
De Rocco, notes that students who are interested in a field that requires graduate study should seek out an undergraduate program that has a good record of sending its students on to graduate school. If you know what you’re interested in, examine the department in question—for example, via the Internet and journals in the field. Or if you don’t know what field you’re interested in, more power to you. The first job of a college may be to show you the options.

Above all, the college search process should be fun, not a measure of how many public service activities are on your résumé or how many honors courses you took. Don’t get depressed by the pressure of college search, testing, and performance. And remember, there’s not just one college that’s right for everyone.

(This piece was also posted on the NEBHE website.)

Early this year, we revived the collection of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

The latest …

Ranks of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont among most peaceful U.S. states in terms of absence of violence: 1,2,3 Institute for Economics and Peace

Number of New England institutions among the 10 safest colleges and universities in the U.S. based on incidents of campus crime as reported by campus safety officials: 0 http://www.stateuniversity.com/

Number of New England institutions among the The Daily Beast’s “druggiest” U.S. colleges based on student-rated “drug scenes,” on-campus arrests for drug violations and a federal survey on drug abuse: 6 The Daily Beast (They are: Dartmouth College, 3rd; Bryant University, 4th; Bates College, 9th; Trinity College, 15th; University of Rhode Island, 16th; and University of New Hampshire, 19th.)

Ranks of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont among U.S. states in terms of child well-being: 1,3,4 Annie E. Casey Foundation (Connecticut ranked 6th; Maine, 11th; and Rhode Island, 17th.)

Percentage of female scientists at research universities who reported they had fewer children than they wanted as a result of having a career in science: 45% Scientists Want More Children

Percentage of male scientists at research universities who reported the same: 25% Scientists Want More Children

Percentage of both men and women who say they are likely to consider a career outside science entirely due to constraints on family lives because of their science careers: 25% Scientists Want More Children

Among 66 institutions accredited by the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (in which qualified students can earn college credit prior to high school graduation), the number that are in New England: 1 National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (The one New England program as of July 19 was the University of Connecticut.)

U.S. rank of Providence among metropolitan areas with the highest Hispanic metropolitan unemployment rates in 2010: 1 Economic Policy Institute (25.2%)

U.S. rank of Hartford: 2 Economic Policy Institute (23.5%)

That was the dangerous question raised by Stanford University behavioral scientist Byron Reeves at the BIF-7 conference in downtown Providence on Sept. 20 and 21.

Reeves had met J. Leighton Read at a soccer game in Silicon Valley, and they began talking about work. Their conversation led to ways to marry the primitive engagement of interactive games with the dull technology of most computerized evaluation and productivity tools. Ultimately, they coauthored a book: Total Engagement: How Games and Virtual Worlds Are Changing the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.

If you worked in a call center, said Reeves, your work would be energized if you could participate in an epic narrative in which you could measure in real time how well you were answering customers’ questions in a sort of competition with others. The more context, the better, Reeves said. He cited experiments in which players in first-person shooter games performed better when they had fuller stories.

IBM has meetings with clients where employees use avatars and dress them as outlandishly as they wish, but in the process, they are doing work. Reeves noted that guild leaders from the game World of Warcraft could play key roles in this world of work. He added that security officials could outline a potential terrorist in the London subway by using visualization technologies similar to those that TV broadcasters and advertisers use to diagram humans with meshy gridlines.

The problem with the concept, Reeves quipped, is that work might become so engaging, we’d see more repetitive-strain injuries.

Gathering dreamers

If the name Business Innovative Factory conjures the image of a belching manufacturing plant or a sterile corporate consulting firm, it’s neither. It’s really a band of dreamers. Reeves is one of them. He was one of 30 entrepreneurs and artists tell stories who gathered to tell 15-minute stories about ways they use innovation and social technologies to help solve problems. Storytelling has become the ritual for BIF and its band of followers.

Lest there be any doubt about the creativity in the room at BIF-7, check out this method of doodling/notetaking by entrepreneur and education reform advocate Angus Davis. Or the “mind-maps” by designer Amanda Fenton.

At the BIF conference, bestselling author Dan Pink said innovators are in the business of giving people something they didn’t know they were missing (in contrast to the “give the people what they want” mantra spouted famously by the Kinks and imitated by scores of marketers). To me, said Pink, giving people what they didn’t know they were missing is what painters and sculptors do. Or physicists like Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the material called graphene that is one-atom thick but stronger than steel.

Pink then told of  Teresa Amabile, who pulled together commissioned and non-commissioned art work and asked art experts to rate the pieces. Both types of work were judged well-executed, but the non-commissioned work was seen as more creative. Yet in most workplaces, Pink noted, everything is commissioned. In response, some workplaces are adopting “Fedex” day or “hack” week when workers can do whatever they like on company time. Companies are not signing away licenses on these innovations. Indeed, Pink said it is during these non-commissioned hours that Google employees developed gmail.

Fourteen-year-old mountain climber Matthew Moniz of Boulder, Colo., told of setting a goal to climb to the highest peaks on seven continents and a record speed ascent of the high points in all 50 U.S. states. He told of devoting his climbing to his best friend who has Primary Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Moniz noted that when climbing Cerro Aconcagua in South America, he realized that the effects of a low-oxygen, high-altitude environment mimicked the symptoms his best friend struggled with on a daily basis. Moniz then conceived of of the “14 Fourteeners in 14 Days” to climb 14 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in 14 days to raise funds and awareness of the disorder.

Big Picture Learning founder Dennis Littky began with his usual bluntness. “High schools suck, colleges suck,” he said. “And who loses? the kids, and who loses the most? The disenfranchised kids.” Littky said he asked Moniz how he managed to spend so much time out of school doing the climbing and fundraising. Turns out only his Spanish teacher marked him down, because he spent a month in South America!

Littky introduced Elicia, a student from the Met Center that Littky founded in Rhode Island in 1995. She talked of her experience, first looking at pediatrics and marine science, “but I love hair,” she said waving a hand through her mane. Michelangelo said in every every piece of granite he saw what it was going to be when worked on, and I saw this in Elicia, said Littky. “Elicia changed so much when she went to Africa and India,” he added, referring to her opportunities to travel abroad.

Elicia’s story gave Littky a segue to tell of his own life. He taught in New York City, then went off the grid in New Hampshire (before people used that expression), became a state legislator, joined the PTA, and then went to Brown, where he worked with education pioneer Ted Sizer. Littky was invited to start a school, and he said only if I can do it how I want. He did, and in the end, 100% of graduates went on to college, and there was a 2% dropout rate compared with 46% citywide. Bill Gates came back with millions of dollars to build more schools just like ours, said Littky.

Then Littky got mad about college. Nearly nine of 10 first-generation college students drop out. Littky started College Unbound, using the same model as Big Picture Learning: Let students find their passions and pursue what they’re interested in. Elicia is now in the first graduating class from College Unbound. Littky noted that Big Picture is interested in integrating learning into the lives of America’s 30 million adult learners, such as having ex-cons study recidivism.

Mari  Kuraishi began her story by recalling what she had observed as a student visiting the Berlin Wall. The people on the Eastern side ignored her and her rowdy friends standing on observation towers on the Western side. She went on to study Russian in college. When in 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart, Kuraishi figured her Russian would be useless. She got hired by the World Bank (though she knew nothing about international development) and became country officer working on Russian. There, she got a tiny piece of the World Bank budget for using innovation. In a form of crowdsourcing, the bank started inviting people to meet in the auditorium with ideas to rid the world of poverty, but the bank’s attention to the issue was obviously low. So Kuraishi left and founded GlobalGiving. She knew nothing about philanthropy (as she had known nothing about international development), but, among other things, she wanted to figure out how a social system could create behavior that was so counter to biological drive as she had seen among the Germans on the Eastern side of  the Berlin Wall. She cited eudaimonia, which she described as the deliberate practice for integration of new options that make sense to you over time.

Chris Mayer began by noting that “capitalism evolves.” Mayer’s figures showed how competition led to antitrust laws and labor exploitation led to labor laws. But the next changes, he said, will come in China and India, where the new species of entrepreneurs are being developed. Mayer told of GE started making a $500 EKG machine that can be used in places like India over dusty roads, but with the same operating system as $5,000 equipment used in the west.

Mallika Chopra and Gotham Chopra told of growing up with father Depak Chopra talking about mind and body, so seen as an East Asian doctor selling snake oil. They wondered why celebrities like Lady Gaga were so impressed with the modest guy they just thought of as father. Mallika founded Intent.com, a website to connect people from around the world to improve their own lives, their communities and the planet. Mallika and Gotham also created Liquid Comics, designed to showcase Indian artists. In early 2001, long before terrorism fears swept the U.S., Gotham did a story for Channel One about madrassas in Pakistan, where a child told him, we don’t have superheroes here … look around. Gotham wondered what a world would be like without superheroes.

Jim Mellado, president of The Willow Creek Association, helped local churches maximize their capacity to change lives. Mellado told of getting Bono to come to the biggest church in the world in South Korea. At the beginning, the priest worried whether Bono was a man of faith. But after Bono spoke, the priest wondered: Am I man of faith?

Angela Blanchard, CEO of Houston-based Neighborhood Centers Inc., explained why here approach to community development contrasts with the old way of studying everything that’s broken in poor neighborhoods. After Katrina, 125,000 people from New Orleans arrived in Houston with one or two items of clothing each. Blanchard said her organization had to change the way we asked questions. They began asking the evacuees about their strengths and relationships, rather than what they’d lost. Blanchard says the evacuees immediately straightened up with new hope.

Alexander Osterwalder described his book, Business Model Generation, and the stiff challenges of marketing a business book. Initially, the idea was rejected by big publishing houses because the authors were relative no-names. Osterwalder decided to self-publish, and hired a designer to developed a very visual book with white space and ways to engage readers. Osterwalder and his partners  charged a fee for participation in the book and raised it several times. The value, he said, was to be part of something bigger. The co-created work of 470 people around the world, eventually attracted one of those big publishers, Wiley. Osterwalder described his philosophy: He’s likes to break the rules and make stuff. And he would be very proud if his kids learned to break the right rules.

Among other storytellers …

Alex Jadad, founder of the Centre for Global Ehealth Innovation in Toronto, noted that so much effort and funding goes into adding years to our lives, he but it’s time to put more life into our years. After years of of trying to find cures for diseases, he has come around to the importance of helping improve healing and wellness—of consoling sick people.

Yahoo social scientist Duncan Watts noted that he the hates the term: It’s not rocket science. Because actually we’re better at rocket science than using social sciences to solve problems. The reason is that history never really repeats itself.

Sebastian Ruth of Community Music Works began by playing an Armenian mournful song and asked how the music made people feel. Music is one way to open doors to world of possibility, he said. He echoed Brown University President Ruth Simmons said assertion that it doesn’t matter what kind of environment you’re from, you should have access to the world of ideas.

Dale J. Stephens described UnCollege, a social movement he founded at age 19 that applies the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised to the realm of higher education. Complaining that colleges too often teach conformity, Stephens noted: “We’re paying too much for college and learning too little.” He received a $100,000 fellowship, sponsored by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook, for promising young people who forgo a traditional college education to work on innovative projects.

Fred Mandell, a sculptor and painter, said he had a creative mantra: create, integrate, make a difference. He read books, letter about great artists to see what made them creative. Yet some didn’t make it in art. Certain core skills beyond pure talent that allow them to sustain creative output over time.

Andy van Dam, who received the second computer science degree ever granted described the challenge of looking at large-scale art pieces such as Garibaldi panorama scrolls, including technology allowing viewers to click on a small part of the work and get more detailed descriptions of that part of the scroll.

Andrew Losowsky, books editor with The Huffington Post, noted that breaking the bounds of “likely space” brings more dopamine. As he explained, the first time he saw a cellphone with a GPS, he was blown away. The second time, he was impressed. The fourth time he doesn’t remember. Everything is a story when you reshape the space and the likely space.

Jon Cropper, cofounder of FuturLogic, a for-profit online entrepreneurship institute, explained his theory of marketing developed during a career spanning posts with Nissan North America to the companies of Sean “Diddy” Combs. Cropper noted that if you’re selling something, aim to out-teach, not to out-sell. Also aim for simplexity: a simple exterior with understated quality. Cropper showed that Playboy magazine was simple and elegant in design when it began.

Whitney Johnson described “disruptive innovation” in which low-end innovation upends an industry (like Netflix currently doing and proponents of distance learning contend it will do). Companies disrupt companies, said Johnson, but people can also disrupt their careers and their lives. Johnson was a music major, who went to New York City as a secretary, then analyst and ended up cofounding a hedge fund with disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.

Valdis Krebs showed the BIF genome he developed based on a survey of attendees’ interests and urged them to connect on similarities and benefit from differences—even after the BIF-7 mutation.

For a fuller look at BIF-7, visit http://businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-7.

(This piece was also posted on the NEBHE website.)

The inset photos feature Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers (“Cheesy get back in your cage!” as my mother used to scream) and blue-collar wing Johnny “Pie” McKenzie. The Turk, Derek Sanderson, also headed to the WHA.

Among the ad’s then-politically acceptable pitches: “Businessmen – Cement the Deal over Lunch and a Hockey Game.”

The Whalers started playing in Boston in 1972, including at the Boston Arena, moved to Hartford in 1974 and  joined the NHL in 1979.

NEJHE’s Paperless Future, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Winter 2010.

Campus Visiting, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Fall 2009.

Inspiration: Bob Woodbury, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Summer 2009.

Trends & Indicators, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Spring 2009.

Back with a Crash, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Winter 2009.

Support The Troops … with Education, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Fall 2007.

Changing Names, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Summer 2007.

Electives, Connection, Spring 2007.

Transparency, Connection, Winter 2007.

International Strategy, Connection, Fall 2006.

Thank You, Gadflies, Connection, Summer 2006.

Trendspotting, Connection, Spring 2006.

Ready Yet?, Connection, Winter 2006.

Fifty Years, Connection, Fall 2005.

Artists Only, Connection, Summer 2005.

861,625, Connection, Spring 2005.

Deep Impact, Connection, Winter 2005.

Bully Pulpit, Connection, Fall 2004.

Unstable Futures, Connection, Summer 2004.

As Maine Goes …, Connection, Spring 2004.

Going Online, Connection, Winter 2004.

Regionalism and Affordability, Connection, Fall 2003.

Growing Our Own, Connection, Summer 2003.

Now and Then, Connection, Spring 2003.

Minding Our Business, Connection, Winter 2003.

New New Englanders, Connection, Fall 2002.

Issues in Campus Architecture, Connection, Summer 2002.

Data Rap, Connection, Spring 2002.

Who Will Teach, Connection, Fall 2001.

Research for the Community, Connection, Summer 2001.

College and Community, Connection, Winter 2001.

Labor Squeeze, Connection, Fall 2000.

News at 11, Connection, Summer 2000.

Access, Connection, Fall/Winter 1999.

NE Online, Connection, Summer 1999.

Future of New England, Connection, Spring 1999.

Pats Head to Hartford?, Connection, Fall 1998.

In those print days, I fancied myself an “artist” of a sort and the old print issues minor “masterpieces” … this one my Sgt. Pepper’s … that one my London Calling … and so on. Other issues marked the way I told time. There was the issue when my first child was born … then the “Emotional Rescue” issue when I took a vacation in Ireland (and some colleagues took advantage of my being away to airbrush out the UConn logo on a cover photo of students misbehaving) …

To be sure, it’s a source of pride to see in one place the archives of print issues since 1998 (the hard copies go back to 1986). Yet my old print self notes that the digital archives lack the smell of hard copies (first fresh ink, then mustiness) as well as the “neurological traction” of print, as my friend Bob Whitcomb says. And my new digital self notes that the pdfs are a bit clunky in this age of impatience.

Still, take your time … as if you’re in a museum of New England.

Leisure
What higher purpose could be tied to education than increasing leisure time? And yet the English songwriter Andy Partridge might have had it right when he complained, “They taught me how to work but they can’t teach me how to shirk correctly.” Added leisure time appears not to be among the many well-documented benefits of increased educational attainment, according to “Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades,” a paper authored by economists Mark Aguiar of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago.

The good news is that leisure time increased for everyone between 1965 and 2003—by six to eight hours per week for men, thanks largely to a decline in work hours, and by four to eight hours per week for women, driven by a decline in time spent on home chores. That’s like having five to 10 more weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week.

But the relative disadvantage for more educated people presents a puzzle for the researchers. “Given that the least-educated households experienced the largest gains in
leisure, this growing ‘inequality’ in leisure is the mirror image of the well-documented trends in income and expenditure inequality,” they write.

In 1965, people with different levels of education balanced work and play in similar proportions. But the allocation of time started to diverge in 1985. The explanation, according to Aguiar and Hurst, is that total time at work fell by 14 hours per week for less-educated men but by under nine hours per week for highly educated men. And less-educated women added fewer work hours than highly educated women. Whether all this reflects more professionals being tied to their desks or more undereducated people underemployed in part-time jobs the authors don’t say.