Bibliographic record
Abstract
What's the Point of College?Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform, by Johann N. Neem (2019), provided a thorough and far-reaching analysis into the history and modern challenges that postsecondary institutions face.Advocating for a return to recognizing education as a valuable venture in itself, and strongly in support of liberal arts education, Neem posited that the true purpose of college is to generate well-rounded, critical thinkers and that the journey to the degree is more critical than the degree itself.Political and financial attacks on universities from hostile provincial governments in Canada are increasing, coming in the form of reduced operating grants and revised funding models that prioritize post-graduation earnings over equitable student access to different disciplines (Allen, 2019; Dhaliwal, 2020; Ojewole, 2019).In light of these changes, much can be learned from Neem's historical overview and rationale in support of institutions that function as locations for knowledge expansion and that are not simply designed to produce workers able to succeed in a capitalist landscape.Although Neem focused exclusively on the American context, which is structured differently from Canadian higher education, his core purpose for higher education remains universal, regardless of context.Throughout the text, Neem was careful not to romanticize higher education; he recognized that higher education has its place and is not going to be able to satisfy the unique goals and circumstances of every student.This acknowledgement is accompanied by the consistent assertion that though the need to stay true to core principles of higher education exists, higher education can and should adapt to changing realities.Neem did not shy away from his strong defense of the arts and humanities, and the text provides evidence-based support for retaining the core values of higher education in an everchanging political and socioeconomic landscape.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".