Teaching intro soc for a second time, and again I'm starting the class with @tressiemcphd's "In the Name of Beauty." It astounds on every read. And also means that the first assigned words in the class are from bell hooks: But then you get wisdom like:

"beauty is the preferences that reproduce the social order"

A super fascinating deep dive into how selective colleges use predictive algorithms to make financial aid decisions as part of enrollment management. brookings.edu/research/enrol… As is true in many other contexts, algorithms here seem to be exacerbating and formalizing inequalities built into the existing structure of the field. Higher ed was already an unequal mess; these algorithms are layered on top of all of that.