Seventy percent of high school graduates go straight to college, up from 63 percent in 2000. But, one in five don’t make it to sophomore year and more than a third do not finish a degree in six years, writes Hechinger’s Jon Marcus. “In 2016, the overall completion rate of full-time, first-time students was 49.1 percent at four-year institutions and 38.6 percent at two-year institutions,” reports Elevating College Completion by the American Enterprise Institute and Third Way.

On Medium, Alex Korchinski writes about what he learned by majoring in applied math — other than math. He learned to tolerate frustration and pain, build his toolbox of problem-solving tactics and check his work, writes Korchinski. Most all, he learned to “practice persistence.” In a famous study, classrooms of American and Japanese first graders were given an impossible math problem. The American students gave up after less than 30 seconds, while the Japanese students persis

My mother, my sister and me (the fat baby) in 1952. Parents — especially educated parents — spend a lot more time caring for their children than in the past in wealthy countries, concludes a new study, reports The Economist. One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a