Who is less fit as measured by body fat percentage, the female or the male students here at COMFSM?
The female students average 31% body fat with a 95% confidence interval of 27% to 35% body fat. The male students average 25% body fat with a 95% confidence interval of 18% to 32%.
So are the women more overfat than the men? The healthy range for females who are between 20 and 39 years old is from 21% to 31%. The healthy range for males who are between 20 and 39 years old is from 8% to 20%.
So while 50% of the females students are overfat, 67% of the male students are overfat. The male students on this campus are less fit in terms of body fat.
Both percentages are high for the age group. Half of the female students and two-thirds of the male students are at increased risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer due to unhealthy levels of body fat. I have students who have body fat percentages that place them in the "morbidly obese" category.
We have male students as high as 45% body fat and female students as high as 50% body fat. While our students struggle with English and math, in some sense they do far worse at remaining within fit levels of body fat. We already teach health science and nutrition, we obviously need to add mandatory physical education courses to our curriculum and pronto.
We might also need to make CPR a required course given the road that our students are headed down healthwise. The above numbers are based on work done with the new Tanita body fat monitor that the math science department acquired for use in health science, nutrition class, and in statistics class (where the students are learning to calculate confidence intervals on the data gathered with the Tanita unit). I continue to gather data as time permits.
Dr. Michael J. Balick, New York Botanic Garden. Ethnobotanical research.
Dr. Roberta Lee, New York Botanic Garden
James Dunham, Cambridge University. Botanical research.
Jon Stafford, Cambridge University
Jennie Bee, Cambridge University
The developmental math program continues to turn away students due to overfull classes despite again hiring Mr. Commendador to add an additional section. The College continues to lose potential student income because of a decision two years ago to cut a requested additional developmental math instructor position.
The nursing and HCOP program are all but dead. The nursing program, what little is left of it, was folded into the HCOP program. The HCOP coordinator feels strongly that if she were given the opportunity to travel with the recruiting team, she could make a difference in the enrollment in this program. In the meantime the states, starved for nurses and health care workers, are looking at a new one year certificate in nursing for high school graduates.
New Personnel:
Dennis Gearhart
Gregg Longanecker
Employment opportunity:
Marine Science