“Scores Stable as More Minorities Take SAT” said the headline on today’s Washington Post story reporting the annual account of average SAT scores. Good news, right? No, just bad news presented in happy talk. “Class of ’08 Fails to Lift SAT Scores,” was the Wall Street Journal’s more accurate version of the story, which raised […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education’s almanac, out in the journal’s August 29th issue, drenches readers in campus statistics. Women account for 57.3 % of students enrolled at American colleges and universities (10,184,100, compared with 7,574,800 for men). Slightly more than 59 percent of women graduate. The figure for men is 53 percent. Freshman males are […]
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How do you thwart an anti-affirmative action ballot measure likely to be overwhelmingly approved by state voters? Let me count the ways in which racial-preference boosters (typically college administrators, liberal state officials, and ethnic advocacy groups) have thwarted or tried to thwart anti affirmative action activist Ward Connerly’s hopes for a “Super Tuesday” this November […]
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Observers of today’s campuses have undoubtedly encountered a phenomenon that I will call “incidentism.” Its principle characteristics are as follows: First, a seemingly minor often obscure, innocuous event, e.g., a student newspaper cartoon, an off-hand remark by the school president, an invitation to a “controversial” outside speaker, among countless other possibilities, triggers boisterous outrage among […]
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Back in June, the American Political Science Association entertained—and then rejected—a proposal by some of its gay and lesbian members to change the locale of its 2012 annual meeting, on the ground that the currently scheduled site, the city of New Orleans, is located in a state, Louisiana, that has a constitutional amendment banning gay […]
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Listen to (elements of) John’s address to FIRE’s Campus Freedom Network Conference.
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Read about it here. And remember why they’re expensive in the first place…
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Sociology, an academic field that’s been in slow decline for decades after its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of social critics Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills, has recently gotten a new lease on life – because one of its subfields, criminology, is now one of the most popular majors on […]
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Today’s Chicago Sun-Times offers tips for college saving, from “experts” and from students.
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Richard Vedder gets it right, on the college facilities race, even at state colleges – “The CountryClubization of Public Universities”
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