Much has been made of recent decisions to re-require ACT or SAT scores in student applications to several elite Northeastern colleges. Start of a trend? Will more colleges now follow…
…Louisiana colleges have four-year graduation rates under 50 percent. At the top of the rankings, Centenary College (52%) and Loyola University (54%) make Tulane (77%) look like a magician. At…
…ranking that reflects my previous method of assessing institutional and cultural quality, program efficiency, and comparative depth. I leave the country and regional rankings the same, as well as the…
…won all—or nearly all—of them. As Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal so nicely put it, “College football has long been an irrational circus thanks to the mammoth television…
…is 242 out of 248 schools in the 2023 FIRE college free speech rankings. In April, Professor Kevin Wallsten pulled together this report for me on how NU compares to…
…Rankings.” Drawing on four extensive databases and responses from 55,000 students, this study seeks to describe college undergraduate students’ perceptions of the free-speech climate at numerous universities. It will not…
In July, five college presidents resigned in a week—one for each workday. Some ran small to mid-sized eastern colleges and universities: Seton Hall University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the Berklee…
…Report, dominate. The Understanding the True Cost of College Act, introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), “would require colleges to use uniform financial aid offer forms and develop standard definitions…
…of colleges and, if they pass a rigorous national exam, why not give them a college equivalence diploma (similar to the GED given to those who seek high-school-level diploma credentials)?…
…is life for every other working adult—it is about making trade-offs. For those who choose advanced learning instead of full-time employment upon college graduation, it is about understanding the eventual…
…will incentivize. Scholars have long complained that the dominant college rankings reward higher spending, and thus tend to spur a spending arms race among colleges seeking to climb up the…
…reduces the ability of college admissions officers to assess the academic performance of applicants. The attempt by law and medical schools to suppress the rankings of their institutions by magazines…
…suppression of free speech continues to plague American higher education. The 2022-2023 College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), found that 63% of…
…dozens of courtrooms, and as the founder of the college rankings for one of U.S. News’ top rivals, Forbes. Also, I have long known and greatly respected U.S. News’ leading…
…perfect score. As a predictor of what it calls “College and Career Readiness,” the ACT uses an empirically derived set of “College Readiness Benchmark Scores” which were established in 2005…
…to FIRE’s 2022 College Free Speech Rankings. Case in point: In October, hundreds of students protested Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), who was invited to speak on campus as the sole…
…Expression (FIRE) released its 2022–2023 College Free Speech Rankings, America’s largest survey on campus free speech. This year’s survey included 203 college campuses and 45,000 student voices. In general, the…
…diversity. [Related: “Self-Identified ‘Compelling Interests’ are Not a License to Discriminate”] According to the “2021 College Free Speech Rankings” by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), UNC ranked…
…loosened academic standards and accountability. Even the Washington Post argued that easing these standards did not help children. [Related: “Why So Many Students Aren’t Ready for College”] “Some critical (Standards…
…performance in global rankings in science, technology, engineering, and math, to the rapid pre-COVID decline in per capita college enrollment and the number of foreigners attending America’s universities. In the…
Based on informal observation of Virginia’s public colleges and universities over many years, I have oft lamented “mission creep” as a factor pushing the cost of college attendance ever higher….
…how much worse and at what rate? Outside of FIRE’s college free speech rankings, there is no one keeping score, and without some baseline, it is all too easy to…
…Teach Yourself How to Learn: Strategies You Can Use to Ace Any Course at Any Level. Moorpark College assigned What the Best College Students Do. Another two institutions, Monmouth College…
…defended slavery), and the title of residential college “masters.” To drive his point home, he quotes Charles Davis, Calhoun College’s beloved black master who opposed the name change and urged…
…College Admissions?” Weisman argues that since colleges admit many students for reasons other than their high degree of academic ability, there’s no good reason to complain about racial preferences that…
…“adversity scores” that colleges and universities have already been using to “diversify” their institutions. For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been requiring students to submit essays about…
…order to be hired in the first place. Still, students can learn a lot about colleges through magazine rankings or from data provided by the U.S. Department of Education on…
America’s colleges and universities are in trouble: falling enrollments, declining public support, even the beginnings of a decline in our dominance in international rankings. While many factors are at work,…
…Forbes financial rankings of 927 colleges, Mount St. Mary’s was one of 107 colleges to receive the D grade—ranking 888th out of 927 in terms of the balance sheets and…
…a college degree, and to place many college graduates in jobs that don’t actually make use of the substance of their college education.4 That leads to a positional arms race:…