In her new book, Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier attacks “testocracy,” the over-reliance on standardized tests in deciding who gets into college, who has the chance to attend America’s premier…

As a former journalist who joined academe, I was often struck by the obscurity of administration-faculty communication. Murkiness prevailed, along with the absence of clear subjects and verbs, and worse:…

American higher education has seriously misguided priorities. Across the country, schools are lowering their academic standards while increasing amenities. Indeed, given the proliferation of luxurious dorms, world-class student exercise facilities,…

Hardly a day goes by that policymakers, educational leaders and corporate executives don’t lament the “STEM crisis,” the alleged shortage of American workers trained in science, technology, engineering and math….

In his new book, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, James Turner has written a rich intellectual history of what many American scholars would describe as the long…

Is majoring in the liberal arts a bad economic decision? Debra Humphreys and Patrick Kelly don’t think so. In their recent study for the Association for American College and Universities…

The ongoing hype over MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) parallels the cold fusion debacle of 1989. The technology sounded like a panacea, a cheap and endless source of energy. Then…

Americans expect the impossible of their higher education system. We demand that it serve dozens of different constituencies; the political and public agendas of left and right; national economic imperatives;…

Sophisticated consumers of higher education always understood that unless they were very wealthy they would rarely have to pay the full sticker price of college. By contrast, information-poor students, often from…

The higher-education story of the week is about cost: colleges and universities are cutting prices. At least that’s the impression one gets from media coverage of the annual report from…

Cross-posted from Big Think So Peter Sacks, author of the excellent Generation X Goes to College, explains what’s really wrong with the likely MOOCification of higher education. Studies show that learning through…

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As…

The end of higher education as we know it is no myth. Say you have three children and they’ll come of college age about two years apart. That’s a lot…

Peter Sacks’s recent piece attacks a straw man. He argues against advocates for eliminating all federal aid to colleges, a powerless faction if there ever was one. In so doing he…

Some critics have called for a near-total rollback of the government’s involvement with higher education, including the end of subsidies to low-income students.  Last month, for instance, Jarrett Skorup of…

Twenty three billion more. That’s what it would cost taxpayers over the next 10 years to restore the federal Pell Grant to its purchasing power 40 years ago.   The…

Richard Vedder made the breathtaking assertion here yesterday that “public support of American higher education, on balance, has increased income inequality in the United States.” He claims we must “drastically”…