Charlotte Allen blogs for the Los Angeles Times and writes frequently about cultural trends for the Weekly Standard.
A recent report from Britain concludes that U.K. universities are “dumbing down” their requirements for majoring in foreign language in order to attract more undergraduate students. “The most widely-reported trend was towards a ‘greater emphasis’ on cultural and film studies, the report said, resulting in a decline in literary studies,” the U.K Telegraph reported regarding […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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Total enrollment in colleges and universities is expected to rise to 20.6 million by the fall of 2018, according to a new projection from the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. That’s a 13 percent increase over the 16 million or so enrolled in 2007, according to the report. The greatest percentage growth […]
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Community colleges stand to be major beneficiaries of the massive Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act passed by the House on Sept. 17, with about $9 billion in federal dollars to be directed their way if the bill becomes law. Community colleges, as locally based, take-all-comers institutions that typically offer two-year degrees for minimal tuition, […]
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Here’s a fun job: adjunct professor, as described by University of Akron adjunct Maria C. Maisto writing in a Sept. 10 manifesto in Inside Higher Education: I teach English composition — one of the most labor-intensive teaching assignments out there. This semester I’ll have to respond to 85 students on two different campuses and almost […]
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Some faculty members in the University of California system plan to stage a walkout starting on Sept. 24—which also happens to be the first day of classes at several of the system’s 10 campuses. The aim of the walkouts is to protest an $813 million cut in state funding for the university system during the […]
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Cuyahoga Community College expects to see nearly 30,000 students enrolled for credit on its three campuses in Cleveland when it opens for the fall semester late in August, with an additional 30,000 taking non-credit courses for job-training “personal enrichment” (instruction in art, photography, and other hobbies). According to campus officials, the 30,000-strong for-credit student population […]
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Average scores on the SAT dipped a bit for high school seniors who graduated in the class of 2009, and the usual suspects—our friends at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FAIR) are already using the lower scores to attack the whole idea of standardized testing, a platform that includes not only the […]
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Last November the University of Texas at Austin issued an alarmed Gender Equity Task Force report indicating that, as the university stated in a press release, “on average, a lower percentage of tenured and tenure track faculty are women than at other schools.” In fact, the percentage of women at UT-Austin wasn’t that much lower […]
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Yet another statistical study reveals that the high school-age offspring of black immigrant families enroll in America’s elite colleges at a vastly higher rate proportionate to their numbers than the offspring of U.S.-born blacks, and even at a slightly higher rate than whites. This latest study, published in the journal Sociology of Education (abstract here), […]
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Most colleges and universities plan to tighten their belts during this recession year, what with shrunken endowments, curtailed donor gifts, and students and parents suddenly feeling too strapped to pay high tuition costs. Yet for a lucky few institutions—institutions with connections to members of Congress—this year will provide some unusual financial bonanzas, thanks to a […]
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A recent report from Education Sector shows that about half of America’s college undergraduates go into debt these days in order to work toward their degrees. In 1993 only 32 percent of college students took out loans to pay for their educations, so these latest figures, from 2008, based on the U.S. Education Department’s National […]
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The talented education bloggers at The Quick and the Ed have turned their attention to a topic dear to the hearts of us at Minding the Campus (see my March 31 opinion piece for the Washington Examiner): the reluctance of colleges and universities to take serious steps to cut costs in the face of shrunken […]
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Here’s one of the latest of those interdisciplinary and usually heavily politicized “studies” programs on college campuses: “poverty studies,” taking its place alongside black studies, Chicano studies, women’s studies, gay studies, and the rest of the ideology-driven academic disciplines in which undergraduates and graduate students can specialize as alternatives to more traditional fields such as […]
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The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) seems finally to have perceived what was in plain view to many people: that most of America’s ed schools are mediocre at best, offering curricula that mix lightweight courses, ivory-tower ideology, and minimal clinical exposure of student teachers to real-life classrooms. NCATE has revised upwards […]
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Those who suspect that “Middle Eastern studies” is actually a code word for anti-Israel advocacy have some new evidence to support their position: an entire academic conference scheduled for this week at York University in Toronto that appears to be entirely devoted to the idea of erasing the state of Israel from the map. The […]
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Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state […]
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Even the dark cloud of the current recession has some silver linings. One of them seems to be an unexpected up-tick in the number of college students majoring in engineering, an academic field that actually leads to production of useful things, such as bridges and medical devices, in contrast to, say, women’s studies, which produces […]
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The good news: A survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) announcing that “distribution requirements” in undergraduate education are out and “general education” is back. Translated, that means—or ought to mean—that colleges are reinstating the idea of a core curriculum of essential courses, conveying essential knowledge, that every well-rounded college graduate ought […]
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Newspapers are folding right and left—the Rocky Mountain News in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March, the Boston Globe any day now, it would seem—and, according to the American Journalism Review, some 15 percent of the newsroom jobs, about 5,000 of them, last year (with another 7,500 vanishing so far this year) at newspapers across […]
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finally got it right. Instead of letting radical protesters chase an invited conservative speaker out of his lecture hall–as they did with former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo on April 14– when the radicals tried the same stunt a little over a week later, on April 22, against […]
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Here’s a sign of colleges’ desperate need for tuition cash to make up for shrunken endowments and less generous donors in today’s economic downturn: many institutions are slinking away from their vaunted “need-blind” admissions policies that admits applicants deemed qualified regardless of their ability to pay and makes up any shortfalls with scholarships and other […]
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Finally, it would seem, colleges are doing something realistic to cut costs in this era of tight budgets and shrunken endowments: they’re scaling back or declining to expand their Ph.D. programs. Inside Higher Education reported last week that a range of institutions, including Emory, Columbia, Brown, New York University, and the University of South Carolina […]
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A modified version of this piece appears today in the Washington Examiner Georgetown University, like many colleges and universities hit by the current economic downturn, is in what look like dismal financial straits. The value of Georgetown’s endowment shrank 25.5 percent last year, to $833 million, the annual deficit it has been running is estimated […]
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This past February about 50 disability activists, many of them in wheelchairs, held a demonstration at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The object of the protest was the humanitarian award to be given at the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 22 to comedian Jerry Lewis for his 42 […]
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Whenever you read the words “for the 21st century” in connection with some educational topic, you know it’s time to run for cover. That’s because “21st century” is edu-speak for “letting your students mess around on computers instead of teaching them something substantive.” The latest manifestation of this seems to be a report released at […]
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Harvard University, trying to trim its operating budget in the face of a projected 30 percent decline in the value of its endowment stemming from the current financial meltdown, announced its intention to cut 13 of the 27 janitors who service its medical school and an unspecified number of custodial workers elsewhere at Harvard residential […]
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On February 11 art-lovers packed a meeting room at Brandeis University to protest Brandeis’s plans to shut down its on-campus art museum and auction off the museum’s entire 6,000-piece collection. The list of holdings at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, most of them donated since the museum’s opening in 1961, reads like a Who’s Who of […]
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Here at Minding the Campus we’ve been elaborating on Charles Murray’s argument that college isn’t for everyone, and that a college degree—which can cost graduates at least four years of forgone earnings and leave them drowning in student-loan debt—isn’t necessarily the ticket to economic prosperity that it’s cracked up to be. So what?, you might […]
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The good news is that neither the House nor the Senate version of President Obama’s $825 billion so-called economic stimulus package opens the sluicegate of federal slush-funding for higher-education construction projects as wide as many college presidents would like. Back in December some 31 university presidents and trustees, representing some of the biggest public university […]
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