Jackson Toby is professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University, where he was director of the Institute for Criminological Research. He is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
It does not surprise anyone that graduates of four-year colleges have lower rates of unemployment – or employment in jobs that do not require a college education – than high school graduates or high school dropouts. What has occasioned mild surprise are the tens of thousands of graduates of four-year colleges who cannot find full-time […]
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Universities have two contradictory traditions: one of searching for truth and, alongside it, one of mindless, self-righteous protests. The Rutgers University protests against giving Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree at the 2014 Commencement belongs to the second tradition. Having served on the Rutgers faculty from 1951 to 2003, I know that this demonstration was not […]
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Asian and Asian-American students, an increasing presence in our college campuses, are carrying a crucial message that the rest of Americans have trouble hearing: that college costs too much time and money to be devoted predominantly to fun and games. Americans generally underestimate the salience of education in most Asian cultures. Take Korea. South Korea […]
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The Boston Globe reports that at least one college, Dartmouth, is making real progress against binge-drinking on campus. Freshmen are banned from fraternity parties for their first six weeks at school. Student-led “Green Teams” circulate at campus parties in groups of four, sober, to watch out for and steady partygoers who may be on the brink of […]
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Indebted college graduates have recently begun to ask whether a four-year college education is worth what it costs. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 11, for example, 23-year-old Bryce Harrison, who graduated last May from Goucher College with a political-science degree and about $100,000 in student loans to repay, is […]
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When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or as medieval monks. However, […]
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< As a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, I taught large lecture courses for years, basing grades on multiple-choice tests. So only after retiring, and offering to teach a small seminar for free, did I discover something important about student writing: it was awful.The short weekly papers turned in by my seminar students […]
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A Wall Street Journal editorial today took a very negative view–rightly, in my opinion–of President Obama’s proposal to let student borrowers discharge private student loans through bankruptcy. By law, repayment of federally guaranteed loans cannot be avoided this way. But the Journal wrote: “If there’s not a great outcry over letting borrowers stiff private lenders, eventually […]
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When Victor Hugo claimed that all the world’s armies are powerless against an idea whose time has come, he probably had in mind good ideas. But the time can come for a bad idea also. Low-cost student loans, embraced by President Obama, Governor Romney, and Congressional leaders of both parties, is a bad idea. Students […]
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No modern-day Paul Revere is taking a midnight ride to warn about this, but the defaults are coming. Many are already here. They are coming from student loans given to the wrong students for the wrong reasons. The portfolio of federally guaranteed student loans passed the one trillion dollar mark in early 2012, and it […]
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The criminal trial of Dharun Ravi commanded national attention and focus on our controversial hate-crime laws. The issue was whether Ravi spied on his Rutgers roommate, Tyler Clementi, and whether he spied because of prejudice against homosexuals generally and against his gay roommate in particular. Ravi’s conviction last Friday on the most serious charge against […]
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Some Penn State alumni, outraged over the Board of Trustees peremptory firing of Coach Joe Paterno, are organizing a campaign to elect three new trustees. The objective of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship is, ultimately, to oust the current Board. The Board fired Paterno, two University officials and the University President for not responding forcefully […]
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Why did the Board of Trustees of Penn State University put a humiliating end to the unblemished career of 84-year-old football coach, Joe Paterno? In announcing the Board’s decision to fire him on the evening of November 9, the Vice-Chairman of the Board, John Surma Jr., spoke vaguely about the need to “make a change […]
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Here’s the major question about the famous suicide by fire of the young Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi: why did it trigger so much upheaval in so many Arab lands? Widespread poverty, political corruption, and ruthless oppression are an old story in Arab countries. Why should this suicide have produced so many furious young adults risking their […]
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J. M. Barrie’s famous 1904 play, Peter Pan o
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Professor of English Mark Bauerlein of Emory University reports on a harmonious conference on the humanities. Harmony is all very well, but perhaps the conference might have done better to raise embarrassing questions that might have made it more contentious – such as that English Departments have shifted away from offering traditional literature and instead […]
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At the beginning of 2011 the portfolio of the federal government for education loans was nearly one trillion dollars. The portfolio consisted of loans for students currently in college extended either directly by the Department of Education or loans from financial institutions like Sallie Mae and banks with repayment guaranteed by the United States Treasury […]
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Thousands of British university students walked out of classes on November 24 to protest the cuts in governmental subsidies. Demonstrations in a dozen cities were mostly peaceful, but several dozen students occupied part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and protesters in London set fires outside government offices in Whitehall where two police officers were injured in […]
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Professor Richard Vedder is certainly one of the most knowledgeable — and wisest – commentators on American higher education. So his cautionary remarks should be taken very seriously. I have one reservation about calling the push for more colleges a “scam.” It is true that some youngsters knew all through college that they wanted to […]
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In his recent speech at the University of Texas in Austin, President Obama expressed deep unhappiness that the United States is no longer the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the 25 to 34 age bracket. By 2020 he wants us to regain the top position we enjoyed ten years ago before […]
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Jackson Toby, professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers and author of the new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, delivered this speech yesterday (April 7) at a luncheon in New York City. The luncheon, at the University Club, was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and Minding the Campus. […]
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This is an excerpt from Professor Toby’s new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger). The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. […]
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