California legislators appear smitten with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In response to the high demand for classes and long waiting lists in California’s public colleges and universities, they have proposed a bill that would force schools to give credit for faculty-approved online courses completed by students unable to enroll in lower-division courses. Unfortunately, the […]
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One of the purposes of Common Core, the initiative to draft new standards for math and English, was to align secondary curricula with the demands of college. The presumption was that high school expectations simply fell short of first-year college coursework and the standards it set. Further evidence of mismatch came out this week in […]
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One of the more annoying tropes of the left is that while it may be all right for profit-oriented businesses to function in many markets – I have yet to hear anyone demand that dry cleaning, for example, be done by non-profit entities – they shouldn’t be in “helping” fields like health care and education. […]
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Originally run as a Manhattan Institute Policy Brief. The growth of student-loan debt has raised a vexing question: Is a college degree still a good investment? No segment of American higher education has faced greater scrutiny than for-profit colleges and universities. For-profits differ from traditional institutions in important respects. They are accountable chiefly to […]
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Gone are the days when the liberal press covered the Federalist Society as if it were a mysterious and sinister cult. Now (April 17) the Chronicle of Higher Education features a largely favorable feature article hailing the Federalist Society’s history as “a story of how disaffection, bold ideas, commitment to principle, and enlightened institution-building have […]
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Another day, and another awful consequence of our student debt problem has come to light. The New York Fed just released data showing that growing levels of student debt have impacted homeownership and car purchasing patterns. In the past, 30-year-olds who at some point owed student debt were more likely than those who didn’t to […]
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Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda–to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based. Historically, the faculty actually did control […]
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If you’re worrying about your child’s student debt obligations, you might want to check up on your parents, too. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that adults over 60 have the fastest growing student-loan debt and that their growing delinquencies are leading the Department of Education to garnish Social Security checks. Stung by the Great […]
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I am writing in response to Dr. Lawler’s post here. First, to clear up one important point that Dr. Lawler addresses – libertarians (such as myself) have no desire to make liberal arts courses be more expensive than STEM course. Indeed, as he rightfully notes, because liberal arts degrees are associated with lower lifetime earnings, […]
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I’m writing in response to Yevgeniy Feyman’s challenging comments to my conservative defense of liberal education: We see more and more libertarian nudging in higher education. Consider the proposal, coming out of Florida, to incentivize students to choose the most demonstratively productive majors. They are, of course, the STEM majors–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Tuition […]
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This past February, in the final act of Brooklyn College’s BDS fiasco, four Jewish students were kicked out of the talk. (Brooklyn’s Political Science Department had formally voted to affiliate itself with the talk, which featured two speakers who advocated a nationality-based boycott against Israelis, divestment from Israel, and international sanctions against the Jewish state.) […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** The great scandal of American education is that students can complete their schooling without learning to write correct prose. Even at the college level, and at good schools, most students cannot write even a page of text without committing some error of […]
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Universities enjoy a privileged position in our society and lots of independence from political and economic forces, partly to provide an environment where diversity of views reigns -where conformist, stifling uniformity is suppressed in favor of a “free market in ideas.” Coupled with that historically has been a sense of meritocracy -the academy is an […]
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The Manhattan Institute has just published my new report on the promise of for-profit colleges. I argue that though these institutions face greater scrutiny than any other sector of the higher-ed industry, we should celebrate their potential to accommodate untraditional students. I acknowledge for-profits’ shortcomings; however, I conclude that if the Department of Education is concerned about loan repayment, completion […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on the Success for ‘Holistic’ Med School Admissions at Boston University: Boston University has demonstrated the success of “holistic” admissions for medical school, according an analysis published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Under such admissions, grades and test scores aren’t accorded the same dominant role they have […]
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Plenty of liberals–and not just liberal professors–think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see no organized conspiracy, and much of the liberal paranoia amounts to whining about the results of legitimate political defeats. Nonetheless, there is something to the thought that hostility to […]
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“Intellectual Diversity in Legal Academe” was the subject of an April 5th conference sponsored by the Harvard Federalist Society at the university’s law school. The videos of the one-day meeting are now available here. You can watch the first panel, entitled “Is There a Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Law School Faculties?,” below. Among […]
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Fareed Zakaria, in his new Time magazine column, “The Thin-Envelope Crisis,” does some hand-wringing over the supposed complicity of our colleges and universities in the decline of economic mobility in our country. He writes, “The institutions that have been the best at opening access in the U.S. have been its colleges and universities. If they […]
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Writer Christopher Shea argued in the Washington Post that the problems associated with student loans – and by extension, the cost of college – are overstated. Contrary to many of the sob stories in the media, says Shea, “…it’s almost always well worth what it does cost — assuming that you graduate and, if your loans […]
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Big news about homework: a new technology allows professors to monitor the reading and studying of their students outside of class. Digital tools record what students do on their e-textbooks: how often they open it and to what pages, whether they highlight or not, whether they take notes. It’s called CourseSmart, and it offers a […]
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Did you know you can get a degree in your pajamas? It’s true, the company EdConnect assures us–thousands of students are doing it every day. Meanwhile, in California, the legislature and governor are cooking up a “faculty free” college experience: just take exams to get a degree. Too lazy to take your own exam? Maybe […]
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Over at The American Conservative, Samuel Goldman has a sharp response to the National Association of Scholars’ Bowdoin report: The authors’ tin ear for readers’ sensibilities is in evidence throughout the report. In particular, the report shows no sympathy for students who doubt, with some justification, that old Bowdoin had room for them. Acknowledging such […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** Many popular proposals to improve higher education would actually weaken it. Faculty are letting academic standards slip–in the name of academic enrichment–and increasingly giving students academic credit for activities that are “academic” in only a lax sense. Not everything taught or learned is […]
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To the careful observer of American higher education, the questions Neil Gross raises in Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? might seem self-explanatory. Indeed, such an observer could reason, everyone knows that American universities are run by left-wing academics who bar conservative students and faculty from moving up the ranks. In addition, he might say, […]
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Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics: The body of the report demonstrates that left-leaning ideology permeates the college; the report’s preface explains the harm this does to students and the nation.The problem is not that Bowdoin teaches contemporary progressivism — that is, the idea that government’s chief aims include securing substantial social and economic […]
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It is difficult to know if MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are a conspiracy to undermine the academy or a way to open the avenues of higher education. However one sees it, though, a revolution is certainly taking place: millions of people are already taking on-line courses. It seems that the U.S. Department of Education […]
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The Supreme Court decided last week to review the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, whose majority opinion (joined by all 8 Democratic appointees, opposed by all 7 Republican appointees) held that the 14th Amendment bars the people of Michigan from amending their state constitution to prohibit preferential treatment based […]
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Very few people who enroll in MOOCs (massive open online courses) tell us about the experience. I just took one and learned these lessons: Lesson One: Professors need to start phasing out in-class lecturing now. Based on my own experience as a student and as an adjunct professor, the vast majority of professors spend much […]
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Yesterday the Manhattan Institute sponsored a panel on the National Association of Scholars’ report on the decline of Bowdoin College. It featured Peter Wood, Thomas Klingenstein, and William Bennett. You can watch the video below:
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Today the National Association of Scholars is releasing the results of its long, in-depth study of Bowdoin College, “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students.” Among the findings: Bowdoin, in a retreat from its past, stresses global citizenship (with declining emphasis and on and concern for the United States). Multi-culturalism, […]
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