How do you reduce the growing mountain of student loan debt? Stop subsidizing higher education? End the notion that ‘any degree’ is better than ‘no degree’? Teach kids that paying off $12,000 in loans isn’t a cakewalk? No, no, let’s just tell them again how much it costs and hope they make the best of […]
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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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Writing in the New York Times, University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson argues that online education is never going to be as good as live education with a real professor in a real classroom. In a sense, he’s right. There’s nothing like a top teacher: someone who can not only present complex material lucidly and […]
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MTC contributor Richard Vedder punctures many myths about American universities in his new report, “Twelve Inconvenient Truths about American Higher Education.” Among other issues, he investigates whether a college degree guarantees success, if students actually make good use of their time in college, and whether freedom of expression truly exists on American campuses. It’s a […]
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J.M. Anderson has offered an increasingly common defense of Common Core’s standards for English language arts and mathematics. They can help us to achieve any utopian educational goals one could wish for. The only fly in the ointment is the quality of our teaching corps. In actuality, 46 states have bought some very expensive snake […]
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The Boston Herald is a scrappy, politically conservative tabloid that normally rants and rails against excessive regulations and good-for-nothing government bureaucrats. Yet in an editorial on the Penn State child molestations, titled “Keeping campuses safe,” the Herald called for a heavily expanded bureaucratic response. It excoriated “the football program staff” of Penn State who, quoting […]
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Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State was taken down not because it was “divisive,” at the university’s new president foolishly said, but because Paterno was morally obtuse and unworthy of the honor. So far so good. But what should we think of the NCAA’s flabbergasting decision to erase history–vacating 13 years of football wins? As […]
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< I argued yesterday that the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is both necessary and a good thing–but I must add that it just can’t work now. It has the potential to transform American K-12 education, but the plain fact is that it is destined to fail because current teacher education programs neither prepare […]
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Not one college or university that I know of has resisted the notorious “Dear Colleague” letter’ urging a lowering of the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases. Reasons for this timidity include the fact that powerful forces within the academy fully support the attack on due process by the Department of Education’s Office […]
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In 2006, the Duke lacrosse case featured an extraordinarily high-profile intersection of college athletics, academic culture, and the criminal justice system. Six years later, the tragedy at Penn State far surpassed events in Durham in the annals of campus scandal. There were clear differences between the two cases (chiefly, of course, that at Penn State, […]
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Over at NRO yesterday Jay Hallen proposed a few solutions to easing the student-loan bubble. Though his impulses are correct his recommendations fall flat. Hallen first proposes that the Department of Education move to a “risk-based pricing” system in which it would consider a student’s high-school GPA or intended major in determining the loan price. […]
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It’s no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college. Every year, 1.7 million first-year college students are enrolled in remedial classes at a cost of about $3 billion annually, the Associated Press recently reported. Scores on the 2011 ACT college entrance exam showed that only 1 in 4 high school graduates […]
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An article co-published by the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education reports that several universities now engage in student data mining. Electronic monitoring systems collect bits of digital information to create databases of profiles by tracking, timing, and tallying student activities like swiping ID badges or working on online assignments. The data collected […]
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Speaking of business and management majors, Douglas Campbell and James E. Fletcher argue in A Better Way to Educate Professionals that their students “should have a strong base in the traditional liberal arts and the physical sciences….to effectively work with people to understand and solve problems as well as to accomplish individual, organizational, and social goals.” […]
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On July 16 Coursera–one of the new ventures by prestigious universities or their professors that offer free-of charge MOOCs (massive open online courses) to the general public–announced that twelve more institutions have joined the Coursera consortium that initially consisted of Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. One of the new […]
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With election season well under way, the Obama administration now finds itself up against lawsuits brought by several of the nation’s most prominent religious universities. Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame have already filed suit in opposition to the now-infamous federal requirement that insurance companies provide no-fee coverage of a slew of contraceptive […]
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The new Sallie Mae-Gallup survey of attitudes toward higher education, “How America Pays for College 2012,” shows that Americans are becoming increasingly resistant to rising college prices. Some people who were saying “I want the best college money can buy” a few years ago, are now saying “We aren’t going to pay sky-high tuition when […]
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Yale’s brand-new college in Singapore, a joint venture with the National University of Singapore (NUS), is “the first new college to bear Yale’s name in 300 years–and the first attempt to start a liberal-arts school in one of Asia’s leading financial centers,” the Wall Street Journal reports. But here’s one key way in which Yale […]
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UCLA’s Proyecto Derechos Civiles — also known as the Civil Rights Project — has just published a useful new study suggesting the extent of racial discrimination in graduate school admissions. It examined minority graduate enrollments in four states with bans on racial preferences — California, Florida, Washington, and Texas (where the ban is no longer […]
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The City College of San Francisco, the largest college in California with 90,000 students, appears to be on the brink of closing. California’s Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges put it on probation and gave it just eight months to demonstrate why it should stay in business. Without accreditation, City College will be ineligible […]
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The New York Times piece John Leo referenced earlier cites a startling statistic: while almost 40% of births to college-educated women are out-of-wedlock, the figure for women who haven’t graduated college is over 90%. Another figure from same study indicates that though a third of women who hold only a high school diploma have had children with […]
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Under the headline “Diversity’s Evidences.” Len Niehoff’, described as a “professor from practice” at the University of Michigan law school, offered an almost humorously pathetic defense of “diversity on Inside Higher Ed today. He served on the legal team that defended Michigan in Grutter, which he claims the Court got “exactly right,” and his essay […]
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As many critics have noticed, the gap between Page One news coverage of social issues in the New York Times and the editorial response inside is often not a spacious one. Yesterday the Times ran a huge news article (more than two full pages), “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,” on the economic and social […]
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Professors with tenure have lifetime appointments that can only be revoked after some egregious transgression, summarized by such formal labels as moral turpitude, gross negligence or dereliction of duty. In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague. Why would […]
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Mark Regnerus is a tenured associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He published a paper in the peer-reviewed sociological journal Social Science Research. The paper, detailing the results of a study of children growing up in households headed by same-sex couples, concluded that those children may be at disadvantage “when it comes […]
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From MyBudget360, a sobering reminder of explosive student loan growth:
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Andrew, I understand that you were critiquing the accreditation system in general. I agree that it’s not perfect and could focus more directly on what students actually learn rather than on inputs and processes. I do think, though, that when a university doesn’t even have an adequate system in place for monitoring and assessing student […]
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The past few months have been troubling for those who believe that Trustees must exercise more aggressive oversight roles on today’s college and university campuses. At the University of Virginia, the board of regents (temporarily, it turns out) sacked President Teresa Sullivan, yet struggled to articulate a reason for doing so. Then, when they did […]
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Charlotte Allen‘s response to my recent piece on the denial of accreditation for Ashford contains some good material, but some misunderstanding. My piece is not about whether the Ashford decision itself was flawed–I never stated that WASC was wrong to deny Ashford accreditation and flatly stated: “It is certainly possible that Ashford doesn’t deserve accreditation…” […]
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Today the law firm of Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan (FSS) released its report on Penn State’s negligence in the case of Jerry Sandusky’s extensive abuse of minors. After a seven-month investigation, The Freeh Report assigns greater blame to Joe Paterno than was originally assumed, claiming that in conjunction with Penn State’s President, Senior Vice-President for Finance and […]
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