(Cross-posted from Open Market) Earlier, we wrote about the Obama administration’s attempt to inject a race-conscious “disparate impact” provision into colorblind anti-discrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how that could lead to risky, race-conscious lending, bad loans, and future bank failures, mortgage meltdowns, and financial crises. Now, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder highlights an […]
Read More
The “Massive” in MOOC refers to class size, but one might think it stands for cost savings as well. MOOCs are free for students who register and cheap for those who seek credit. Few colleges and universities plan to grant credit for MOOCs, but of those who do, the cost to the student is typically a […]
Read More
There are a number of college rankings. Of course, the best known by far is the U.S. News& World Report ranking, which for many people is the college ranking. (This year, Princeton edged out Harvard for bragging rights.) Forbes publishes another ranking, using an approach designed by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. (Stanford […]
Read More
“Study Gives Tenured Professors a Failing Grade” is the headline of a recent Walter Russell Mead blog post. The study shows that a Northwestern undergraduate in an introductory course is more likely to take another course in the field and perform well in it if his or her instructor is not tenure-track. That, according to […]
Read More
Surveys suggest, unsurprisingly, that most students go to college to acquire job credentials, not to pursue deep learning or ponder eternal truths. The biggest problem: that credentialing is extremely expensive–usually between $100,000 and $200,000–and doesn’t indicate much. Given today’s non-selective admissions policies, grade inflation and lax college academic standards, a college diploma doesn’t tell us […]
Read More
Google is always trying to expand our access to information, so it’s no surprise that it’s teaming up with the MOOC platform EdX to create Open EdX, a website that will open up the MOOC-building process to anyone with a message, an Internet connection, and a few pieces of hardware. “All of us are learners […]
Read More
More than 130 members of the Wellesley College faculty are protesting the potential dismissal of a dissident Peking University professor and threatening to challenge the formal partnership Wellesley recently signed with the Chinese institution. In an open letter, the Wellesley protesters noted that Peking University will sponsor a vote on whether to fire professor Xia […]
Read More
It was bound to happen sooner or later: an important committee at the University of Virginia (UVA) has recommended the de facto privatization of the institution. Specifically, “The University of Virginia and its supporters should initiate a process designed to change the status of the University from a state controlled…and supported entity to a state […]
Read More
What is “nonconsensual sex”? Rape, right? Not at Yale, where the term can be applied to a variety of acts generally accepted as minor offenses or non-offenses in the real world. Since 2010 Yale has become the national center of efforts to whittle away the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault in […]
Read More
This semester, Harvard Business School marks the 50th anniversary of the arrival of its first female students. Just in time for the occasion, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page feature on a new experiment at HBS intended to boost the performance of female students, which has tended to lag behind that of the men. The article, by Jodi […]
Read More
In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley argued that we should “treat universities like for-profit enterprises” and remove their tax-exempt status. Richard Vedder, Ronald Ehrenberg, Roger Kimball, and Daniel Bennett respond below. Richard Vedder: In an email to me shortly before he died, Milton Friedman said “a full analysis…might lead you […]
Read More
The anti-Republican classroom rant of Michigan State professor William Penn has attracted considerable attention in the last few days. (A student surreptitiously recorded Penn criticizing the Romneys, attendees to the 2012 Republican National Convention, and the election law recently passed on a party-line vote in North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature.) Three lessons come to mind about […]
Read More
In a revealing incident at the beginning of Michigan State’s new academic year, writing professor William Penn went off on a rant aimed at Republicans. Fortunately, a student captured it on video, which is included in this story on Inside Higher Ed. Among Professor Penn’s comments were such ideas as these: “If you go to […]
Read More
The great transformation of higher education may be under way. Two indicators: First, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that enrollments at America’s universities in 2012 fell for the first time in years. What the Census did not stress was that the decline was fairly substantial, about 500,000 students, or roughly three percent. Rather the Census, […]
Read More
A strange story out of Swarthmore involving anti-due process activist Mia Ferguson, who was last in the news in April, when she joined several fellow students in filing a Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, on grounds that college procedures insufficiently protected the rights of sexual assault accusers. (Ferguson claimed that she was raped by another […]
Read More
The Washington Post is currently running a series of research pieces on the economics of higher ed entitled “The Tuition Is Too Damn High.” Last week, I criticized Washington Post blogger Dylan Matthews’ assertion that paying for a college education is uniformly worth it, arguing that although aggregate data on employment and wages suggests that […]
Read More
That sounds like a slogan of progressives, who often justify their critique of the United States, organized religion, patriotism, Western civilization, and other traditional institutions on the grounds that the purpose of higher education is to instill critical thinking about prevailing norms and beliefs. But the phrase above actually comes from a blog post by […]
Read More
Buzzfeed has a must-read story about the challenges facing colleges that seek to undermine the higher-ed status quo. Altius Education, a for-profit education company, partnered with the non-profit Tiffin University to create “Ivy Bridge College,” a program within Tiffin that offered associates degrees in practical fields. Atius and Tiffin designed Ivy Bridge hoping that its […]
Read More
College is becoming the new high school–and in many respects, already is. Colleges and universities are remediating more and more students in basic skills, and increasingly teaching them content material that they should have learned in high school. The proliferation of dual-credit/dual-enrollment courses has helped to accelerate this trend while further blurring the distinction between […]
Read More
Tepid. Even disapproving. That’s the state of many professors’ attitudes towards MOOCs, according to Inside Higher Ed‘s 2013 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, released on the IHE website on Tuesday. That reaction isn’t surprising, given fears that MOOCs will wipe out hordes of academic jobs. Plus, I’d like to think, professors who’ve spent their […]
Read More