Heavy pressures for more accountability are descending on colleges. Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio want states to release data on salaries for recent grads of public colleges, and Eric Cantor pledges the same in the House. The information, the argument goes, would help parents and high school seniors make wiser choices, the reasoning goes, […]
Read More
The push to make public the earnings of new college graduates and President Obama’s “College Scorecard,” which he touted in his State of the Union Speech last night, are promising tools to assist graduates in making the best choices of school and major. Several states have also set up similar methods of evaluating the “bang […]
Read More
In his response to the President’s State of the Union address, Marco Rubio once again displayed his worrisome approach to higher ed policy. Though he rightfully lamented both tuition cost growth and the government’s bias against non-traditional institutions, his proposals did not address the heart of the matter. He suggested expanding federal student aid for students […]
Read More
From the New Criterion Last month we noted some of the trends affecting the future of higher education in this country. One trend is the explosion in tuition and fees over the last several decades, an explosion matched by the hypertrophy of college administrators, as more and more “deans of diversity” and programs in non-subjects […]
Read More
Here’s a plug for a site I belatedly discovered the other day: Open Culture offers free access to 650 academic courses, movies (from Charade to Charlie Chaplain), language lessons, self-help advice, books (from textbooks to the Harvard Classics), audiobooks, a list of grants available to women, and much more cultural and educational material “scattered across […]
Read More
The Brooklyn College pro-BDS event–with which the school’s Political Science Department formally voted to affiliate itself–has come and gone. The big news from the gathering last Thursday came not in anything the two pro-BDS speakers said (their anti-Israel ramblings were entirely predictable) but in reports from Tablet and the Daily News that four anti-BDS students […]
Read More
After the indictment of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, Penn State did something quite rare for an institution of higher learning facing scandal–it hired a respected outside investigator (former FBI director Louis Freeh) and gave him total access to the relevant university records, including e-mails between key administrators. The resulting Freeh Report used senior […]
Read More
From the blog The Quick & the Ed The Undergraduate Teaching Faculty The 2010-2011 HERI Faculty Survey , a survey of faculty at four-year universities by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, contains some interesting findings. Almost a quarter of professors at four-year universities do not consider teaching their “principal activity” (pg 19) The […]
Read More
Clues to the structure of academia and its ideological leanings sometimes turn up in policy journals. Here’s one: In the Georgetown Public Policy Review, Robert L. Oprisko, a visiting professor at Butler University, notes that “eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political […]
Read More
A petition hosted by MoveOn.org is circulating protesting comments made by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory about the curriculum in colleges and universities in the state. He made his remarks on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and they infuriated faculty members at Chapel Hill and elsewhere. Responding to Bennett’s question about what he plans to do […]
Read More
Perhaps as long as people have made maps they have also made maps of imaginary places. Sometimes inadvertently, of course. Some cartographers really did think Terra Australis filled up the bottom of the globe or the red marks on Mars were the canals of Martian commerce. But imaginary maps have mostly been a recreation for […]
Read More
Buried in a new Congressional Budget Office report is the revelation that the CBO now thinks federal student loans will add $35 billion more to the deficit in the next ten years than it previously thought. “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” released this week, details the changes in the CBO’s […]
Read More
Richard Vedder made the breathtaking assertion here yesterday that “public support of American higher education, on balance, has increased income inequality in the United States.” He claims we must “drastically” reduce government subsidies for education in order to attack income inequality. He calls his view “non-orthodox.” I would just call it wrong. Vedder states, for […]
Read More
A sign of the times: Yale, Penn, and George Washington University are now suing their former students for defaulting on their student loans. The loans in question are Perkins loans, which are set aside for poor students and disbursed by colleges rather than the federal government and. This news broke shortly after the Wall Street […]
Read More
Let us look at the typical liberal/progressive American who supported President Obama in 2012, who enthusiastically favors raising taxes on the affluent, and who supports most federal programs designed to help economically disadvantaged Americans. My guess is this individual also probably supports vastly expanding federal financial aid to college students, favors increased state appropriations for […]
Read More
It seems that higher education reform has found its voice. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave a speech earlier today at the American Enterprise Institute on the role of the federal government in creating economic opportunities for families, and he devoted a good amount of attention to the failings of our higher education system. He […]
Read More
The Intercollegiate Review has news: To fulfill the religion requirement at the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross, students can study “Gardens and World Religions,” learning about world foliage instead of actual faiths. We can think of other hard-hitting religion courses Holy Cross could add: How about “The Phrase ‘Holy Moley’ in Batman and Robin: […]
Read More
Connecticut governor Daniel Malloy recently made a splash with a plan to spend $1.5 billion expanding the University of Connecticut’s science, technology, engineering and math programs, thus–he thinks — turning his state into a magnet for high-tech employers. Alas, the idea of using educational central planning to boost the economic fortunesof a state is beset with problems. […]
Read More
American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times defending online higher education by appealing to his own experience with distance-learning and correspondence schools. As a nontraditional student, he enrolled in Thomas Edison State College, a distance learning university, and he also received college credits through correspondence schools. As […]
Read More
It turns out that “easy A” classes can lead to complications–even at Harvard. Last week the university announced that around 60 students were asked to withdraw for one to two years after a cheating scandal emerged from the much-derided “Introduction to Congress” course. The students who enrolled in the course last Spring did so on […]
Read More