In an attempt to buck conventional wisdom, Nicole Allan and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic are tackling what they call “The Myth of the Student-Loan Crisis.” In a neat little infographic, they argue that both the cost of tuition and student debt obligations are lower than we think, that college is always and everywhere a wise investment, […]
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Say you go down to local fishmonger and order a nice tuna steak. You take it home, cook it up, serve it, and find it is succulent and delicious. But before long you have cramps, nausea, and something worse. Chances are what you thought was tuna was another fish, escolar. Tasty but not recommended. The New […]
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By John S. Rosenberg This may be a first: the president of a major research university has just been formally censured by his faculty — a no confidence vote may be coming next month — because of an opinion about a historical event (and a conventional, mainstream opinion at that) he expressed in a university […]
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Most reasonable people realize that the tuition bubble is bound to burst. On line courses are altering the university landscape, reducing costs and the need for brick-and-mortar settings. Moreover, despite President Obama’s call for additional student aid, Washington’s support for higher education is bound to wane in this period of economic exigency. Student aid is […]
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Those who advocate admissions preferences for “diverse” students say that colleges will be better learning environments if the student body isn’t all “the same.” Former Harvard president Derek Bok famously said, “It just wouldn’t do to have an all-white university.” In its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, a majority of the Supreme Court echoed […]
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Readers of Minding the Campus are familiar with the argument that universities produce far too many graduates in “impractical” humanities majors. This point applies especially to graduate education in the liberal arts, where today’s students are welcomed into a leftist fellowship with poor job prospects. Jordan Weissmann of the Atlantic claims to upend this narrative […]
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Past MLA President Michael Berube’s speech to the Council of Graduate Schools, a version of which was published this week at the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a sober account of the terrible condition of the humanities circa 2013. Professor Berube mentions the job market, which “has been in a state of more or less […]
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A debate has raged for nearly a year over federal government’s funding of political science research. On one side are those who argue that very little public benefit is derived from such funding and that it only furthers Ivory Tower navel-gazing. On the other side are, not surprisingly, the political scientists themselves and those who […]
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In November, I reviewed the new, supposedly “untold” story of 20th century U.S. history penned by Oliver Stone and American University professor Peter Kuznick. (Parents of American University students can spend their tuition dollars having their children enroll in Kuznick’s course, “Oliver Stone’s America.”) In the review, I mentioned that Princeton professor Sean Wilentz had […]
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If I were asked to name the ten organizations most adversely impacting Americans – I would undoubtedly think of a few terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or criminal elements like Russian or Italian Mafia crime families, but also on my list, right below the quasi-corrupt NCAA that exploits young athletes to profit and entertain adults, might […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** Every American should know Western civilization, of which American culture and political institutions are an integral part. By Western civilization I mean the constellation of ideas, political arrangements, ethical precepts, and ways of organizing society and the economy that are traceable to […]
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Business schools and their students are confronting an unpleasant truth that law schools and their students had to learn some time ago: their degrees are not the tickets to automatic success they once seemed to be. Unlike law schools, however, business schools are actually dealing with the problem. A recent WSJ piece reports that starting salaries for recent MBA grads […]
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For many economists, the big point about the current higher education bubble is that it deserves to burst. College education is overpriced because colleges have been getting away with charging students for amenities that have little or nothing to do with real education. The list of amenities is long, with a lot of disagreement on […]
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Superior, Wisconsin is at the far northwest tip of the state and the population is overwhelmingly white. There have never been any racial troubles in the area. Nevertheless, officials at the University of Wisconsin branch campus have become “sponsors” of a group calling itself the “Unfair Campaign.” The campaign is built around the assertion that […]
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Twenty three billion more. That’s what it would cost taxpayers over the next 10 years to restore the federal Pell Grant to its purchasing power 40 years ago. The early 1970’s were the heyday of the Pell Grant, the federal program targeted to low-income students. But now the maximum Pell Grant of $5,500 is […]
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A courageous group of students are using Valentine’s Day to protest the hook-up culture. At twenty-five schools, students from the Love and Fidelity Network are holding a week-long campaign called “Words that Still Matter.” On Monday they hung 4,400 posters around their campuses, placed ads in their student newspapers, and began inundating social media with […]
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Near the beginning of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit (1857), a character named Monsieur Rigaud explains to a companion, “I am a cosmopolitan gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss–Canton de Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born in Belgium. I am a citizen of the […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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