The Department of Education released new information about student loan defaults yesterday, and it isn’t pretty. A dismaying 10 percent of student borrowers are now defaulting on their student loans within two years of repayment, and nearly 15 percent are defaulting within three years. These are the highest default rates since 1995. The data bear […]
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The Huffington Post brings news of faculty complaints at Occidental College. The background: Several months ago, students filed an OCR complaint, alleging that the school’s process for investigating sexual assault complaints was so biased against accusers that it violated Title IX. That process (which nearly all news media ignored) denies the accused student a right […]
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Writing at National Review Online about the recent release of SAT scores, Jason Richwine wonders whether all the fretting about low college-readiness rates among high school graduates really makes much sense. He links to an Atlantic Monthly story on the 2013 scores that bears the title “This Year’s SAT Scores Are Out, and They Are Grim.” Scores were […]
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Many recent articles say the humanities are in deep trouble on our campuses. Minding the Campus asked seven prominent scholars to respond briefly to this question: “If you could change one thing about the humanities, what would that change be?” Here are the answers from Stephen F. Hayward, Samuel Goldman, James Piereson, Daphne Patai, Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, […]
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(A speech delivered September 19 at a symposium on “Religious Freedom Under Obamacare,” the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.) * * * The official title of this talk, “New Gods on the Public Square,” is a cleaned-up version of what it would be at the New York Post, where I now work as […]
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Some 200 Canadian and American men’s activists will gather this Friday at the University of Toronto, where they will be met by angry feminists dedicated to tearing down their posters, heaping abuse on speakers, blockading events and denouncing police as “f—ing scum” if they try to restore order. At least that’s what happened last November […]
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Children of alumni have long enjoyed advantages in gaining admission to the most selective private colleges and universities in the United States–a practice rare in other nations and puzzling and unsavory to foreigners. If not as puzzling, legacy admissions are equally unsavory to many Americans, especially those who consider themselves “meritocrats” and those on the […]
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Classes have started at CUNY, and at least one highly troubling event has occurred. Last week, NRO revealed that CUNY students and at least six members of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, had descended upon the Macaulay Honors College campus to harass David Petraeus, a visiting professor at the Honors College this term. The […]
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Reprinted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the […]
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“Disrupting” may have had its day as a pervasive buzzword, claims Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic. It is or is soon to be toast as “jargon cluttering the pages of Forbes and Harvard Business Review” and as part of the title of many a TED talk. Disruptive used to refer to students and others who had impulse-control “issues” in class. It now […]
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Several years ago, I attended a Liberty Fund conference where one of the readings was Edward Chase Kirkland’s Dream and Thought in the Business Community. What I remember most from the book is that many of the great business leaders of the late-1800s not only regarded college education as unnecessary for anyone who was looking […]
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(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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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“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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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