Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology? SUNY Maritime College? Yes. They are among the top ten “value-added” U.S. colleges likely to increase a student’s lifetime earnings, according to a study, “Beyond College Rankings,” by Brookings Institution Fellow Jonathan Rothwell. The highest ranking among 4-year colleges are: 1) California Institute of Technology, 2) Colgate, 3) M.I.T., 4) Rose-Hulman […]
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Millennial workers have had it rough in recent years, coming of age during the Great Recession and experiencing higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than older generations. A new study finds that Millennials, who will dominate the U.S. labor market for the next 50 years, may face another problem: They’re less prepared for today’s job […]
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Federal rules for state authorization of online college teaching raise some odd questions. Why is Massachusetts charging $40,000 for an online college to hire a work-from-home professor living on the Vermont-Massachusetts border? Why does North Carolina demand a $37,000 fee before allowing administrators with a distance learning university to meet prospective students face to face? […]
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Should college professors teach more? Specifically, should professors at public research universities devote more time to teaching undergraduates, and less to research? In two states this, um, academic question has become a political controversy, one likely to crop up elsewhere. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican presidential candidate, has proposed a tuition freeze and […]
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A new ACTA survey, “The Unkindest Cut,” shows that’s among 52 top American colleges and universities, only four require their English majors to take even one course in Shakespeare. Of course, much of this is the Bard’s own fault. He is paying the price for being a dead white male at a time when the […]
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First, the good news: My undergraduate students here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are quite literate, contrary to all the bad press and fears. Every week I give them a 20-minute writing assignment in class, the sole preparation for which is having done the week’s homework. Turns out they write pretty well; arguably, in […]
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Male in ‘Mattress Case’ Sues Columbia KC Johnson Paul Nungesser—the Columbia student targeted by Emma Sulkowicz’s media campaign and described by Kristin Gillibrand as a “rapist” in a statement released by the New York senator’s office—has filed a Title IX lawsuit against Columbia University. The case was assigned to Judge Gregory Woods, an Obama appointee recommended […]
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Completing a college education, people have long presumed, shows that a young adult has not just mastered a particular subject but has broadened his or her intellect by exposure to many different disciplines, philosophies, and diverse approaches to both knowledge and life. A successful college education replaces ignorance with insight, and insularity with confidence and […]
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Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist who has figured out something important – many Americans are completely caught up in the costly, pointless, and often damaging obsession with getting their children into our supposedly elite colleges and universities. His new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, is his effort at […]
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Scott Walker made himself into a presidential candidate with his victory over the minions of Madison, Wisconsin. Despite the howling demonstrations inside and outside the state capital building, Walker succeeded in passing ACT 10. It stripped the public sector unions of their most powerful organizing tool — the dues check-off, by which unions fees were automatically deducted […]
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Well-known author and scholar Heather Mac Donald recently visited UCLA to talk about the idea of “micro-aggressions” on college campuses, but before she even went there, she had a few words to say about the people running the place. The launch of her talk Thursday began with outlining the proliferation of the “massive diversity bureaucracy” […]
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Civility is a watchword on campuses these days–partly because it is an admirable characteristic, partly because the word is always useful as an apparently benign cover for censorship. From my work defending student and faculty speech for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, I know that many faculty members already recognize civility as a velvet […]
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Molly Horwitz, a junior at Stanford University, is running for a spot in Stanford’s student senate. In the course of her campaign, Horwitz, a Latina and a Jew, sought the endorsement of Stanford’s Students of Color Coalition (SOCC) and was granted an interview. During the interview, Horwitz claims, she was asked this question: “Given your […]
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“Our university campuses are now islands of oppression in a sea of freedom.”—Abigail Thernstrom, 1990 So say many critics of our colleges, and, alas, in many cases correctly. Here are the hallmarks of today’s college campus: The implementation of hate speech codes The stultifying strictures of political correctness The greatly expanded notions of verbal harassment […]
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After rejecting several previous proposals over the past several years, the UCLA faculty has finally succumbed to politically correct pressure from above (Eugene Block, the Chancellor, and other administrators) and below (“progressive” students) and voted to impose a four-unit “diversity” course requirement on all undergraduates. Ironically, the felt necessity for this new course requirement reveals […]
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• Campus Reform asked out-of-state students at UVA and UMD if they would be willing to give up their U.S. citizenship to become “undocumented students.”
• Out-of-state students at both universities pay nearly twice as much as in-state students and illegal immigrants pay.
Higher education and its comfortable inhabitants on campus have long been hotbeds of support for Obama and Obamacare. Now, along with business and labor, i.e., the other inhabitants of what passes for the real world, they are about to become victims of one of its high “Cadillac” tax on generous health plans. In 2009 President […]
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Thomas Bender, NYU professor of history and the humanities, laments that historians have “lost their public.” Economics, he notes, “has an audience in corporate and government circles; sociology and psychology have important roles in the social services. But historians generally have not had a similar targeted audience, except in schools. They have aspired to reach […]
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Hans Bader has a perceptive post analyzing the University of Virginia’s new “affirmative consent” policy. Rather than learning from Rolling Stone and stressing due process, the site of the year’s biggest campus rape hoax has redefined sexual assault to include routine contact that no one off campus would deem criminal conduct. As Bader notes, UVA […]
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By Edward Morrissey The University of Michigan swerved away from folly yesterday by reversing a decision not to show the popular film American Sniper on campus after 300 students protested its depiction of the late Chris Kyle. In a statement written by a group called Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and the Muslim Students Association, protesters had […]
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How Accusers Play the Drinking Game at Washington and Lee As you’ll see from the this list of stories, the male students who have the resources to challenge the illegal bullying of their constitutional rights do so by filing a due process lawsuit, like the one facing Washington and Lee. The facts, by this point, […]
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By Taylor Schmitt I have some confessions to make: I am a liberal. I am pro-choice. I favor the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Given supreme authority, I would drastically cut our military budget and use the money to institute a single-payer healthcare system (certainly not something many of my colleagues at the Independent would agree […]
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The long-awaited Columbia Journalism Review report of Rolling Stone’s UVA article, which ostensibly takes the magazine to task for falsely reporting a rape that never happened, sparked a new outcry from both the media and students on America’s college campuses. They’re horrified that the report could have a chilling effect on students reporting sexual assaults. No […]
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One of the most important elements of a senator’s power comes in the tradition of recommending district court judicial nominations in the senator’s home state. And so it perhaps should come as little surprise that the Senate’s most ardent opponent of campus due process, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), would have recommended the author of the […]
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Stop giving every student a loan. That’s Megan McArdle’s advice on Bloomberg View. Talking about accredited four-year schools as well as for-profit colleges, she says: “…stop making the loans directly, then invite private companies back into the student-loan market — and force them to eat some of the losses.” So the companies will have to do […]
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The University of Houston, a public university, is proud to have snagged actor Matthew McConaughey as its 2015 commencement speaker. The University says that McConaughey has “the kind of star power that adds muscle to the University of Houston’s bold reputation campaign “Welcome to the Powerhouse.”” I understand that colleges and universities are fighting for […]
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If you can’t beat them, join them. So seems to be the MOOC mantra now that “tsunami” hype is fading. Gone is talk of do-it-yourself education replacing credit hours and diplomas en masse. Now MOOC providers are developing elements of the structure of the traditional institutions they once challenged, and focusing predominantly on niche tech […]
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Over the more than 25 years that I have been writing articles and giving talks critical of racial preferences at American universities, I think I have learned something about the contours of the public debate on this issue, especially as it pertains to the more selective institutions. Here are four salient conclusions
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Back in 2008, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote here that on campus, the word ”sustainability” was moving away from its normal English meaning (prudent use of resources with the needs of future generations in mind) toward a usage with heavy ideological baggage: “sustainability” (definition 2) – a condition that arises […]
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Kevin Carey hates college. Or rather, he hates the higher education industry, the system, the establishment. An encounter on page 39 of his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere indicates one reason why. Carey sits down at a Starbucks in Washington, DC, with a junior at […]
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