Day: March 17, 2025

A Private Student Loan System Should Not Mirror the Federal Family Education Loan Program

Shifting student loans from the current government-as-lender model to the private market would be beneficial. As I recently reported, this shift would reduce malinvestment—educational spending that doesn’t justify its costs—while increasing accountability for colleges, improving incentives for both students and institutions, and fostering more informed decision-making through price differences. But privatization is a broad bucket. […]

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This Ohio Superintendent Proves Local Leadership Trumps Federal Bureaucracy

The Department of Education (ED) is a bloated bureaucracy feeding off taxpayer dollars and far removed from understanding school districts’ needs. A new report, Waste Land: The Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, lays out exactly where the Trump administration should cut, reallocate, or eliminate wasteful programs. One case study in the report proves what conservatives […]

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SB17 Banned Race-Based Hiring. Texas Universities Ignore It.

Texas universities, similar to Iowa’s Public Schools, maintain affirmative action plans, likely in noncompliance with state legislation, recent executive orders, and the Department of Education’s (ED) latest Dear Colleague letter. Passed in late 2023, Texas’s Senate Bill 17 specifically banned “policies or procedures designed or implemented in reference to race, color, or ethnicity.” Affirmative action plans directly contradict this, mandating race-based “strategies” […]

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I Interviewed AI. It Thinks Classical Education Can Thrive with Technology.

In graduate school, up-and-coming academics can dream about conducting interviews and focus groups in a foreign language in some hot and far-away locale. It does not always work out this way. You go where the information can be found. In confronting the elemental challenge of integrating classical education with artificial intelligence (AI), I decided to […]

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The Great Un-Wokening Meets the Campus Resistance

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on March 17, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Many of America’s large corporations are beating a retreat from their former commitments to saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. They are also […]

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Think Twice Before Attacking the Department of Education

There’s been a lot of chatter around recent cuts to the Department of Education (ED) since President Trump announced a 50 percent reduction in the ED’s task force. On the left, teachers and administrators worry that a dip in funding will disproportionately affect low-income and disabled students, citing an unclear future when it comes to […]

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