Anthony Paletta is a freelance writer.
The LA Times just finished a 3-part series on the study of video game design, at the collegiate level. Over 200 schools offer courses in “some aspect of video game development.” On the one hand, these students are actually learning something that employers value – the average salary for a video game designer is $73,600. […]
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The Shark provides a list of the top five Law School “Admissions Innovations” of 2008, with analysis. The ludicrous Baylor case is ranked one, but I hadn’t heard of several of the others. Take #3 University of Michigan Law School’s Wolverine Scholars Program admits University of Michigan undergrads who have at least a 3.8 GPA […]
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Harvard faculty maintain that additions to the courses that will fulfill General Education requirements (a replacement for the Core) are not growing easier. Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. Here’s a defense, reported in the Harvard Crimson: Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. “I don’t […]
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Baylor University has taken U.S. News list hucksterism to a new level, in granting students a $300 bookstore credit for retaking the SAT, and a $1000 per-year merit aid increase for improving their score by at least 50 points. That’s called buying your way up the list.
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Madonna Constantine has filed a lawsuit against Columbia University in the New York State Supreme Court. What could possibly be the grounds? The Spectator reports: The law firm of Paul Giacomo will litigate Constantine’ case under an Article 78 proceeding of New York’s Civil Practice Law and Rules, which allows Constantine to challenge the process […]
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Walter Olson writes at Point Of Law on a “lawsuit in a Moscow commercial court in which the government of Russia is invoking the RICO law — America’s RICO law, that is, not some equivalent on its own books — to demand that Bank of New York pay compensation over a ten-year-old episode in which […]
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– The University of Michigan has opened a Computer and Video Games Archive Now, as the Michigan Daily reports, students can study video games at their library. “Or just play them.” How exactly will this work? Once traffic picks up, the library will use a reservation system, with priority going to researchers. …. Because of […]
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John McCain and Barack Obama’s calls to Columbia to end its ban on the ROTC continue to yield procedural results, however much any real change remains in doubt. Columbia is set to feature two informational forums in coming weeks prior to a student survey on whether to lift or continue a ban on the Naval […]
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The Harvard Crimson today reports that, beginning in 2009, Harvard Law School students will no longer receive letter grades, and will instead be evaluated simply on a modified pass-fail system, consisting of “Honors” “Pass” “Low Pass” and “Fail”. Yale and Stanford have similar grading systems. An obvious point of objection was raised: According to Richard […]
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The “Diversity In Academe” issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is out. And how is the quest for diversity going? Badly, as always. The number of Asian-American university Presidents remains insufficient, Middle Easterners aren’t considered an ethnic group, and paltry numbers of minority students study abroad. And those are just the minor problems. What’s […]
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A new issue of the Dartmouth Review, and with it, a revealing listing of Dartmouth’s worst professors. Here are some stellar academics: A self-described “recovering racist” who makes her classes into an airing of grievances rather than a study of literature because she “can’t read male authors anymore,” Grantham injects her writing courses with dogmatic […]
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“Senior officials never discussed hippo phase-out” In case you were wondering.
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Today’s New York Times features a front-page story focusing on academic centers devoted to Western thought, the American founding, and similar ideals, which naturally features our VERITAS Fund prominently. It offers several stories of what the VERITAS Fund is accomplishing. Here’s an example: Colorado Springs used its $50,000 grant to publish “A Free Society and […]
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Harvard is replacing its “core” (a somewhat shaggy assortment of distribution requirements, in fact) with a set of “Program in General Education” guidelines. The program seeks to “connect a student’s liberal education.. to life beyond college.” It mandates one letter-graded half courses in each of eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding; Culture and Belief; Empirical […]
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I just learned about your organization today, following a link from, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thank you for what you are doing. As a voice crying in the wilderness, I find that many of the points being made on your site resonate with my own critiques that fall, inevitably, upon deaf […]
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– The Engingeering Student Council at Columbia has advanced a measure to permit student petitions on issues. The Not only are Barack Obama and John McCain for the step, the Columbia Spectator is as well. Past polls revealed majority student support. Opposed? The faculty, the administration, and, in past forms, student government. – Richard Vedder […]
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I certainly am. Those with narrower interests will be well-served by Popular Science’s recent “A Geek’s Guide to College.” What do you want to do in college? Shoot Particles? Try Stanford. Enter The Deep Freeze? Montana State has a -80 degrees Fahrenheit lab. Study Killer Bugs? Boston University. See, much simpler than defining “best.”
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Walter Olson tipped us off to this, at Point of Law: Paul Caron of TaxProfBlog has run the numbers on this year’s Presidential contributions (at least those coded “law professor”, which may miss some) and they’re even more overwhelmingly lopsided than you might have expected: 95 percent Obama, 5 percent McCain. At Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, […]
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Transgendered Students at Yale are pressing for gender-neutral housing, the Yale Daily News reports. Somehow, Yale, run by a Puritan cabal as it is, has failed to yet provide it, and cites further difficulties in moving forward with such a plan: Administrators say they remain committed to meeting the needs of their students and have […]
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The public furor over textbook prices shows no sign of halting, as students part with ever-larger sums for books. Before petitioning congress, all should take a look at the burgeoning number of private options for used and cheaper textbooks. Charlotte Allen pointed out several here this summer. Additional options continue to spring up. – The […]
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The keynote speaker at Brown’s opening convocation this year urged that students, according to the Brown Daily Herald, “should not limit definitions of themselves to those imposed by society” that they “should they should use their time at Brown to forge their own values and determine their own priorities” and “the importance of independent thinking […]
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1. Several colleges have refused to return the U.S. News surveys asking colleges for opinions of their peers. The obvious question is why “peer review surveys” on an institutional level were ever regarded as helpful? It’s one thing to ask a philosophy department for their opinion of their peers, but a whole university? The level […]
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Tim Groseclose, a Political Science Professor at UCLA, has resigned from its Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, stating that “a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions” – of course, in order to circumvent the state ban on the use of race as a factor in admissions. […]
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We’ve documented the foolishness of most “Freshmen Reading” assigments in the past. Looking through the dreck, Charlotte Allen discovered a ray of hope in Cornell’s assignment this year of Gary Wills’ Lincoln At Gettysburg. Now that the assignent is completed, what did Cornell students think? The Cornell Daily Sun reports: “I thought it was awful […]
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Listen to (elements of) John’s address to FIRE’s Campus Freedom Network Conference.
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Read about it here. And remember why they’re expensive in the first place…
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Today’s Chicago Sun-Times offers tips for college saving, from “experts” and from students.
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Richard Vedder gets it right, on the college facilities race, even at state colleges – “The CountryClubization of Public Universities”
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The Wall Street Journal reports on a new survey of 1.2 million bachelor’s degree holders, which reveals significant variations in average salaries of different graduates. Ivy League graduates earned a median starting salary 32% higher than average liberal arts college graduates, and, at ten year’s distance, earned salaries 34% higher than average liberal arts college […]
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Rockingham Community College in North Carolina has shifted the schedule of all of its course offerings to reduce the cost of commuting. Classes held five times a week will be held four times, while classes held three times a week will now be held twice. If only larger colleges showed a comparable attention to cost…
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