James Patterson is a visiting assistant professor at Duke.
In 1999, I was a sophomore at the University of Houston when Dr. Ross M. Lence invited me to participate in a small, graduate seminar entirely dedicated to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. It was an experience I will never forget. During the first few weeks, I found myself utterly unprepared for the rigor […]
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American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times defending online higher education by appealing to his own experience with distance-learning and correspondence schools. As a nontraditional student, he enrolled in Thomas Edison State College, a distance learning university, and he also received college credits through correspondence schools. As […]
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Is it true that only some recipients of student loans are getting their money’s worth–those with “majors closely aligned with actual occupations” such as engineers or computer scientists? Daniel Foster of National Review Online makes that argument in The American Spectator. These students, he says, are more employable and earn more upon leaving college than […]
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Political scientists Gary King (Harvard University) and Maya Sen (University of Rochester) recently produced a working paper titled, “The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities.” Everyone interested in higher education should read it. The paper is instructive for those who want to understand how little most academics understand the crisis universities face. The problems with […]
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I recently wrote here about the unwarranted optimism that the dawn of distance learning brought to higher education in the 1990s. That trip down memory lane might–and probably should–throw cold water on the enthusiasm about online education today. Arguably, the troubles with online education now are no different from those of the old distance learning […]
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Think back. What was the revolutionary technological advance of the 1990s that we thought pointed the way to the future of higher education? It was “interactive television,” of course! Interactive television was at the center of the revolution in education called “distance learning.” It would connect classrooms within a city, state, or even (with some […]
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By any ordinary standard, Teresa Sullivan is the kind of university president conservatives love to hate. In 2010, after the Board of Visitors unanimously elected her the first female president of the University of Virginia, one of her first acts was to endorse and publish the UVA Diversity Council’s statement expressing commitment in–what else?–diversity. Sullivan […]
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