Spring is always a riveting time for observers of American higher education. Indeed, the end of the school year portends two time-honored rituals for our colleges: the announcement of embarrassing information they hope students will forget over the summer and commencement. The latter is especially exciting because it lends higher education an imprimatur that has […]
Read More
The New York Times reports a relatively small proportion of young Americans work by international standards, and suggests it may be because we are lagging in educating college students, since college graduates have low unemployment rates (3.9 percent in April for all college grads). There are several problems with this conclusion. First, while the Bureau of […]
Read More
Well, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports the big news that philosophy professors at San Jose State have refused to adopt a pilot program centered on the legendary Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on justice. Here are my reflections on their stand: Watching the Sandel MOOC doesn’t add anything of value […]
Read More
In the highly competitive free market economy that propelled the United States into our planet’s richest nation, business enterprises making mistakes pay huge and sometimes fatal consequences. Indeed it is what Joseph Schumpeter aptly called “creative destruction” that forces firms to be productive, efficient, innovative, and willing to take risks. Contrast this to higher education. […]
Read More
At Occidental, a student can be found guilty of sexual assault even if his partner said “yes” to sexual intercourse. And yet the school has been targeted by opponents of due process on campus–ranging from celebrity attorney Gloria Allred to Occidental professor Danielle Dirks to Richard Pérez-Peña’s slanted coverage in the New York Times–for not […]
Read More
Why are phony “hate crimes” so common, particularly on campus? James Taranto took a stab at answering this perennial question yesterday in his popular “Best of the Web” column. The occasion was the latest hoax: a women’s studies student at the University of Wyoming sent an aggressive and vile sexual message to herself, denounced it […]
Read More
Cross-posted from Big Think So Peter Sacks, author of the excellent Generation X Goes to College, explains what’s really wrong with the likely MOOCification of higher education. Studies show that learning through MOOCS and related online delivery systems isn’t worse than that through the more traditional or personal ways of teaching, at least according to allegedly reliable […]
Read More
In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university’s status would diminish because it would lose its competitive […]
Read More
Gallup reports today that most Americans understand the higher-ed crisis at least partially. Indeed, a new survey shows that 59% “strongly agree” that colleges and universities should “reduce tuition and fees.” While they’d be crazy not to think this, it’s reassuring that a large percentage of the population recognizes that higher-ed institutions are mostly to […]
Read More
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that a new study by the American Council on Education discovered the “stark lack of representation” of Asian-Americans among leaders of higher education. “Despite leadership inroads made by other racial minority groups,” ACE announced, “only 1.5 percent of college and university presidents are Asian Pacific Islander Americans.” […]
Read More
Charles and David Koch are reportedly interested in buying the Tribune Company’s eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. According to The New York Times, this is less about making a profit than acquiring a platform to extol the brothers’ laissez-faire ideas. Current estimates put the price tag […]
Read More
The New York Times recently published a fascinating piece that exposed the fraudulent research of one Diederik Stapel, a professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. What we learn from the piece is applicable to America, where the incentives for producing worthless research are no different. Stapel had become an academic star […]
Read More
Move over MOOCs, a different model is coming to town–blended learning. Deep within the New York Times’ article today on online courses, readers learned of the “striking” success of San Jose University’s pilot blended course. While MOOCs dominate conversations about the future of higher-ed, it’s the blended model, which combines face-to-face interaction with web based […]
Read More
PETER WOOD: Samuel Goldman seeks to distinguish the small and marginal subset “conservative defenders of liberal education” from other kinds of conservatives. He places these poor folks “in a blind alley.” They are, he says, at odds both with “potential allies outside the conservative movement” and with the conservative movement itself, which finds its center of […]
Read More
I found much to admire and little to disagree with in Sam Goldman’s defense of liberal education. Well, I was offended that he called my use of “cultural transmission” postmodern. I wasn’t offended for any good reason, of course. Putting the techno-phrase in quotes is, of course, a postmodern or cloyingly ironic “move.” It is a way […]
Read More
What’s conservative about liberal education? On any serious consideration, the answer is: a lot. Students do pick up marketable skills when they take classes in literature, history, or philosophy. But the real purpose of studying languages, books, and arguments is to initiate them as members of a community of free men and women, the present […]
Read More
Wednesday’s episode of “Law & Order, Special Victims Unit” dealt with fictionalized versions of recent campus rape cases. In the story, a fraternity produces a crude, misogynistic t-shirt (left). The real T-shirt it is based on (right) was far worse. It was produced and sold last year by an unauthorized frat at Amherst College. Jezebel and AVC have […]
Read More
Time to end it, says the Economist: Universities that want to improve their selection procedures by identifying talented people (of any colour or creed) from disadvantaged backgrounds should be encouraged. But selection on the basis of race is neither a fair nor an efficient way of doing so. Affirmative action replaced old injustices with […]
Read More
It’s clear that the return on the investment in a college education isn’t as promising as it once was. To that end, The Chronicle of Higher Education recently wondered how to “assess the real payoff of a college degree.” Answering this question necessitates defining higher education’s purpose. If one attends college simply hoping for an […]
Read More
Here’s an instructive exercise: The next time you read an article about “diversity” (see, e.g., the interview with the University of Wisconsin’s diversity honcho in Inside Higher Ed today), mentally substitute the letters “BS” for “diversity” every time the latter appears. It’s amazing how much more accurate and understandable the article becomes! (It’s even better […]
Read More