Students ‘Adrift’? Don’t Blame Them
…apathetic, or that they shouldn’t be in college, or that they worship the wrong values—apparently Arum and Roksa tell us that college students spend 51% of each week on socializing…
Search Results for: college is a good investment
What Else Do Professors Do? They Teach.
…investment in research. Blame it on the insistence to publish or perish. Blame it on entitled students whose demand for good grades puts teachers on the defensive and produces grade…
Let’s Change the Student Loan Program
…themselves as well as for taxpayers. Marginal students, unprepared for college by their pre-college educational experiences, are trapped– -they drop out of college before graduating or graduate without having learned…
The Amazing College Debt Bubble
Teaching One Student Costs Only $1,456 A Year?
…is almost always a good thing and that the loans needed to finance it are “good debt” since it is an investment are both widespread and contribute to the problem….
Why Remediation in College Doesn’t Work
…they could have if they were structured as rewards for good academic performance in pre-college schools and continuing good academic performance in college. The empirical research of Harvard psychology professor…
Those Accountability Rules for Student Loans
…super-size them. Extending the effort to cover all colleges and universities that receive federal student loans would provide consumers with much-needed information about institutional quality and return on investment. The…
Sustainability—More Cash and a Softer Side
…than two dozen college campuses during the last few years. The schools now offering the major include small private liberal arts colleges and the public Arizona State University, which operates…
What Is For-Profit Education Really Like?
…federal investment. This is why the Department of Education’s proposed “gainful employment” regulation, which College, Inc discusses at length, is problematic. If the goal of a college education, and of…
Out Of Her Depth?
…Sachs nightmare, writing about why serving simultaneously as a director on the board of the most infamous investment bank and as president of a university that keeps is investments secret…
Is an Endowment a Nest Egg or a Gambler’s Stake?
College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can…
Does U.S. News Make Law Schools More Expensive?
…law school out of reach for many students who consider the growing costs and diminishing return on investment. The GAO methodology of asking questions largely to school officers could not…
Waste And Folly In Student Loans
…the House acted, Education Department staffers were explaining to college financial officials In October Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to colleges nationwide urging them to get “Direct Loan-ready…
Princeton’s Victory Over Grade Inflation
…means “Excellent,” “Truly Outstanding,” a B “Very Good,” “Above Average,” and a C “Average” — carries a good deal of weight. But implementing such a grading policy is impossible in…
Rescuing The University, II
Part II, The Solution (The first part of this essay can be found here.) Restoring good sense to universities means allowing levelheaded academics to compete with radical imposters who proliferate…
Why Don’t More Graduate
…that the major mismatching problem today may be that college graduates increasingly are way over-trained for the jobs that they take. We are increasingly in the era of the college…
Why Are Graduation Rates So Low?
…to continue on to college, but less attention has been paid at the college level to the third factor -college drop-outs. Why do students drop out of college? The evidence…
The Cambridge Empire Strikes Back
…some background: Harvard is ruled principally by a self-perpetuating body known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, consisting of six trustees with lifetime tenure plus the university president….
A Benefit From The Recession?
Even the dark cloud of the current recession has some silver linings. One of them seems to be an unexpected up-tick in the number of college students majoring in engineering,…
A Call for “Intentional Upheaval”
…about programs for investment and disinvestment, and about how we meet today’s enormous challenges. We must finally learn to say the word “no,” a word rarely used in higher education….
Let’s Cut The Administrative Fat
After years of fat, our colleges and universities are now facing decisions imposed by the coming years of lean. Will the academy pull back from the spending binge of recent…
Ivy-Covered Hedge Funds
…cash. College administrators are convinced that their expenditures have every right to increase commensurately with their abnormal investment returns. Thus fat years bring unnecessary new initiatives, while subsequent lean years…
Why University Presidents Make So Much, And Why They Shouldn’t.
…usual argument about whether this is obscene or a consequence-of-a-necessary-search-for-talent-in-a-hypercharged-world has already flourished today. And there are undoubtedly good points to be made in each particular. Margaret Soltan offers a…
Change Can Happen One Professor At A Time
Of the many problems besetting higher education today, perhaps the most intractable is the incentives problem. On hundreds of campuses across the United States, thousands of college professors are being…
Are Colleges “Failure Factories”?
…huge problem – a very high drop-out rate. Our colleges are failure factories for literally millions of students, Schneider says, and I agree. To be sure, our statistics on college…
The Noble Lies Of PC
“..the one aspect of American culture and society most in need of improvement and investment–education–has been greeted by deafening silence on the part of all candidates.” Leon Botstein, president of…
The Long Shadow Of The Sixties
In every discussion of left-wing bias on college campuses, a good portion of faculty defenders come to the table with a blunt contention. There is NO bias, they insist. Sure,…
What Does ‘Sustainability’ Have to Do With Student Loans?
…opportunity and plunge themselves into debt in order to get a college degree. Generally these appeals are more carrot than stick, more “get a good education to get a good…
University Of The Absurd
Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University…
How Mismatches Devastate Minority Students
…in good faith. By lowering admissions standards for African-American and Hispanic students at selective law schools, they hoped to increase the number of minority students on campus and ultimately to…
Student Loans – Sequel To The Mortgage Mess?
…all they can in Title IV loans, they frequently need to borrow still more to meet the extravagant costs of college. They often borrow at relatively high interest rates from…