“Everything goes when anything goes all of the time.” —Paul Westerberg Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America (1835/40) that upon the advent of written constitutions and electoral politics, the aristocracies of the Western world had to rediscover their purpose. He saw the United States as the most acute example of a society in […]
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My favorite explanation of Hamas’ and its Iranian sponsors’ latest war against Israel is the erudite Israeli expert on the Arab and Islamic world, Professor Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli Jew who teaches at what Westerners would call Israel’s only conservative university, Bar Ilan. It is conservative because it supports Jewish tradition. Almost all of the […]
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The Chronicle Review is notorious for publishing outlandish opinion pieces more in the nature of white-hot rants than well-reasoned essays. A good case in point is Professor John Quiggin’s “A Vicious Duo” (September 16 – subscriber site), is one of the most overwrought pieces I’ve read there. Quiggin, who teaches economics at the University of Queensland […]
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There is a remarkable moment in Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College, which just came out this week. (The New York Times has an excerpt from the book here). Ferguson and his son are in the middle of the application process, both of them dismayed and discomfited […]
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Trying to rank hundreds, if not thousands of colleges is obviously foolish, but this foolishness has consequences beyond supplying iffy advice to clueless shoppers. To the extent that potential enrollees take ratings seriously, institutions may be tempted to game the system and these tricks may well undermine education. To use Malcolm Gladwell’s illustration from Car […]
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As the author of a college guide that tries to help college-going students identify schools that would be a good “match” for them as individuals, I’ve always had three main gripes with the U.S. News & World Report rankings. First, you can’t quantify the really important factors that go into selecting the right college, such […]
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The U.S. News & World Report rankings of America’s “best” colleges and universities amount to nothing more than an annual ritual, a predictable coronation of entrenched wealth and power. Even more importantly, for aspiring students and parents who hope to transcend their present class status, the yearly “guide” serves as the handmaiden to the elite. […]
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In every Marx Bros. movie, there occurs a moment when Harpo works himself up to a frenzy, hyperventilating, jumping up and down and crossing his eyes. These interludes never fail to beguile the viewer, even though they have nothing to do with the plot. I was reminded of these Harpovian shenanigans when I came across […]
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Forbes has issued its 3rd annual College Rankings, delivering its crown to Williams College. Comparison to the U.S. News and World Report list is inevitable so let’s not delay in getting to it; this result, and most of the top 20 rankings on the Forbes list aren’t that dissimilar from the similar U.S. News list […]
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If damaging evidence against affirmative action turns up in a pro-affirmative action book, the author often explains it away as misunderstood or exaggerated. This has happened once again, this time to a book that made no splash when it was published last October, but drew attention here at Minding the Campus in criticism that spread […]
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The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of […]
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While selective colleges and universities have become more selective, middling and lower-tier schools have become less selective, according to a new study reported on Inside Higher Ed. The study’s author, Stanford’s Caroline M. Hoxby, correctly noted that “typical college-going students in the U.S. should be unconcerned about rising selectivity. If anything, they should be concerned […]
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When I came out of high school in 1977, I had a GPA of 3.1, a straight B average. My SAT scores were 710 Math and 590 Verbal, pretty good but not stellar. My entire college application process took a half hour. I sauntered into the counselor’s office at Torrey Pines High School north of […]
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Yet another statistical study reveals that the high school-age offspring of black immigrant families enroll in America’s elite colleges at a vastly higher rate proportionate to their numbers than the offspring of U.S.-born blacks, and even at a slightly higher rate than whites. This latest study, published in the journal Sociology of Education (abstract here), […]
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The New York Times poses the question. I’m not going to tell you the answer – take a look for yourself.
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“Weighing Price And Value When Picking An Elite College” from the Wall Street Journal.
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If you think that student life at an ultra-elite law school is a page ripped out of The Paper Chase—one long, frighteningly competitive grade grub under the icy eye of a clone of the movie’s fictional Prof. Charles W. Kingsford Jr.—think again. At Yale Law School, grades have been strictly optional since the 1960s (students […]
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Despite a great flurry of activity to expand financial aid at selective colleges over the past several years, a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this gloomy bottom line: “Top Colleges Admit Fewer Low-Income Students.” As someone who has worked for more than a decade to push colleges to enroll more economically […]
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Confirming what college administrators have known for years, Education Sector has released a report based on U.S. Department of Education figures detailing huge gaps between the college graduation rates of white students and those of blacks. The gap (measured by failure to graduate within six years from a four-year institution) averages about 20 percent, although […]
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In an Op-Ed in last Monday’s New York Times, UC-Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel painted an alarming picture of our elite universities as institutions that systematically discriminate against poor and middle-class students. In Karabel’s words, these schools are “serving less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.” This is […]
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