College was a transformative period in my life. I held my professors in high regard, viewing them as beacons of wisdom. For most of my time there, I was a teaching assistant and laboratory technician in the chemistry department, a role that made me feel like an integral part of the university community. The camaraderie […]
Read More
Along with a 10-year corporate career, I studied in American business schools for about nine years, culminating in a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1991—Columbia was different back then because I did not need to file a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” plan. Then and now, though, American business schools have been long on theory but short […]
Read More
Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and […]
Read More
By now the “Cupcake War” in which the Berkeley College Republicans sold cupcakes with different prices for various ethnic/racial/gender groups is well known. Drawing less attention is why it produced the panicky overkill reaction, including strong condemnations from some university administrators. After all, the anti-affirmative action bake sale hardly threatens the diversity infrastructure and is […]
Read More
Richard Vedder’s basic argument is sound: universities have become too expensive and too mediocre and too often the default for young people who might do well to pursue appropriate schooling through the secondary level. And as he writes, with too many seeking to preserve a bloated system, a reckoning is at hand. But in the […]
Read More
That I disagree with nothing important in Patrick Deneen’s post is a measure of how different this elephant seems, depending on what part you’ve got hold of. Very briefly: I want everybody, not just an elite, to acquire as much liberal education as possible, for the reasons that Deneen describes. But we don’t have to […]
Read More
How many different ways are there for colleges to cut costs? A lot. At the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, we have identified 25 such ways in a book-length study. In Part 1, focusing on Using Lower Cost Alternatives, released Wednesday, we offered the following 5 suggestions for college and university administrators and public […]
Read More
Some faculty members in the University of California system plan to stage a walkout starting on Sept. 24—which also happens to be the first day of classes at several of the system’s 10 campuses. The aim of the walkouts is to protest an $813 million cut in state funding for the university system during the […]
Read More
Now that the Senate finance committee has requested – the New York Times said “demanded” – that the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities supply detailed information about their endowments and financial practices, it seems clear that college cost is emerging as a long-running, popular and bipartisan issue. The request/demand came in a stern but polite […]
Read More