The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, along with the massacre of nine black churchgoers last summer in Charleston, South Carolina, created racial hysteria and gave rise to an anti-intellectual movement that has now extended to American campuses. Its promoters want to purge society—and our universities—of historical relics and symbols that they say glorify white supremacy and perpetuate racism.
This report shows, through graphs and tables, the University of North Carolina’s enrollment growth, tuition history, admissions data, and graduation rates. It provides details about student aid, student debt, the ratio of faculty to students, and the ratio of administrators to faculty. It includes information about faculty salaries, state appropriations, and state subsidy of instruction costs.
Common threads running throughout the latest campus upheavals include attacks on principles of free speech and a willingness on the part of school officials to mollify students and cede control to leftist protesters. Given higher education’s track record, however, both developments are unsurprising.
Because of protectionist regulations, North Carolina’s range of higher education choices is not as wide as it should be. But it’s not just the Tar Heel State that gums up the works with excessive red tape. North Carolina schools that want to offer their online courses to out-of-state students have had to navigate burdensome approval processes. In many cases, schools have decided it’s just not worth the considerable expense in terms of both time and money—thereby limiting options for students seeking online alternatives. But now there is a better way. The State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) is an agreement among member states that establishes comparable national standards for interstate offering of online education.
Entrepreneurship programs are spreading rapidly across America and are attracting a growing number of students. But one question keeps coming up: Is it really possible to teach entrepreneurship? The answer is both yes and no.
America’s national obsession with raising our “educational attainment” level leads politicians and bureaucrats to focus on the silliest of things. Lately, that has been college accreditation.
The recent decision by UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism to eliminate requirements that journalism majors take certain basic courses in economics, U.S. government, and American History since 1865 is troubling. If the people who are supposed to keep us aware are unaware themselves, how can we know how to stand up for ourselves?
The mainstream media’s mantra about community colleges is that their performance should be evaluated based on degree completion statistics, just as it is for traditional four-year colleges and universities. But what about the students who never intended to earn a degree? The cited statistics on completion are not very meaningful if they fail to consider the intentions of the institution’s students. Yes, many community colleges (and others) have low graduation rates, but it is a bad mistake to leap from that to the conclusion that they are “failing their students.” Rather, they are serving a widely diverse student population with a wide range of programs particularly well.
A new report by the National Association of Scholars, “Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels,” is welcome because it shines a light on the excesses and especially the anti-intellectual nature of this campus phenomenon. Students, parents, alums, professors, and administrators should pay close attention to the report, just as miners needed to pay attention when their canaries started going unconscious.
In the last few years, the rights of students in North Carolina universities have received some significant new protections. It is important that state legislators and educators continue to do so, for such rights—pertaining to free speech and due process of punitive proceedings—have been under assault on college campuses nationwide in recent years.