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.
It is extremely wasteful to lure students into high-cost degree programs with easy-to-get government loans, then saddle the taxpayers with the unpaid balance when the student later defaults or manages to qualify for loan forgiveness. That artificially inflates the demand for college credentials and helps to accelerate the constant increase in the cost of higher education.
Every once in a while, we all read something that really excites us or makes a deep impression on us. Sometimes it’s a timeless classic, sometimes it’s entirely new. We thought we’d share a few such influential works with our readers. Enjoy.
Senator David Curtis (R-Lincoln) has emerged as one of North Carolina’s leading voices for higher education reform. On July 28, he wrote a letter titled “UNC System Policy Change Suggestions” to the UNC system’s Board of Governors. His proposals, if implemented, would vastly improve key areas of UNC governance in great need of reform.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Gainful Employment (GE) regulation judges degree programs on the debt and earnings of their graduates within just one area of higher education—the for-profit sector. While the GE Rule may result in the closure of many poor-performing programs, this complex regulation will also harm many reputable ones by penalizing those that actually produce excellent outcomes for their students and imposing sanctions for poor performance without offering an opportunity to improve.
University presses exist to publish scholarly books and journals that might not be published by a for-profit publishing house due to the small market for most academic books. Therefore, they require subsidies from willing donors and/or presumably less willing taxpayers and students. But as Milton Friedman often pointed out, “No one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” That applies just as much to book publishers as to everyone else.