We’ve created a serious problem by allowing federal bureaucrats to dictate education policies nationwide, K-12 through college. Many rules that appeal to ideologically zealous regulators would never be adopted by school and college officials who are in the best position to weigh costs versus benefits.
Just how bad colleges have become when it comes to free speech and toleration for anyone who disagrees with those who hold power cannot be underestimated. Many Americans who think back fondly on their college days decades ago are shocked to learn the truth. Toward that end, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just released its Top Ten list—the worst colleges and universities in the country last year when it came to freedom of speech.
The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has just launched the latest offensive in the war over admissions to the supposed elite of America’s colleges and universities. In its report entitled True Merit, the Foundation advocates economic preferences so that smart students from relatively poor families can have their fair share of the small number of spots at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. But admission preferences, whether based on race or income, are clumsy tools for achieving social or educational ends. A much better approach is to identify academically sharp but lower-income students, then help them to find the best college and assist them through to their degrees.
Many students and their families are starting to wonder about the value of going to college at every expense only to come back home afterwards and settle into a mundane job that high schoolers could do—a growing problem that Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa examined in their latest book, Aspiring Adults Adrift. That being the case, colleges that can point to successes in preparing students for careers and helping them land jobs that actually call for higher education have a big advantage over those that can’t. As a result, the last decade has seen a surge in college programs intended to integrate study and work.
Rarely have I read a book about higher education that is so varied as Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. As I’ll explain, it is by turns intriguing, annoying, and challenging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How much “privatization” have we actually had in higher education? In one sense, none, because no state-owned college or university has been sold off to private investors. But on the other hand, there has been quite a bit, since to a considerable extent, governmental funding for higher education has been replaced by private funding. In Privatization and the Public Good, Matthew Lambert, vice president for university advancement at William & Mary, gives us an approved “establishment” view of the privatization phenomenon in which it is perceived as a great threat.