The Missing Element of Higher Education: High School Guidance
The emergence of a holistic, individual-centered approach to guidance, which informs students of alternate paths, is promising. New innovations are addressing an issue that public high schools have been straining to solve. Raising awareness of alternate careers, apprenticeships, and earning non-degree certificates will allow more students to enter the workforce early and without amassing debt. That may not be the right path for everyone, but more high school graduates need to be aware of those options and more. Any progress in this long-neglected area is welcome.
Why the College Board’s New Standards Would Make Teaching History Even Worse
People are right to be skeptical of the College Board’s new Advanced Placement U.S. History standards. They accelerate the trend toward making American history mainly about race, class, and gender grievances. Events are included only if they can be framed that way.
How to Right-Size a University System
Today, the system is faced with an important existential question: how to “right-size” the system itself, which may include reducing the number of campuses. This question badly needs to be addressed, and soon; as Harry Smith, the chair of the Board of Governor’s budget and finance committee, admitted in March, “[P]eople have been ducking this conversation for a long time.”
Lani Guinier Wants to Transform Higher Education
Higher education will work better for all Americans if academic theorists like Lani Guinier would stop using it for social engineering and just let each individual search for the education or training that best suits his abilities and circumstances.
The Next UNC President Should be a Reformer, Not a Caretaker
The most important decision that the University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors will make this year is the selection of the next system president. Board members have an excellent opportunity to find someone willing to initiate a badly needed departure from the university establishment’s status quo.
Beyond the Academy: As Some Departments Decline, Lifelong-Learning Rises
If certain subjects are studied less in the academy, they will be studied more outside of it, and by those who are seriously interested. And that may turn out to be for the best. After all, many top poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and many important thinkers, from John Locke to Edmund Burke to John Stewart Mill to Eric Hoffer, had non-academic day jobs when they produced their greatest works. A shift to the life-long learning model, using resources both inside and outside the academia, may very well initiate a flowering of culture instead of decay.
College Is Not a Theater
I am delighted to see that Asian-Americans are speaking out against racial preferences in admissions. That stands to reason, since their children are the big losers in the racial preferences game. But they should be joined by non-Asians who understand that the purpose of college is for students to maximize their learning, not for administrators to play at social engineering.
Improving Higher Education Through Professor Specialization
Every economist will tell you about the benefits from specialization. We have known about that since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. But for some reason, this knowledge is thrown out when it comes to specialization in academia.
A Massive Book on the History of Higher Education Makes You Wonder If It’s Getting Better, or Worse
Writing a comprehensive history of American higher education from colonial times up to the Second World War is a monumental undertaking, but if anyone is up to the task it’s Penn State University professor Roger Geiger, perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the history of post-secondary education in America. Geiger’s new book The History of American Higher Education is the most fact-filled treatment of its subject to date, and will likely remain the standard work for years to come.
Two Conflicting Visions, Part II: Will Producing More Degree Holders Benefit Society?
Strong cultural momentum—strengthened over several generations by parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and elected officials—has fostered an unwarranted faith in college’s benefits, raised attendance to irrational levels, and yielded an oversupply of graduates.