The Future for Industry Credentials
“Industry credentials” are a popular trend in modern education. But the term is rarely defined. Industry credentials offer the promise of short-term training or retraining for an agile, 21st-century workforce.…
The New Racism, Part II: The Sociologist’s Toolkit: Justifying Racism Through Language
Editor’s note: Part I of The New Racism can be read here. The best way to grasp how sociology has managed to make color-blind racism (CBR) seem believable is to…
The New Racism, Part I: How ‘Race and Ethnic Studies’ Made Color Blindness a Bad Thing
Like most Americans, I have always assumed that color blindness is our ideal. Not any more: color blindness is now become the new racism. So much for a 70-year struggle…
UNC Faculty Teaching Loads Report Is Insufficient for Making Policy
Reliable information is a prerequisite for good management. How can you make intelligent decisions if you are basing them on shaky information? This has been an ongoing problem for the…
Generation Z: The Intolerant Ones
The post-millennials have arrived. As the oldest millennials turn 37, demographers have designated a new generation for those born after 1996, Generation Z. The oldest members of this cohort just…
Sperber’s ‘Beer and Circus’—An Unintentional Argument for Community College?
The year 2000 saw the publication of Beer and Circus, the notable book by former Indiana University professor Murray Sperber. It was a big step forward for the analysis of…
A Professor’s Tough Examination—Of Our Higher Education System
There are lots of people in our higher education system who claim that it is “the envy of the world” and just needs more money to graduate more young Americans…
The State of Private Higher Ed in North Carolina
Private colleges and universities face challenges distinct from their public counterparts. For one, unlike public institutions, they are not the recipients of generous state funding. Instead, they rely heavily on…
College Students’ Disability Claims Show Unintended Consequences of ADA
Twentieth-century American sociologist Robert Merton popularized a term that is now a part of our everyday vocabulary. “The Law of Unintended Consequences,” often cited but rarely defined, posits that actions…
Free College Is Just Another Middle-Class Entitlement
Tennessee legislators received a shock in 2012 when a study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce predicted that by 2020, 55 percent of Tennessee jobs would require…