What is needed is for students and parents to realize that swallowing the education that’s given to them isn’t the best way. They’ll have to change things from the bottom by seeking out schools and online programs where student progress comes first.
The preferences of a largely left-of-center corps of faculty and administrators explains much of the pressure for diversity, but the impact on accreditation also has to be considered—not just regional accrediting organizations, but also the professional bodies that accredit degree programs. They have pushed the diversity agenda by requiring specific programs and preferential hiring policies. Although diversity sounds benign, these programs are a silent dagger thrust at intellectual pluralism. They use the market signal of legitimacy, conferred by accreditation, to reinforce an academic intellectual monoculture.
Since the federal government feeds students in K-12 schools via the National School Lunch Program, it should similarly feed college students who are “food insecure,” argues a new policy brief published last month by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab.
Lawmakers returned to Raleigh at the end of April to attend this year’s “short session.” On the agenda are adjustments to the state budget and a few policies left unresolved when legislators adjourned last year. Many of those policies focus on community colleges.
There are limits to technology’s influence on higher education, just as there are limits to the “disruptive innovation” theory generally. And although some colleges have lived beyond their means in recent years, there are compelling reasons to believe that most of them will find ways to adapt and become solvent. The higher education sector is vibrant, and its resiliency precludes apocalypse.
Hillary Clinton’s higher education proposals will not solve the cost and value problems in our higher education system, but will instead make them worse.
It’s possible that the relatively calm season is the result of well-publicized controversy in previous years, as universities appear to overwhelming exclude conservative speakers from commencement ceremonies. A 2015 study from the Young America Foundation found that, of the top 50 universities ranked by US News and World Report, the ratio of liberal to conservative speakers was nine to one. That trend holds at North Carolina universities.
What started out as a law to give women more opportunities in higher education has morphed into a bureaucratic monster that destroys due process of law, sets students against each other, and encourages bureaucrats to search for new ways to expand their authority.
UNC System leaders are overhauling their 2013 strategic planning initiative. Whether that will result in sound reform ideas, however, is up in the air. North Carolina’s university system is a powerful force in the state—armed with its own lobbying team, almost 50,000 employees, and a $9.5 billion annual budget. It is a machine with a tendency to aggrandize. Curbing its appetite for expansion and self-serving policies won’t be easy.
The real harm of grade inflation is that it is a fraud on students who are misled into thinking that they are more competent than they really are.
