The Bell Tolls for Higher Ed
Writing four centuries ago, John Donne memorably opined, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He…
Heritage Foundation’s College Ratings Should Be Welcomed to the Field
In September, the Heritage Foundation launched an interactive, web-based guide to help students “Choose College with Confidence.” It currently grants nearly 300 colleges and universities one of three designations: “great…
Blueprint for Reform: Accreditation
The Blueprint for Reform: Accreditation critiques the current accreditation system in higher education, which has shifted from a voluntary advisory role to a regulatory gatekeeper for federal funding. This transformation has…
A New Liberal-Arts University Arises
Ralston College counts among its first graduates a 24-year-old man who, in his third term of study, asked me what he could do to help ensure our fledgling institution would…
The Three-Year Degree Is a Good Starting Point
The Higher Learning Commission, the largest institutional accreditor in the United States, recently introduced a new process for reviewing bachelor’s-degree programs that require fewer than the traditional 120 academic credits.…
Let’s Open the Black Box of Selective College Admissions
The aftermath of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) has put a spotlight on the capriciousness of admissions practices at selective colleges. In…
New Accreditors Are the Future
In 2020, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos deregulated college and university accreditation by ending regional accreditors’ monopoly status. The purpose of the move was to introduce innovation and competition to…
Can North Carolina Bridge the Gap Between Education and the Workforce?
ApprenticeshipNC (ANC) is helping to bridge the gap between education and the workforce by creating apprenticeship programs throughout the state—and it is having great success. Formerly under the supervision of…
Let’s Train Students on AI
In a recent Digital Education Council survey, 86 percent of college students said they “‘regularly’ used programs such as ChatGPT in their studies,” while over half of students claimed to…
Could the AI Evangelists Be Right?
Asked about chatbots in 2022, a colleague or professor may have replied, “Huh?” In 2024, however, AI-assisted chatbots are seemingly everywhere: embedded in social-media feeds, integrated into workflows, and visibly…