Faculty Salaries Reflect Reality, Not Politics
The absence of a state-mandated across-the-board salary increase does not mean that UNC system faculty members are not receiving increases. There are quite a few programs and procedures for raising faculty wages. One thing that may be angering the more strident faculty voices is that many of the means for raising salaries are merit-based rather than automatic.
Don’t Feed Academia’s Wasteful Practices
The truth is most college donations make very little impact, at best. On occasion, they are used to produce a bad impact. But that doesn’t mean giving to higher education is necessarily bad or irrelevant. In fact, if done properly, it can be exceedingly valuable.
No Conservatives Need Apply
My career at West Liberty University came to a screeching halt this fall. My department has been terminated and I’m looking for a new job. The reason why this occurred boils down to nothing more than political animosity.
In Fisher II, the Supreme Court Should Look at Reality, Not Pretense
On December 9, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a crucial case dealing with racial preferences in college admissions, Fisher v. University of Texas. It would be ideal if the Court would recognize that the University of Texas has been unable to show any legitimate academic justification for its racial preference regime. Its “educational benefits” claims are empty.
North Carolina Should End Its Protectionist Policies Limiting Online Courses
Because of protectionist regulations, North Carolina’s range of higher education choices is not as wide as it should be. But it’s not just the Tar Heel State that gums up the works with excessive red tape. North Carolina schools that want to offer their online courses to out-of-state students have had to navigate burdensome approval processes. In many cases, schools have decided it’s just not worth the considerable expense in terms of both time and money—thereby limiting options for students seeking online alternatives. But now there is a better way. The State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) is an agreement among member states that establishes comparable national standards for interstate offering of online education.
What Entrepreneurship Education Can (and Can’t) Do
Entrepreneurship programs are spreading rapidly across America and are attracting a growing number of students. But one question keeps coming up: Is it really possible to teach entrepreneurship? The answer is both yes and no.
“Public Service” Loan Forgiveness Will Inflate the Cost of College
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.
What We’re Reading
Every once in a while, we all read something that really excites us or makes a deep impression on us. Sometimes it’s a timeless classic, sometimes it’s entirely new. We thought we’d share a few such influential works with our readers. Enjoy.
Gainful Employment: An Unfair Rule With Bad Consequences
The U.S. Department of Education’s Gainful Employment (GE) regulation judges degree programs on the debt and earnings of their graduates within just one area of higher education—the for-profit sector. While the GE Rule may result in the closure of many poor-performing programs, this complex regulation will also harm many reputable ones by penalizing those that actually produce excellent outcomes for their students and imposing sanctions for poor performance without offering an opportunity to improve.
Stop the Presses! Or, At Least, Stop Their Subsidies!
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.