Ranking the Worst Colleges and Universities in the U.S.

This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the…

PBS NewsHour Series on “Rethinking College”

Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…

Too Big–and Too Awful–to Fail

The Department of Education and Corinthian Colleges have been engaged in extended negotiations over how the for-profit corporation will either shut down or scale down its various entities, including the Everest University, WyoTech, and Heald College chains. The government actions against Corinthian Colleges came after the Harkin Report highlighted Corinthian’s extraordinarily high student-loan default rate,…

So Everything That We Have Read and Heard Is Wrong?

Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…

Education Reform: The Individual at Risk (Except when Protected by Money)

Taylorism, the systematization of labor developed by Frederick Taylor, makes the worker immediately replaceable. Individual skill and knowledge becomes irrelevant–on the part of the worker. Only at the higher levels of management and ownership does creativity count for anything. It’s an elitist system positing that those at the lower echelons are merely cogs, not thinkers.…

'They're Just Going to Punch the Clock': The Faculty of the Future

The most disturbing consequence of the contemporary belief that any sort of ‘progress’ in education stems from individual initiative and can be proven by testing is the devaluation of the teacher. Problem is, we don’t learn on our own; learning always involves community. Language itself builds from–and builds–community, and learning is dependent on language. And…

Tips for Navigating Corporatized Colleges and Universities

Guest blogger Jeanne Zaino is professor of political science and international studies at Iona College. In his provocative and deeply depressing The Last Professors Frank Donoghue warns that corporate logic has taken over the academy.  His findings are confirmed by Andrew DeBlanco who, in his award winning College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be not…