This is a photo of a fraternity on move-in day at Old Dominion University: _________________________ In case this one photo does not seem emblematic to you, this morning the Huffington Post included this item in its daily HuffPost College newsletter: It’s Not Just ODU Students Putting Up Offensive Signs About Freshman Girls While a fraternity at Virginia’s Old Dominion…
Writing for the Huffington Post, Shahien Nasiripour reports that “Borrowing for College Is Set to Hit a Five Year Low.” More specifically, for the first time since the 2009-2010 academic year, student loans are likely to total less than $100 million. That sounds like good news. But it actually reflects very little change. In fact,…
Earlier this week, on August 17, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a decision refusing to assert jurisdiction in the case of the Northwestern University grant-in-aid scholarship football players’ petition for an election seeking union representation. While this is a disappointment to those hoping that the Board would uphold the Regional Director’s ruling finding…
One of the ways faculty are intimidated and coerced into accepting codified curricula is through the specter of not living up to assessable “outcomes” (I use the scare quotes because the word has become one of those cant words of educational “reform”—another word in the category—that have become so popular in some quarters, especially administrative…
This will be the first in a series of posts taken from the blog of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron [http://akronaaup.org/blog/]. That blog provides a chronicle of the changes that have been occurring with often startling rapidity at the university in the wake of a change in institutional leadership. This sort of…
Between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. this morning, the Discovery Channel aired the following three 30-minute infomercials:Sexy in Three Weeks!; The Graduate: Learn about Innovative Grad and Undergrad Degrees; and No More Wrinkles! The middle of those three infomercials has been produced by Tribune Media for Western Governors University. One alternative to conventional, on-site delivery…
In a post to this blog that I made on June 18, “Why Selecting a College Major Primarily Because of the Employment Outlook in That Field Is a Terrible Idea” [https://academeblog.org/2015/06/18/why-selecting-a-college-major-primarily-because-of-the-employment-outlook-in-that-field-is-a-terrible-idea/], I focused on some of the salient points made in an interview by Peter Cappelli, a Professor of Management at the Wharton School at…
Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…