In an article last week on School Board News Today entitled “The New College ‘Caste System’–and How We Might Change It,” Lawrence Hardy writes: At a Washington, D.C., forum this week called “2013 College Rankings and Higher Education’s New Caste System,” a Texas college president, journalists from the Washington Monthly and elsewhere, and a key Obama administration aide,…
Last week, the Princeton Review released its annual rankings of U.S. colleges and universities. In the category “Top Party Schools,” the University of Iowa was ranked #1, moving up from its #2 ranking last year and bumping last year’s “winner” West Virginia University from the top spot. A spokesperson for the university responded to the…
On Monday, September 9, Ohio Conference AAUP President John McNay delivered testimony [full text provided below] to the Higher Education Reform Study Committee–a new standing committee started in the Ohio House of Representatives over the summer. The committee has embarked on a “road show,” traveling all over the state to public and for-profit colleges to discuss…
President Obama has set the higher education agenda for the remainder of his term by linking consumer fears with politics. There is substance in the president’s arguments about sticker price, the squeezing of the American middle class, and the failure to provide access to a higher education degree for those who seek it. The fundamental…
Writing for Business Insider, Cork Gaines has surveyed “All the Crazy College Football Uniforms for This Season” [http://www.businessinsider.com/new-college-football-uniforms-2013-8?op=1]. On its surface, the article seems a survey of an aspect of the sport that has become increasingly eccentric, almost a gimmicky trademark for some teams. Long the trendsetter in mutating and eye-popping uniforms, the University of…
Part 4: Create a National College Equivalency Test Similar to the GED. [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an earlier post, I pointed…
On the evening of August 20, two students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign went to the emergency room of the local hospital with darts in their arms. The students had been walking several blocks away from each other. Each reported feeling a sudden sharp pain in the left forearm and looking down to…
A year ago, in the wake of the protests across the Muslim world ostensibly sparked by the Internet trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims, Aya Bratrawy and Rachel Zoll, writing for the Associated Press, collaborated on the article “An Overview about the Prophet Muhammad and Why He is So Revered by Muslims.” The writers…
Part 3: Reduce the Cost of a Degree by 40% by Reducing Labor and Capital Costs. [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an…
I teach courses in postcolonial literatures and cultures, and I like to think that I have moved largely beyond a self-referential and reductive perception of unfamiliar aspects of other cultures as exotic or bizarre. But then I come across a news item that leaves me wondering whether it is worth my time to wonder what…