Daniel Luzer

How many college graduates is the United States going to need in the next few decades in order to maintain its current economic status? Predictions like these are notoriously difficult to do with any real precision, but many pundits (and, apparently, President Obama) are taking seriously the recent projections of Anthony Carnevale and colleagues at […]

Despite attempts to push electronic books on college students, the books remain relatively unpopular. Most college kids, apparently, still prefer real books. Publishers figure that maybe it’s because aren’t edgy enough, or something. And so Course Smart, a company created by textbook publishers to sell electronic textbooks to students on a subscription basis, has partnered […]

Various technological innovations are coming to college classrooms. “New programs, functionality, [and] gadgets change [the] higher ed experience,” reports the Chicago Tribune. But will it make colleges better? Probably not. According to the Tribune article: “Teaching is really, really difficult,” [DePaul anthropology professor Robert Rotenberg] says. ” When I find something that helps the student […]

In another example of some ground-breaking information coming out of Harvard, it turns out that going to college will totally make you a fatty. That’s, apparently, kind of a good thing. As Irene Chen writes in The Crimson: Similar to the Boston winter, the “freshman fifteen”—so named for the number of pounds a freshman usually […]

It’s so unpopular, in fact, that the state’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, objects to it. Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco (right), thinks that the budget recently proposed by Governor Jerry Brown is a bad one, and he suggests the University of California should challenge it. According to an article by Jack Chang in […]

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a progressive political watchdog group that’s lately become involved with issues affecting for-profit colleges, is asking the Department of Education to look into investment strategies surrounding proprietary schools. According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education: [CREW] is asking Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to investigate […]

You’ve probably seen the advertisements put up recently by the for-profit colleges’ lobbying group aimed against the Department of Education’s coming “gainful employment” rules. The rules would limit the ability of for-profit colleges that leave students with unaffordable debt to take advantage of federal financial aid. Check out examples here, here and here. On Tuesday […]

U.S. News & World Report announced that it plans to begin ranking yet another set of programs. The magazine will now rank teacher education programs. This is likely to generate a great deal of coverage, though it’s actually a total waste of time. According to a piece in Inside Higher Ed: U.S. News & World […]

An effort to help out state education employees proposed by acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in his State of the State speech might help them, but it’s going to be a little difficult to implement across the state. On January 12 Tomblin said: I know that our teachers deserve a higher salary. But at this […]

There’s so much interesting evidence coming out from the Social Science Research Council report on college learning. The study, which measured students’ knowledge when they left college relative to their knowledge when they began, is oddly the first ever attempt to look at college progression in terms of actual learning. As I wrote yesterday, it […]