Daniel Luzer

According to a piece in Harvard Magazine the school’s faculty recently adopted a policy such that final examinations will no longer be automatically scheduled for all classes, “the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination,” unless the professor specifically schedules the examination in advance. The article explains: It […]

Does online education really work? Well no, actually it doesn’t. At least not in the way people have been talking about it. Back in June the Department of Education released a report about online learning. Researchers found “that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Interesting news, right? […]

Just because students graduate from high school doesn’t mean they’re ready for college. This line has long been a familiar one in the world of education policy, often introducing some alarming new statistic about remediation or dropouts. But the trouble with high school may not be that it’s objectively bad; it may be just that […]

The Washington Post has just announced the winner of its comic strip contest. In May the newspaper started its search for “America’s Next Great Cartoonist.” Some 500 people entered, submitting comic strip ideas to readers and judges. The winner is a college student, College of William and Mary senior Olivia Walch. Walch is a cartoonist […]

According to a piece in the Huffington Post, Harvard is cracking down on espionage, or something: Harvard University has revoked a degree in public administration it gave to a man who turned out to be a Russian spy living in Massachusetts under a stolen Canadian identity. Harvard spokesman Doug Gavel said Friday the John F. […]

The group in charge of managing the endowment of the University of Texas system is apparently very anxious about the state of the American economy. The University of Texas Investment Management Company is so nervous that it converted $500 million of the fund into gold. According to a piece by R.G. Ratcliffe and Jeannie Kever […]

There are financial problems, and then there are financial problems. Lots of American colleges are struggling this year, either due to bad investments or reductions in state support. And then there’s Birmingham-Southern College. According to an article by Jeff Hansen in the Birmingham News, on Wednesday the school’s president, David Pollick, laid off 51 employees […]

Thanks in part due to President Obama’s ambitious college graduation goals for America, community colleges are hot. So clearly community colleges need to step up, change how they do things in order to be an effective part of producing more American college graduates. According to Community College Times, community colleges are looking to make this […]

Social networking is not a waste of time. According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kelly Truong: Researchers at Northwestern University found no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace had no effect on grades, despite how often students used them or […]

One major problem with a long-running recession is that budgeting becomes particularly tough. There’s no money and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any money soon. This situation is problematic for progressive writers (ok, admittedly not as hard as it might be for, say, a state governor). Consider the problem with of colleges […]