Daniel Luzer

Columbia University has now essentially been granted the legal permission to go ahead and take over New York. According to an article by Charles Bagli in the New York Times: In a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that prohibited the state from using eminent domain to take property in […]

A proposal by congressional Democrats to have colleges certify students’ private loans, to ensure quality, will not happen. According to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA): The Senate rejected a House-sponsored amendment to the financial regulatory reform bill currently being negotiated in a bicameral conference committee that would have mandated school certification […]

Apparently Cornell University (now suicide-free for three months!) will be up keeping the hideous and sort of non-functional “temporary” fences it erected over campus bridges at the end of March. According to an article by Andrew Hu in the Cornell Daily Sun: The City of Ithaca Common Council voted last week to extend the deadline […]

Something about America’s vocational programs doesn’t really work too well. Jamie Merisotis and Stan Jones argued just that in the May/June issue of the Monthly. Well they’re not the only ones. According to an article in The Economist, the United states appears to have a “misplaced disdain for vocational education”: America has a unique disdain […]

Today featured the first of the Senate Help Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearings on for-profit schools. Chaired by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) the committee is now investigating the practices of America’s for-profit schools with an eye toward creating new regulations to monitor and police these schools. Today’s hearing featured testimony from Steven Eisman, a […]

Pennsylvania State University knows if you really wrote that essay. Or at least it knows if you copied it word-for- word from a publically available source. Earlier this month PR Newswire gleefully announced that, iParadigms, the global leader in plagiarism prevention, today announced that its Turnitin for Admissions service has been selected by the Penn […]

There is a fair amount of discussion in the academic community about the stress engineered by the “publish or perish” system of granting academic tenure. What comes up less often, however, is the actual quality of a lot of that published research. According to an article by Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, […]

Apparently a school’s move up or down a position or two in international annual college rankings doesn’t really much affect people’s opinions of that school. According to an article by David Wheeler in the Chronicle of Higher Education: A new survey of 49 of the top-ranked 137 universities found that those institutions noticed little or […]

More news from the department of mildly offensive college mascots: a new Wisconsin law allows the state to ban all ethnic sports nicknames. According to an NPR piece by Brian Bull: The day Wisconsin’s new sports-mascot law took effect, Oneida tribal member Carol Gunderson and her husband, Harvey, drove three hours to the state capital, […]

Apparently SAT preparation is so popular that it’s now showing up in some unexpected places. According to an article by Jacques Steinberg in the New York Times, college prep was, on Monday, offered by a benefits program of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to more than 13 million union members. The Princeton Review, one of the nation’s largest […]