Daniel Luzer

In the absence of any well-recognized measure of student learning at the collegiate level, one of the most popular substitutes is the Collegiate Learning Assessment. CLA is a computer administered standardized test that consists of open-ended (not multiple-choice) questions. CLA is supposed to measure not what a student knows but the college or university’s contribution […]

Apparently all overblown college athletic programs are not created equal. According to a report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, the cost of college sports has gone up, a lot, in recent years but that means different things depending on the school. As the paper, by Richard Vedder of the Center for College […]

College students today are not nearly as nice as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. According to the press release about the study: “We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a […]

The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, believes that it’s a great idea to start college savings accounts for kindergarteners. According to an article by John Cote in the San Francisco Chronicle: Every child who enters kindergarten at one of San Francisco’s public schools will get his or her own city-funded college savings account under […]

Paul Bradley has an interesting piece in Community College Week about many community colleges’ efforts to help students earn more credits. According to the article, “Playing Catch-Up,” there’s too much remediation: The phenomenon has its roots in the open-access mission of community colleges, and has dogged colleges for decades. But even as public and private […]

By now everybody kind of knows that community colleges should do a better job graduating students and preparing them to transfer. But what is a “better job,” anyway? How much progress can colleges really make? Byron McClenney of Achieving the Dream, a national project to improve community colleges, argued at the annual meeting of the […]

The New York Times had an interesting piece on Sunday about student debt. It’s pretty crippling. According to the article, by Ron Lieber: In an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people… are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as […]

The Department of Education recently released its annual publication on the condition of American education, The Condition of Education. This one report, and the statistics within it, always forms a major component public understanding about how the U.S. is doing in terms of education. It’s divided into several parts. The higher education component contains some […]

Last year Brandeis University, facing a big cash flow problem, considered selling its art collection. It planned to close its Rose Art Museum and sell the entire college. Then alumni and donors became very concerned and threatened to withhold funds. So Brandeis backed off. Well now the school has a new plan. According to an […]

You know what would be really cool? If someone famous slept in your dorm room. The odds go up a great deal if you went to certain schools. According to an article by Alison Leigh Cowan and David Walter in the New York Times: A search of archival records at several universities reveals how easy […]