Higher Education

I missed it at the time, but The New York Times‘ Education Life supplement had a piece on the whole top-students-going-to-public-universities thing I touched on yesterday. It nicely captures some of the difficulties and tough questions brought about by the economic climate: [A]pplications are pouring in from students shut out by the stratospheric cost of […]

Over at Higher Ed Watch, Stephen Burd has an informative writeup on the case of Matteo Fontana and what it says about government oversight of the student loan industry: The news that Matteo Fontana, a former high-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education, has pleaded guilty to charges that he lied to the government […]

James Altucher does some provocative number crunching on a Wall Street Journal blog: [Y]ou would think with these increasing costs [of attending college] that the income potential must be there. Someone who goes to college can be expected to earn about $800,000 more than their peer who didn’t go to college. My thoughts on this: […]

The Los Angeles Times adapted a speech Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Cal State University Board of Trustees, gave to the board, and ran it as a column. It’s rather depressing: For nearly six years, I have served on the Board of Trustees of the California State University system — the last two as its […]

Last night’s most disappointing election result probably occurred in Maine, where a majority of the state’s voters were apparently convinced that if they continued to allow gay marriage in their state, newly married gay couples would break into their houses wielding a fearsome arsenal of gay weaponry and would forcibly dissolve their straight marriages. Or […]

Gene C. Fant, dean of arts and sciences at Jackson, Tennessee’s Union University, writes in The Chronicle about his experience racing through college in the 1980s. It’s a good read and a nice followup to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-Tenn.) recent column on the subject in Newsweek.

Inside Higher Ed notes that it’s become more or less the conventional wisdom that one of the reasons the United States’ economy is at such risk is because other parts of the world are doing much better in the higher education department, whether you measure graduation rates, those who graduate with degrees in engineering, or […]

The Washington Post helps embarrass the younger generation: One night inside a George Washington University fraternity, a sky-diving, weight-lifting, energy-drink-swilling group of brothers gathers around the pool table, boasting about how, no matter what their college, government and parents might say, they don’t need any swine flu vaccine, thanks very much. The men of Sigma […]

The Washington Post took on rising tuition costs in one of today’s editorials, acknowledging that the recession is, as everyone acknowledges, a factor. But it would be foolish to shovel too much of the blame onto the current economic situation: This problem didn’t start with the recession — and it won’t end with it, either. […]

Inside Higher Ed sums up some of the key findings in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, a new book on (as the title would suggest) how race and class impact the college experience, from start to finish: * Significant advantages and disadvantages exist for […]