Higher Education

If you’ve got an interest in the extraterrestrial qualities of dolphins—and $1,200—then an online certificate in galactic diplomacy may be just what you’re looking for.

Inside Higher Ed has an article highlighting the difficult choices facing one community college in California: Throughout the last year, leaders of many four-year colleges have adopted the mantra that their institutions can “no longer be all things to all people.” This has led to efforts to identify areas of strength, to carve out niches, […]

I am confused and troubled by this Robert VerBruggen post on Phi Beta Cons in response to the article I blogged about earlier, which reported that several years of U.C. Davis’ sexual assault statistics had been inflated: The University of California at Davis ‘fesses up — in three years, it says, an employee doubled-to-tripled the […]

Jason Delisle wrote a useful post for Higher Ed Watch examining one of the more ridiculous assertions made by members of the student loan industry in an attempt to fight back against the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act: that they “are not being paid subsidies” by the government. Very very not true, as Delisle […]

Between 1955 and 2005, college enrollment in the United States exploded. This should have brought with it a great increase in social mobility, lifting millions up out of their economically tenuous origins. It didn’t. And now Sigal Alon, a sociologist from the University of Tel Aviv, is attempting to explain why: The key factors, she […]

“ginny,” commenting on the intro to our 2007 rankings, doesn’t approve of our method, and writes that “the next thing you know, you’ll be ranking them on the number of basket-weaving classes they have.” Believe me, ginny, when I say that this idea has already been forwarded on to the appropriate people. Look forward to […]

Well this is bizarre: The University of California at Davis revealed Thursday that for at least three years it reported an inflated number of sexual assaults to the federal government. An internal investigation and an external review both found that the university totals released for 2005, 2006 and 2007 were substantially greater than the totals […]

The Student Lending Analytics blog has a good post outlining the simultaneous—and surely not coincidental—rise in American tuition costs and decline in the United States’ world ranking of percentage of young citizens with college degrees. It even has a nifty chart, so check it out.

“cthulhu” (hopefully not the Cthulhu!) doesn’t fully agree with my assertion that whether or not a university is involved in gambling-related sponsorship deals is unlikely to have much impact on its students’ rates of harmful gambling behavior: I’m a drug dependence researcher and treatment specialist. I would agree that the initiation of gambling dependence has […]

Inside Higher Ed: Struggling to understand the national debate over health care? You’re not alone — your future doctor may well be baffled, too. A study published in the September issue of Academic Medicine found that nearly half of all medical students believe they have been inadequately educated about the “practice of medicine” — especially […]