Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on a report (PDF) released yesterday that takes aim at gambling on campus and how to curb it, an important task given that between 3 and 11 percent of college students have serious gambling problems. The report included ten recommendations “aimed at reframing how institutions tackle gambling issues.” This […]

Inside Higher Ed has a very Campus 2.0 article on a new problem facing college administrators: new students who already have email addresses and are therefore reluctant to use the ones their schools provide. In order to keep things simple, many students set up their institutional accounts to automatically forward mail to one of their […]

I know I recently argued that journalism school isn’t worth the cost, but today the Boston Herald changed my mind. If attending J-school could teach me to write like this, I’d happily bite the bullet and do so: Tufts University bans nookie if roomie ‘is present’ Dorm rooms doubling as steamy love huts have Tufts […]

I’m glad to see The New York Times‘ “staff ethicist” counsel against Harvard alums giving money to the university during such turbulent economic times. He points out that Harvard, despite the hits it has taken over the last year, still enjoys an endowment of $26 billion, while the endowments of even the most well-off historically […]

I think there’s reason to be skeptical about a good chunk of the “Oh my God our nation’s men are screwed!” talk that’s occurred over the last couple years (for the same reason it makes sense to be skeptical about claims that rich people or white people or Christian people are having a rough go […]

Textbooks are an incredible ripoff, and the sort of ripoff that most adversely affects folks who are already financially strapped. This, then, seems like a pretty obvious idea: let students rent them, which is what Sacramento State is doing. At the moment, the school’s program is still somewhat larval: Parsons says every rental book will […]

This seems like a pretty great program: Before Justin Jefferson got to college, the only kinds of doctors he or his parents had ever heard of were physicians and preachers. Not many researchers and teachers with doctorates live amid the gunshots of east San Antonio’s housing projects, the only world that he and his parents […]

Peggy Noonan, a fellow at at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, is leading a “study group,” which I gather is kind of like a seminar combined with a writer’s workshop. It’s called “Creativity in Journalism, in Politics, and in Life.” Her syllabus is, without a doubt, the worst-written I have ever seen. But this should […]

As you may be aware, today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. The point of the holiday, which is considered the most holy on the calendar (well, at least by better Jews that I), is for us Jews to take a day to fast and reflect on our sins and how to be […]

Wallace Bain has a good column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel in which he asks whether or not we truly value higher education. His piece is specific to California’s higher ed crisis, but hits on some attitudes that are, unfortunately, quite common across the nation: Oh, we say we do, of course. I can’t think […]