Higher Education

Camille Paglia treks merrily ahead in her years-long quest to be as wrong as possible.

From Reuters: Democratic lawmakers seeking a thorough overhaul of the $92 billion U.S. student loan market were expected to score a win in the days ahead from a favorable finding by the Congressional Budget Office. With a House of Representatives floor vote anticipated next week, the CBO was expected to say the Democrats’ bill would […]

The Ivy League is of course far from this blog’s focus, but it’s still astounding—and difficult to grasp, really—that a university’s endowment could shrink by $11 billion in one year. I wonder how many community colleges you could run for a year with that much money…

Earlier today, the Washington Monthly and Education Sector, with support from the Lumina Foundation for Education, hosted a great discussion on the future of higher ed reform down at George Washington University. Hopefully I’ll eventually have audio to put up, but in the meantime a few highlights and thoughts: -Kevin Carey of Education Sector, in […]

The Chronicle has a writeup on the new chair of the Senate health and education committee, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who replaces the late Ted Kennedy. Harkin wasn’t seen as the most likely replacement for Kennedy: Mr. Harkin’s decision to accept the chairmanship came as somewhat of a surprise to higher-education lobbyists, many of whom […]

It’s worth driving this point into the ground endlessly: when a state is forced to make budget cuts to higher education programs, it’s often community colleges—whose students tend to be the ones most vulnerable to exiting higher ed—that suffer the most. Even when the percentages of cuts made to community versus four-year colleges look similar, […]

Inside Higher Ed notes that, while health care is still dominating the headlines and will be for awhile, now that Congress is back in session, “a flurry of news developments Wednesday served as a reminder that higher education issues remain a top priority for the administration and its Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.” Including: * […]

I usually try to stay away from such general statements, but doesn’t it seem like conservatives have a prevailingly negative view of human nature? I ask this after having read George Leef’s latest Phi Beta Cons post, in which he describes typical college students as “academically weak and disengaged kids who just want a few […]

Setting aside nostalgic pro-print sentiments (yes, overall I prefer reading things in print), is there much of an argument against a college paper going online-only? Given that such papers serve a demographic that grew up reading things online anyway, isn’t this a good way to save money and to force the papers’ staffers to pick […]

The usual suspects are all reviewing Crossing the Finish Line, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.