March 31, 2009 – 11:58 am
The NYT has a winking piece suggesting that colleges are going to be more and more welcoming of kids who can pay full freight. It’s hard to know what to make of “need blind” promises. They sound so good, but I’ve always heard that they’re artfully constructed half-truths. One of the classic tricks is to [...]
March 31, 2009 – 11:45 am
Now that I write that headline, I realize just how weird the words sound. If only I could find an official place to teach me about blogging and twittering in an official way. Then I would know exactly what to think about them. I was depressed about this until I read that Birmingham City University [...]
March 30, 2009 – 12:59 pm
If you’re wondering where the big tuition bills at Auburn are going, the Huntsville Times still has enough staff to write a good story about the fancy corporate jets at Auburn University.
March 29, 2009 – 10:57 am
Sure you could pay $42,000 a year to go to Middlebury, but it looks like you could also just watch “The Wire”. The school is offering a new course devoted entirely to David Simon’s acidic deconstruction of life in post-industrial Baltimore. The professor is one of those trendy types who once devoted an entire paper [...]
March 25, 2009 – 12:10 pm
We’re not sure which genius came up with this idea, but a neat website called Academic Earth is filled with videos of some of the best professors in the world. So let’s see. You could get your parents to pay $50k per year to sit in a lecture hall with your laptop browsing LOLCATS and [...]
March 23, 2009 – 12:01 pm
I pity the poor 20 somethings. They grew up being told that education was the key to a successful career and control of your life. Now, they’re often the first ones let go by companies in this recession and they’re asking what went wrong. Here’s a good story from the AP that shows the misbegotten [...]
Bless the heart of William Kirwan, the devoted public servant who runs the University of Maryland. He doesn’t want budget cuts to get in the way of providing a first-class education. The kids of Maryland deserve a great education, he says. They deserve professors who are jetting off around the world to present inscrutable papers [...]
The NYT’s Floyd Norris devoted his column to asking what we do now that so much money is gone. How will we raise our children and how much education will be buy now that we don’t have the money to pay for it.
March 19, 2009 – 11:43 am
A nice, balanced piece from the WSJ points out that law school may not be the best place to ride out the recession. The debt will still be there after you’re done and it’s far from clear that the jobs will be there: “There are very few schools that can guarantee students that they’ll find a high-paying [...]
The University of Chicago is proud of the burgeoning enrollment in their “Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates.” From Jodi Cohen’s piece: “It is almost too fun for the University of Chicago, so I will make sure they read a bit of theory every week,” Dawdy said. Arrrrrrgh!!! According to the article, the lecturer also [...]
March 17, 2009 – 11:37 am
Excuse me while I dry my teary eyes. Arizona State is cutting back its plans that helped boost the tuition through the roof to create a fancy research university, at least according to the NY Times. “Universities aspire to prestige,” Ms. Wellman said, “and that is achieved by increasing selectivity, getting a research mission and [...]
Some new research and some mostly anecdotal blather suggests that new college graduates are pretty narcissistic. (BBC Story here and Slashdot discussion.) The colleges lather on the praise and nurture the tender ego of a young mind that will be soon crushed by the hard work awaiting him or her– if he or she is [...]
When Jesse Jackson shows up, you know that an issue is reaching the pinnacle. Now, he’s joining in the push for a lower interest rates on student loans, a well-meaning idea if you ask me but one that’s quite misguided. Why shouldn’t students pay a fair market rate for the capital they absorb? If the [...]
A long time ago, college was something that you could pay for by waiting on tables for four years. Now, it’s part of the big three horsemen attacking American society: ballooning health care costs, the retirement of baby boomers and the need to suck up a huge debt to pay for four years of education. [...]
It’s nice to see a sober consideration of the debt involved in education. Beth Lattin, a recent graduate from GWU, just published in Forbes a careful analysis of the debt weighing on the shoulders of her generation. She looks at the cost of a master’s degree and decides that it might pay off for her [...]
Where would we be without experts to hold our hand and tell us that the world as we know it is still alright? I have a great deal of sympathy for journalists who must walk some narrow line in reporting. It sounds like this reporter from a local TV station is asking the right questions [...]
Sure you could buy all of the CD and that would run several hundred dollars, but where would that leave you? You might decide to fill your house with memorabilia, vintage vinyl, and other more authentic bits of Beatlemania. If you really work at it, you might spend several thousand dollars. But that’s nothing compared [...]
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