John Hechinger at the WSJ brings us good news from the endowment at our old favorite, Coopers Union. Who can’t love a college that’s free? The WSJ notes that CU got out of the go-go investments several years ago sparing them the meltdowns that are giving the yips to the folks at Princeton and Harvard.
There are two ways that the academic industrial complex can reduce the brutal payments that weigh so heavily on our students. They could cut the cost of college by getting rid of the fancy features or they could just do some clever financial manipulation to hide the cost. It should come as no surprise what [...]
The NYT magazine comes with a long, handwringing piece written by Lucy Ferriss, a mom with a son who’s more interested in playing poker than going to college. We’re going to leave it to the readers to determine whether Ms. Ferriss should be described as “harpie-like” or “caring”. We’re not going to wonder whether Ms. [...]
We’re big fans of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s blog around here. Their blog is filled with writing that’s quite willing to question the ruling meme that a person is not fully whole without four years of college education. They’ve recently been running a series of posts that issue new “commandments” for the [...]
If you have prostate cancer, wouldn’t you want to be treated by someone with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania? Think carefully and read this scary story from the New York Times’s Walt Bogdanich.
We’re not college-haters, just ultra-pragmatists. We don’t see the diploma as half empty, but we do see it as half full of itself. College is great fun and occasionally useful but it’s much too expensive for what you get. So the NYT turns to the areas of the country that once grew fat on making [...]
The poor Baltimore Sun, torn apart by the economy and the poor advertising market, leads the story about colleges with some happy news: “Things look remarkably the same,” said Shannon Gundy, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Maryland, College Park. But it all depends on where you look. If you dig a bit [...]
If you’re the kind of person who thinks that the standard BS isn’t enough and you need a PhD (piled higher and deeper), then read this sad story from Erica Alini at the Wall Street Journal. New PhD graduates can’t find any jobs in the US– that’s not a surprise because most don’t find jobs [...]
One of my favorite jokes from the Soviet era in Russia was the line, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Jonathan Robe over at one of my favorite blogs, CollegeAffordability, notes that InsideHigherEd caught USC fibbing about the number of fancy-pants professors on its staff. USC told US News and World [...]
High school students everywhere should take a long look at the comments attached to this NYTimes story. You know that things are bad when the staid NY Times starts writing headlines like, “Student Debt, Fools’ Gold?” Their readers are the last bastion of true believers in the college myth. The comments, though, are truly heartbreaking: [...]
The NYT rounded up five people to speculate on how much debt is too much. Some didn’t answer the question. Robert Applebaum, the dreamer who keeps hoping that the US government will give him a bailout and pile his debt onto everyone’s shoulders, says that it may not be a good idea to “find yourself” [...]
The NY Times has a short piece by Allen Salkin about how Harvard alumni are loaning money to Harvard students who need a shot of cash. It’s one of those micro-loan mechanisms like kiva.com. People get together, act like loan officers, and make a decision about where to loan their money. Then they reap the [...]
Zac Bissonnette, a talented sophomore who already writes for distinguished venues like the Daily Beast, sets the record straight on why he’s going to Univ. of Massachusetts at Amhearst, not a tonier private school: he doesn’t want debt. He wants to own a house when he grows up, not eat in a fancy dining hall [...]
The Alabama Public Schools and Finance committee sent out nice invitations to their party. They were selling $285m in bonds but no one showed up to bid. Ouch. I hate when that happens. In the past, those paragons of insight, the bond rating agencies, gave the committee a AA rating. It looks like the good [...]
Before addressing the substance of Jonathan Glater’s piece on Reed College on the front page of today’s NY Times, I wanted to point out one detail about the way he mentions Apple’s Steve Jobs as one of the more famous students who attended Reed. Notice his phrasing. Jobs never graduated. He dropped out after a [...]
Don Tapscott runs through a number of reasons why the universities aren’t going to be the best place to get an education in the future. The Internet changes everything. I’m still digesting it but I think he makes solid points that are, not coincidentally, similar to solid points that I’ve made.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Some say that college teaches you about english, chemistry, physics and big, theoretical ideas that seem so full of promise as long as you don’t try to actually apply them. Others hide their cynicism and say that college “teaches you about life.” Still others say it’s all just [...]
It’s commencement time, a time that should be reserved for celebrating the hard work and achievement of the graduates. Okay, we’ll give them 24 hours to sing, dance, and chant, but then it’s time for them to get their stuff out of the dorm and make room for the next crew. But I’m feeling bad [...]
Robin Wilson contacted me about a story on student debt but I guess I didn’t make the cut. It is a thoughtful and seemingly thorough piece that does a good job of noting the most of the hottest issues. There’s talk about the price, the conflicts of interest and the terribly romantic notion of college [...]
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