December 31, 2009 – 7:44 pm
I suppose I can’t be too hard on the poor journalism professors. The business is going through a catastrophic transition and that always leaves people a bit nutty. But what am I to make of Leonard Downie, Michael Schudson and their amazing plan to send their students out into the world to report the news [...]
December 31, 2009 – 12:52 pm
Tuition goes through the roof but there are fewer and fewer full-time professors. Everyone seems to be an adjunct or a part-timer. In 1960, 70% were full-time. Now only 27% are. So where is the cash going?
December 31, 2009 – 12:51 pm
I wish I drove a Porsche every day– except on the days when I was visiting my vineyard up in the hills. Then I would pull out a vintage Jeep from my car collection. A person’s entitled to dream, right? What do we make of Amanda Ly, a young girl who found out a bit too [...]
December 31, 2009 – 12:41 pm
The NY Times’s Jaques Steinberg updates us the scoop on the work of Justin Monarez of the Scripps Howard News Service.
December 30, 2009 – 1:04 pm
I liked “The Big Lebowski”. I liked college. But somehow I don’t think the two things belong together, at least at the price point currently associated with a place that calls itself a university. Not that it matters. I can’t stop the flood. Dwight Garner from the NY Times reviews a new collection of academic [...]
December 29, 2009 – 10:23 pm
David Brooks over at the NY Times highlights his favorite essays from the year and one by William Chace in the American Scholar caught our eye. He goes through a long discussion about why English departments and most other liberal arts are finding fewer majors. Buried deep in the essay is the admission that the [...]
December 29, 2009 – 1:41 pm
As usual, I want to dodge the debate about the undocumented illegals creeping through the desert at night. Maybe we should echo President Reagan and tear down the wall. Maybe we should build it ever higher. I just wanted to point out the ravings of some brilliant professors who are fighting to open up the [...]
December 28, 2009 – 6:38 pm
Repeat after me: “Duh.” David Cho of the Washington Post reports the tough news about college loans and then dances around the fundamental problem before concluding with a quote from some college president burdened by the last name Marx. The faculty at Amherst probably giggled when they voted him in as President because nothing warms [...]
December 22, 2009 – 7:36 pm
If you want to see the academic industrial complex work its magic, turn to the op-ed piece by J.B. Schramm and E. Kinney Zalesne in today’s NY Times. They love the idea that schools will be graded on how “they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year [...]
December 22, 2009 – 6:27 pm
In every war, there’s always been a Christmas truce and that is what Pittsburgh and the local colleges announced yesterday. The NY Times’s Ian Urbina and Jack Kadden have the long and short of it. Is it over? Not at all. In theory, the colleges and the schools came to a “handshake” agreement where the [...]
December 22, 2009 – 11:57 am
Today’s story comes to us from the NY Times’s Sam Dillon who writes to us about the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. The institute and its president, Harold J. Raveché The state is suing both the university and the president for spending too much money on things that aren’t really helping the [...]
December 21, 2009 – 12:25 pm
And so it is said of Fiona Graham, a woman who received her PhD from Oxford and headed off to Japan to become a Geisha. Perhaps it was easier than getting a job in a university. Perhaps this was her one true dream. The article spends more time talking about sex. This is just another [...]
December 20, 2009 – 2:25 pm
A long time ago, it seems, college was a carefree time when a young mind could explore the breadth and depth of human knowledge, sipping from one well, drinking a bit deeper from another, enjoying the marvelous discoveries of the human mind. That was a long time ago. Today’s kids are tightly wound bundles of [...]
December 18, 2009 – 2:55 pm
C. Cryn Johannsen is pushing to poke more holes in the average debt stats from the College Board, one of the handmaidens of the academic industrial complex. I thought of her push when I read a comment to a short piece from the NY Times’s Jacques Steinberg about the average debt. One person writing under [...]
December 18, 2009 – 1:23 pm
Buried in the comments to this letter from TemporaryAttorney.com are a number of comments suggesting that schools deliberately lie about the employment success of their students. One claims that his law school claimed 100% employment even though he returned a survey saying he was unemployed. Another said it was common for culinary schools to fudge [...]
December 18, 2009 – 1:20 pm
I’ve been mulling over an excellent letter posted to TemporaryAttorney.com, a sort of bile-filled blog like this one populated by temporary attorneys who fuss over the quality of their jobs. They like to post the harsh stories of work in the document sweatshops and then grouse but most of them have few other choices. And [...]
December 17, 2009 – 7:42 pm
Maybe the Mayor is close to a real deal. Maybe the universities are going to play hardball. I don’t know, but Ian Urbina at the NY Times is pouring more ink on the topic. The vote is delayed for a week. My suggestions: Schools: Promise to boost your PILOT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) if [...]
December 17, 2009 – 7:33 pm
C. Cryn Johannsen is pushing for journalists to quit quoting the College Boards statistics about the extent of college debt. She had a conversation with the author of the book No Sucker Left Behind and decided it was time to push harder. You can even join a Facebook group if you so choose. If you [...]
December 16, 2009 – 8:32 pm
ABC.com offers a text version of television reporting that says pretty much what we’ve been saying: college is only good for a narrow range of people, debt costs are brutal, and the best way to find some security is to learn a serious trade like being an electrician. (Oh, the trades aren’t immune from the [...]
December 16, 2009 – 12:45 pm
The WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger asks many good questions about how to guess at the value of a college degree. There’s nothing that we haven’t covered and said ourselves ad nauseum, but it’s nice to see others tackle the issue. And I suppose the politer tone can’t hurt.
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