January 31, 2010 – 1:06 pm
Now that the police have found a healthy and self-sufficient Phil Agre, I can make a snarky comment. He was a professor of information sciences at UCLA and then he just stopped coming to work. Finally after a number of months, his family noticed he was gone and took action. Here’s the great sentence fragment [...]
January 30, 2010 – 2:28 pm
Every law school likes to brag about having full employment of its graduates. TemporaryAttorney.com brings us news that Georgetown is hiring its unemployed to help with reviewing the applications for scholarships. It all sounds so nice until TemporaryAttorney points out that the jobs are coming just as the school tries to count the number of [...]
January 30, 2010 – 2:21 pm
The editors at RPInsider have a list of 20 items. Somehow I think the list could be much, much longer. And to be fair, I’m not sure that number 14, more division one sports is really better. Both the new mansion and a big sports program seem like luxuries that do little for the average [...]
January 30, 2010 – 2:14 pm
The endowment of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is down but a new home for the president is going up high. Perhaps she was inspired by the late JD Salinger’s short story title, “Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters”. Maybe she just likes the energy-inefficiency of high ceilings. Who knows? But RPI is asking the city for a [...]
January 26, 2010 – 5:51 pm
The NY Times’s Jacques Steinberg takes a deliciously cynical point of view of the way that some universities send out mailers offering to wave the application fees for some select folks. He sees it as a technique to boost their rankings in the US News and World Report charts, a mechanism that includes some measurement [...]
January 25, 2010 – 6:12 pm
Am I excited about the fact that President Obama is said to be proposing capping student loan payments at 10% of your income? Nope. If anything, I’m a bit leery and much depends upon the details of the proposal. If I’m forced to be positive, I’m going to say that it’s good that he’s aware [...]
January 23, 2010 – 1:26 pm
MedicineSux, a blog run by a former resident, notes that it’s now cheaper to fly on a rocket into outer space than go to medical school. Okay, the rocket trip will only last a few minutes, but it’s going to be an exciting trip without mucking around in human bowels or other gross things.
January 21, 2010 – 2:28 pm
In California, the students are protesting because the tuition bills can’t stop going higher and higher. In Sweden, the students are protesting to– and this comes from a reputable news site— build a pipeline from the local brewery to the student union. In Sweden, the universities can’t jack up fees and force the students into [...]
January 21, 2010 – 12:27 pm
Neal Templin, a reporter for the WSJ, writes about the thrift of his daughter Marina who is working at one of those low-paying, dream jobs in publishing. When kids dream of being English majors and going on to be famous book editors, they often imagine that such a life would require a top-flight degree. But [...]
January 18, 2010 – 12:58 pm
Why does an official stamp of certainty on your educational status take 4 years? Why not 3? Why not 30? It’s all just arbitrary. Russell Sage college is going to experiment with a three year program that will reportedly jam the same number of credit hours into three years. The savings? $20k. (Thanks to Scott [...]
January 17, 2010 – 2:19 pm
Well, we just tuned into TemporaryAttorney a few weeks before the NY Times decided to pop the law school bubble. The bitter boys at Temp Attorney and the other great law-sucks blogs are the real avant garde. But Alex Williams delivers some excellent quotes and a good summary. Enjoy it once again. Still, I think [...]
January 16, 2010 – 2:48 pm
Richard Vedder is asking why the states spend so much to sponsor flagship schools like UC Berkeley and U Va. Traditionally, it was to open up education to all but now the state flagships are so good that they’re attracting relatively rich kids. So should we cut them off? Perhaps but they would only raise tuition [...]
January 15, 2010 – 1:19 pm
Let me skip the joke that Arne Duncan went to Harvard and ended up being a secretary. After all, he’s the Secretary of Education and that’s a pretty good job, right? Except when kids go on and be successful without an education. It’s not really possible to criticize the computer geniuses because no one really [...]
January 14, 2010 – 7:02 pm
Richard Vedder over at the Center for College Affordability offers some staggering numbers about the number of hours that professors spend in the classroom at Ohio University: Whereas in 1965, the typical faculty member was in class 288 hours a year, in 2012 his counterpart will be in class 168 hours –over 40 percent less. [...]
January 14, 2010 – 6:47 pm
Before heading off on another linguistic bender, let me say that I enjoy the discussions of literature with English professors. It is a noble pursuit and one that embiggens us all, a word coined by the script writers of “The Simpsons.” It’s kind of cute when these lit critters get a bit bored with the [...]
January 14, 2010 – 1:06 pm
Wow. These colleges have powerful mojo and immense chutzpah. Governments around the United States are cutting shifts for the firefighters, laying off police officers, and generally cutting services left and right. And when the colleges come demanding more money, the governments just roll over and say “Sure.” Governor Martin O’Sucker is the latest to fall [...]
January 13, 2010 – 1:47 pm
Just like pretty much everyone else in the real world, I’ve worked at businesses that had to cut back 10% or even 20%. It was painful. We had to guess at priorities and in some cases I lost. That’s life. That’s how businesses move forward. Now imagine you’re working at such a business and your [...]
January 13, 2010 – 1:24 pm
I didn’t say that education is sleezier. That’s Jane Shaw quoting William Patrick Leonard, a former economist who ascended to the throne at the Solbridge International School of Business. Leonard says that boosting tuition is the simplest way to keep his business solvent. The students are borrowing the cash and so they don’t have a [...]
January 11, 2010 – 4:02 pm
Mike Mandell points out some very disturbing statistics on his blog: in the last ten years, the average salary for PhDs has dropped 10%. Dropped. This doesn’t speak well of education if people overloaded with said education are making less and less. One of the trickiest points to argue is that education may not make [...]
January 10, 2010 – 6:01 pm
Education is a powerful drug and those who are educated are the worst addicts. So it’s not surprising that a number of the unemployed educated are turning around and purchasing still more education. Consider all of the people rushing to law school according to this story from the NY Times’s Rebecca Ruiz. I don’t want to [...]
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