Author Profile

George Leef

George Leef is director of external relations for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Carroll College (Waukesha, WI) and a juris doctor from Duke University School of Law. He was a vice president of the John Locke Foundation until 2003.

Prior to joining the Locke Foundation, Leef was president of Patrick Henry Associates, a consulting firm in Michigan dedicated to assisting others in advocating free markets, minimal government, private property, and individual rights. Previously, Leef was on the faculty of Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, where he taught courses in economics, business law, and logic. He has also worked as a policy adviser in the Michigan Senate.

A regular columnist for Forbes.com, Leef was book review editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, from 1996 to 2012. He has published numerous articles in The Freeman, Reason, The Free Market, Cato Journal, The Detroit News, Independent Review, and Regulation. He writes regularly for the National Review's The Corner blog and for SeethruEdu.com.

Articles by George Leef

What If the U.S. News College Rankings Went Bye-Bye?

Apr 25, 2007 · George Leef

Ask Americans how they know which colleges and good and which ones aren’t so good and they’ll probably say, “the U.S. News college rankings.”

For several decades, the annual issue of U.S. News & World Report that focuses on the rankings of colleges, universities, and graduate schools has been treated with exceeding respect by the public. It purports to identify the best university, best liberal arts college, best law and medical schools and so on according to a complicated formula. Rarely do people analyze that formula and ask if it’s a reliable means of identifying schools where students are most likely to receive an excellent education.

The Higher Ed Completion Hobgoblin

Apr 12, 2007 · George Leef

There is a cottage industry in the U.S. (located mostly in Washington, DC, but with satellite plants scattered around the country) that produces hand-wringing policy reports saying that America faces a crisis unless it finds a way to put more students into and through college. (Here are two recent examples: “The Waning of America’s Higher Education Advantage” published last June by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and “American Higher Education: How Does it Measure Up for the 21st Century?”) H. L. Mencken once wrote that politics is a game of menacing the people with “an endless series of hobgoblins” to keep them clamoring for governmental officials to make them safe. This business of scaring people into thinking that we’ve got to get more students through college fits that description perfectly.

The most recent addition to this genre is a paper released March 7 entitled “Hitting Home: An Analysis of the Cost, Access and Quality Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today” published by the group Making Opportunity Affordable. The paper’s big point is that the U.S. suffers from a “degree gap” that threatens our economic future. In the words of the author, “In fact, the size of this gap – the difference between degrees produced in the United States and those produced by nations who are among our top competitors – could reach almost 16 million degrees by 2025….” To close this supposedly dangerous gap, the paper advocates government action to get far more young Americans into and through college – thus “producing” the degrees that will enable us to keep right up with those competitors.

Duke Praised for Educational Innovations

Mar 15, 2007 · George Leef

Duke University’s undergraduate curriculum — like many others – went through a period of erosion beginning in the late 1960s. For many schools, that decline has continued, but not at Duke, according to a new paper just released by the Pope Center. “The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: The Focus and Gerst Programs,” written by Russell K. Nieli, examines how Duke stopped the decline and suggests ways in which other schools can help their students find more meaning in their education.

Nieli, who graduated from Duke in 1970 and now teaches at Princeton, observes that the administration at Duke – as at many other prominent universities – succumbed to two Siren songs during this period. One was to relax the constraints of the old idea of a core curriculum in order to give students more control over their college education. The result was a “distribution requirements” system that allowed students to pick most of their courses from a smorgasbord of offerings.

That change destroyed the educational commonality that had once tied Duke students together. “Gone were the days when almost all Duke students would have read the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and King Lear; when you could strike up a conversation with even a Duke chemistry or biology major on the differences between St. John’s Gospel and the Synoptics; when students eagerly debated in their dorm lounges whether Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were fascists or high-minded traditionalists; and when Southern students and faculty took special pride in the outstanding literary achievements of the great Southern writers,” Nieli says.

Could We Have Champagne Education on a Beer Budget?

Feb 22, 2007 · George Leef

In a recent Clarion Call, I lamented the fact that when higher education types get together to talk about the problem of affordability, they almost always conclude that the solution is to spend more government money to further subsidize college attendance. Very rarely do they consider ways of delivering education that will simply cost less.

At least one professor has given this some serious thought, however. Vance Fried, the Brattain Professor of Management at Oklahoma State University, has set forth a proposal that he believes will enable students to get “champagne education on a beer budget.” (You can read his proposal in full here.)

Professor Fried proposes what he calls the College of Entrepreneurial Leadership and Society (CELS) as a new model for undergraduate education that will give students more educational value for less money. His idea certainly caught my interest.

Big Education Conference Misses the Boat

Feb 8, 2007 · George Leef

Every year since 1986, the Institute for Emerging Issues has held a highly publicized conference devoted to some current policy issue. For 2007, the theme was “Transforming Higher Education: A Competitive Advantage for North Carolina.” Sadly, there was very little said about actually transforming higher education in the state over the two days of the event – that is, how it might be made a better and more valuable experience for students. Instead, the speakers were mostly fixated on the supposed need for North Carolina (and the United States as a whole) to put more students into and through college.

In other words, it was about quantity rather than quality. What needs to change, according to most of the speakers, is the number of young Americans entering and graduating from college, not the educational worth of the courses they take. This made for a rather monochromatic conference, rather like attending a concert where every piece was just a variation on the same theme.

The main theme was that America’s higher education system is “underperforming.” Whereas in the past the United States had the highest percentage of its workforce holding college degrees of any nation, today a number of countries now surpass the U.S. and more are catching up. Several speakers, including Governor Mike Easley, asserted that this situation poses a threat to our standard of living. Businessman Thomas Tierney stated that there is a “direct relationship between completion of higher education and economic growth,” and since the U.S. is losing its “lead” over other nations, our standard of living is in jeopardy.

Is Law School a Waste of Time?

Feb 1, 2007 · George Leef

Strange as it may seem, it is quite possible for someone who has never gone to law school to be a good attorney.

An article that appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal makes that exact point. In “Meet the Clients,” (available here) New York attorney Cameron Stracher writes, “One of the biggest problems with the current state of legal education is its emphasis on books rather than people. By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about.”

Can You Find the Fake Course?

Jan 11, 2007 · George Leef

What follows are descriptions of four college courses. Three of them are real courses and one is not. Can you identify the fake?

A. The Adultery Novel. Students will read a series of 19th and 20th century works about adultery and watch several films about adultery. They will apply critical approaches to place adultery in its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of the family as a social and economic institution, and feminist work on the construction of gender.
B. Queer Musicology. This course explores how sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation during the 1990s. Music under consideration will include works by Franz Schubert, Holly Near, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.
C. Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism. This course will spark critical thinking on these questions: What is whiteness? How is it related to racism? What are the legal frameworks of whiteness? How is whiteness enacted in everyday practice? And how does whiteness impact the lives of both whites and people of color?
D. Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing. This course will analyze foodways in recent Chicana lesbian literature, examining writings that illustrate the cultural endurance of heteronormative constructions of gender even as they demonstrate how these beliefs are disrupted, destabilized, and transformed in queer literary kitchens.

Can States Use Higher Education as an Economic Tonic?

Jan 4, 2007 · George Leef

Politicians in three Midwestern states – Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin – have lately been working on plans that are based on the idea that higher education can spur state economies along to better performance. While the details differ somewhat, all are rooted in the concept that increasing the number of residents with college educations is an investment for the government. Put some money in now, get much more money back later.

Will it work?

In Michigan, Governor Jennifer Granholm calls the new Michigan Promise scholarship a cornerstone of her economic plan to revive Michigan’s lagging economy. The program provides a $4,000 scholarship to students who complete two years of post-secondary education at a two- or four-year school in Michigan, public or private, provided that they have a GPA of at least 2.5. In her press release, Governor Granholm stated, “A $4,000 scholarship makes earning a college degree or technical certification a real possibility for every student. It’s an amazing opportunity for our students and a critical necessity for our economy.” This new scholarship is part of an effort by the state to double the number of college graduates within the next decade.

The Skills College Graduates Need

Dec 14, 2006 · George Leef

One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.” I have never actually seen evidence to back that contention up, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your fantastic higher education system in America!” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.

On October 2, The Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey entitled “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of 2-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of 4-year colleges as “excellent.”

The greatest area of deficiency identified by the business respondents was in communications. Roughly half of new workforce entrants with 2-year degrees and more than a quarter with 4-year degrees were rated as “deficient” with regard to their ability to write and understand written material. That finding is not surprising, given the results of last year’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which concluded that literacy among college graduates was shockingly low – and falling.

The skills college graduates need

Dec 8, 2006 · George Leef

One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.” I have never actually seen evidence to back that contention up, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your wonderful higher education system in America.” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.

On October 2, 2006, The Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey entitled “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of 2-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of 4-year colleges as “excellent.”