When students take federal loans to pay for college, the government declares them to be in default if a student doesn’t make a payment for 9 months. According to the Department of Education, North Carolina has an 11.6 percent federal student loan default rate. That rate is slightly higher than the national average of 11.3 … Continue reading “Did You Know? The North Carolina Colleges with High Student Default Rates”
The College Scorecard, a Department of Education initiative that publishes data on student debt and earnings after graduation for thousands of schools, just got a major update. Previously, the Scorecard’s major shortcoming was that it only reported data at the institution level—so we could see how much a typical graduate from the University of North … Continue reading “The Majors that Pay and the Degrees that Don’t for Graduates”
A college endowment is a fund where an institution keeps its financial assets and donations and can invest that money for the college’s long-term stability. In North Carolina, the largest college endowments saw their market value increase between 8 percent and 20 percent from 2017 to 2018. Endowment increases weren’t simply a case of the … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Biggest NC Endowments Keep Growing”
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from The Not-So-Great Society, published by the Heritage Foundation. Who cares that 20 students at the University of Wisconsin staged a protest in October 2017? Just months earlier, violence broke out at the University of California, Berkeley, after the invitation of a controversial speaker to campus. In March, a … Continue reading “Conserve Free Speech on Campus”
Universities may not target unpopular speech on campus often, but when they fail to protect it, the results are similar to officially silencing speech. A recent example of this lack of effort to protect comes from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where an anti-socialism display was destroyed on campus within a day after … Continue reading “Students Tear Down Anti-Socialism Display at UNC Charlotte”
Scholars gathered October 24 and 25 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to discuss free speech—and focused on its alleged pernicious effects. The conference’s takeaway was that the problem with free speech in the public sphere is not one of inadequacy, but rather one of overabundance. The conference, “Finding Expression in Contested Public … Continue reading “An Anti-Free Speech Conference in Greensboro”
As academia becomes increasingly political and some professors call for an activist academy, some critics have questioned the impact of “cultural studies” and critical theory on the quality of research in the humanities. Academics Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian have led the reaction against scholarship-as-activism with their famous “grievance studies” hoax. The three … Continue reading “Did You Know? Grievance Studies in the UNC System”
The fact that conservatives are outnumbered on college campuses isn’t groundbreaking news. The amount of ink that’s been spilled recounting the left’s stronghold on the academy and the threats that such ideological imbalance poses to rigorous academic inquiry—not to mention the perverse effects it wields on the culture—has been enough to fill volumes of journals, … Continue reading “Outnumbered: Academia’s Tilted Ideological Landscape”
“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” —Socrates Classical education—a tradition of education with ancient roots—is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to the current K-12 public education model. Its emphasis on reading the Great Books and making students active participants in their own education is appealing to parents and educators who … Continue reading “The Benefits of Renewing Education with the Socratic Method”
A sense of urgency has taken hold of higher education leaders nationwide. Reports of declining community college graduation rates and the lack of skilled workers have led policymakers and college leaders to sound the alarm and vow to do whatever it takes to lower the high rate of “dropouts” and equip students to meet the … Continue reading “The Success of Community College ‘Non-Completers’”