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’”
Orwell’s famous dystopia 1984 is often cited as a parable about the banality of administrative evil. The ever-vigilant bureaucrats of Oceania position themselves not only on the Left side of history, but also at its end. To err from their ideology is treason. The citizens of Oceania live in a state of self-imposed hypnosis where … Continue reading “The Ministry of Love: Ongoing Gender Partisanship in the Department of Education”
Public colleges spend public money, but college officials are reluctant to make information about their budgets easy to understand. That aversion to transparency makes it easier to pass non-instructional expenses along to students. Many experts have discussed the problem. But without transparency, it can be hard to show just how much so-called instruction is actually … Continue reading “Without Financial Transparency, Colleges Mislabel Research Spending as Instructional”
In his new book The Assault on American Excellence, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman traces many of the current woes of American universities back to the use of one word in one opinion in one court case. That word is “diversity” and the opinion was Justice Lewis Powell’s in the 1978 Bakke case about minority … Continue reading “Overlapping Magisteria–A Review of Anthony Kronman’s ‘The Assault on American Excellence’”
A letter from the federal Department of Education has sparked yet another controversy on the campuses of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This time, the issue is about how to honor the intentions of donors, with the donor being the federal government instead of a private individual or corporation. … Continue reading “No, Academia, Title VI Funding Is Not for Your Pleasure”
Since 2016, colleges and universities have fought to stay open as enrollments fall, especially liberal arts colleges. Many colleges are adding more certificate programs in technology fields and dropping low-enrollment humanities programs. The threat has been most acute for small liberal-arts colleges with small endowments that rely on tuition for most of their revenue. To … Continue reading “Did You Know? 86 Colleges Have Closed or Merged Since 2016”
An important new front in the culture war has opened up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one with major implications about intellectual diversity and how universities in North Carolina are to be governed. The controversy concerns plans for a new “Program on Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse,” scheduled to begin in … Continue reading “UNC Board Steps Up to Defend Civil Discourse on Campus”
Last year, the Martin Center released its first report on the state of free speech and institutional neutrality in the UNC system. The report serves two main purposes. The first is to measure how much of an effect the free speech law has had on the state’s public colleges and universities. The law, also known … Continue reading “Free Speech: A Year in Review for UNC Campuses”
As young people worry about their futures, going to college isn’t necessarily their first step toward a good job. Entrepreneur Isaac Morehouse predicts the relevance of colleges, and the degrees they confer, will erode as employers increasingly look for workers with demonstrated, often self-taught job skills. “I think it will be a long, slow decline, … Continue reading “The Key to Success for Young People Isn’t Always College”
The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) rates teacher education programs on how well they teach different subjects such as science, social science, and content knowledge. As Shannon Watkins describes, most public North Carolina education programs do a poor job teaching the future educators of the state. And education schools at University of North Carolina … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Uneven Performance of UNC Education Schools”