Gender Indoctrination: Not Just for Four-Year Colleges

Community colleges focus more on practical subjects than theoretical ones, reducing the chances of their pushing a political agenda. But such schools’ lack of blatant indoctrination is coming to an end, due to recent actions taken by the federal Department of Education. Individual schools should attempt to mitigate the damage rather than force it down our throats.


Erasing the Past Will Not Improve the Future

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, along with the massacre of nine black churchgoers last summer in Charleston, South Carolina, created racial hysteria and gave rise to an anti-intellectual movement that has now extended to American campuses. Its promoters want to purge society—and our universities—of historical relics and symbols that they say glorify white supremacy and perpetuate racism.



North Carolina Should End Its Protectionist Policies Limiting Online Courses

Because of protectionist regulations, North Carolina’s range of higher education choices is not as wide as it should be. But it’s not just the Tar Heel State that gums up the works with excessive red tape. North Carolina schools that want to offer their online courses to out-of-state students have had to navigate burdensome approval processes. In many cases, schools have decided it’s just not worth the considerable expense in terms of both time and money—thereby limiting options for students seeking online alternatives. But now there is a better way. The State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) is an agreement among member states that establishes comparable national standards for interstate offering of online education.



Community Colleges: Much More Successful Than Statistics Seem to Show

The mainstream media’s mantra about community colleges is that their performance should be evaluated based on degree completion statistics, just as it is for traditional four-year colleges and universities. But what about the students who never intended to earn a degree? The cited statistics on completion are not very meaningful if they fail to consider the intentions of the institution’s students. Yes, many community colleges (and others) have low graduation rates, but it is a bad mistake to leap from that to the conclusion that they are “failing their students.” Rather, they are serving a widely diverse student population with a wide range of programs particularly well.


In Troubled Times, Some Important Advances to Protect Student Rights

In the last few years, the rights of students in North Carolina universities have received some significant new protections. It is important that state legislators and educators continue to do so, for such rights—pertaining to free speech and due process of punitive proceedings—have been under assault on college campuses nationwide in recent years.


“Public Service” Loan Forgiveness Will Inflate the Cost of College

It is extremely wasteful to lure students into high-cost degree programs with easy-to-get government loans, then saddle the taxpayers with the unpaid balance when the student later defaults or manages to qualify for loan forgiveness. That artificially inflates the demand for college credentials and helps to accelerate the constant increase in the cost of higher education.


What We’re Reading

Every once in a while, we all read something that really excites us or makes a deep impression on us. Sometimes it’s a timeless classic, sometimes it’s entirely new. We thought we’d share a few such influential works with our readers. Enjoy.


When University Governance Fails, Political Leadership Becomes Necessary

Senator David Curtis (R-Lincoln) has emerged as one of North Carolina’s leading voices for higher education reform. On July 28, he wrote a letter titled “UNC System Policy Change Suggestions” to the UNC system’s Board of Governors. His proposals, if implemented, would vastly improve key areas of UNC governance in great need of reform.