Category Archives: Education

…make it this excellent and refreshingly evenhanded New Yorker piece by Nathan Heller. It traces the rise of MOOCs at Harvard while carefully examining their many pros and cons, how they fit into the broader higher ed landscape, the roots of cost … Continue reading →

World-renowned music moguls and entrepreneurs Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are getting into another business: higher education. The rapper and producer made a $70 million donation to the University of Southern California to create a degree “that blends business, marketing, … Continue reading →

Georgia Tech announced yesterday that it is teaming up with Udacity, one of the leading providers of massively open online education, to offer a full graduate program in computer science. For a mere $7,000 dollars—or 1/6 the cost of the equivalent program … Continue reading →

Congress is considering legislation that seeks to hold American higher ed institutions accountable for results. On Thursday, a group of Senators proposed the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act”, a bill that would create a federal database containing … Continue reading →

Tuition costs at private universities may be plateauing, but not at public schools. Government spending on public colleges has been on the budget chopping block, so many public schools have been raising tuition to make up for the lost funds. … Continue reading →

By now everyone has heard the statistic that American students and graduates owe more than $1 trillion on student loans. But while everyone knows what these students did with their loans, it’s far less clear what the colleges are doing … Continue reading →

Enstitute, a new alternative to college, may be bringing higher education back to the Middle Ages. Rather than college degrees, Enstitute offers a two-year program that aims to give college students real-world job experience, akin to the venerable apprenticeship model. … Continue reading →

Florida Polytechnic University will be the state’s first public university to operate without a unionized faculty. EAGnews reports that FPU is ditching the tenure system altogether in favor of fixed-term contracts that will be renewed based on performance: Ghazi Darkazalli, … Continue reading →

This year’s crop of college grads will be entering one of the toughest job markets the country has seen in years. Some of this is a natural result of the recession, but as Zero Hedge points out, much of it is due … Continue reading →

“Tuition discounts” (grants and scholarships) at private colleges have been steadily rising for the past seven years, reports the WSJ. In 2012, the average discount rate hit 45 percent off of the total tuition bill—the highest it’s ever been. The downward pressure … Continue reading →

The statistics that open Richard Epstein’s WSJ review of Steven J. Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble paint a depressing picture of the state of the legal profession. Top firms are cutting back, wages are down, and tens of thousands of young law grads are looking … Continue reading →

How much do top college administrators care about their students? The results of a recent Gallup survey of college presidents are pretty revealing. While most college presidents acknowledge that tuition cost and academic preparedness are some of the biggest hindrances to … Continue reading →

Unions are starting to make a serious push into a segment of the education system from which they have been heretofore largely absent: charter schools. In mid-April we noted that the American Federation of Teachers was planning to organize employees … Continue reading →