Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
And yes, the coaches walked out too. Impressive. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed college sportsball players can change the world. In response to protests over his inaction following a number of racist incidents, University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe resigned Monday morning. While he hadn’t yet been moved by a black graduate student’s…
Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students complained to them that Yale administrators were offering heavy-handed advice on what Halloween costumes…
In a characteristically insightful essay, Clay Shirky discusses the largely invisible rise of online education and dissects the causes of that invisibility: namely that the American higher education system is an iron-clad requirement for economic success, and it is remarkably bad at serving people who are already poor. It’s the kind of one-two punch…
Are memorials to racists of yore a present-day crisis? That was the gist of Lincoln Caplan’s recent essay in The Atlantic. Caplan wrote about the white-supremacist lineage of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges that make up Yale University’s undergraduate community. Named for the alumnus John C. Calhoun, the building is a legacy to…
Do we make both a conceptual and analytical mistake when we refer to student loans as a form of “financial aid”? Should that term be something to be resisted? Demos’ Tamara Draut brought up this point in a conversation recently, and I think it needs to be explored further, because it frames how we speak about student…
The Economist is out with a new ranking of colleges that ranks Harvard fourth and Yale 1,270th. The rankings are based on whether a college’s alumni fare better than expected in the labor market, as measured by earnings 10 years after starting school. Using a range of variables — a college’s location, its religious affiliation, its students’…
For millions of Americans, it’s not getting better. While the national unemployment rate has been on a downward trend in recent years—after reaching a high of 10 percent in October 2009—not everyone has been able to enjoy those benefits. According to a recent report from the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, the paper found that food stamp rates…
Former secretary of education and new president of the University of North Carolina System Margaret Spellings, photographed in 2011.Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images When Republicans gained supermajorities in both houses of the North Carolina legislature in 2012, they stacked the University of North Carolina System Board of Governors with extremely partisan, conservative appointees. Those…
Photo Credit Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch In 2013, the median LSAT score of students admitted to Florida Coastal School of Law was in the bottom quarter of all test-takers nationwide. According to the test’s administrators, students with scores this low are unlikely to ever pass the bar exam. Despite this bleak outlook, Florida Coastal charges nearly $45,000…
Kellie Woodhouse’s story yesterday about Wagner College and its plans to shrink strategically should be required reading for people at teaching-intensive institutions in the Northeast, and for the politicians who decide on budget allocations. Much of the Northeast and Midwest suffers from a decline in the number of 18 year olds, and the decline is…