As my colleague Ben Miller notes, Congress is currently working through the annual process of taking money from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) that's supposed to be used for research and redirecting it toward pork projects so staggeringly vague or inappropriate that they defy parody.

For example, Dickinson State University, in Dickinson, North Dakota, is vying for $600,000 to support its "Theodore Roosevelt Center," which is "designed to raise the profile of Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota, to deepen our understanding of one of the most remarkable statesmen and intellectuals in American history, and to convene Roosevelt-related events of local, state, and national significance." Northern Kentucky University, by contrast, is looking for $2.4 million for "the purchase of equipment." That's it: "equipment."

I'm not per se opposed to raising the profile ...

As the Chicago Tribune reported a couple of days ago, University of Illinois trustee Lawrence Eppley has resigned "against the backdrop of a state investigation of a shadow admissions system that gave preferential treatment to students with ties to trustees, politicians and deep-pocketed donors. About 800 undergraduate applicants had their names placed on clout lists, known internally as Category I, at the Urbana-Champaign campus during the last five years, a Tribune investigation found. Dozens more received special consideration from the law school and other graduate programs."

Now, it'd be easy enough to use this merely as a point for Illinois in the Great American Corrupt-o-Thon it seems to be contesting against the state of New Jersey , or to chuckle at the inevitable appearance of the words "whose law firm donated $105,000 to Blagojevich's campaigns." But really, isn't the only...

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from the teachers' union-funded "Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice" touting a new study written by Holly Yetick of the University of Colorado at Boulder, allegedly uncovering rampant pro-think tank bias in the mainstream media. As the policy director of a think tank, I was naturally interested -- we're always looking for new ideas when it comes to prosecuting our nefarious media-manipulation plans. Alas, I was disappointed. In an analysis of 864 articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Education Week, the author found that:

Although university and government sources were cited more often, a higher percentage of reports produced by advocacy-oriented think tanks were cited by both types of publications. Universities produce 14 to 16 times more research than think tanks, but the three publications...

Last week I wrote that the problem of runaway college spending presents libertarians with something of a dilemma, because, “the best way to bend down the long-term higher education cost curve and thus reduce government spending is to increase government regulation in the form of mandatory reporting [of information about institutional performance].”

Unsurprisingly, Neal McCluskey of the libertarian Cato Institute disagrees. I think he’s unpersuasive, but before I explain why it’s worth reviewing the central argument of the paper that prompted this discussion, The Revenue-to-Cost Spiral, by Robert Martin, published by the conservative John William Pope Center for higher education policy.

Martin begins with the principal / agent problem, an issue that’s endemic in large modern organizations. Essentially, the problem arise when the interests of people who own or otherwise have a stake i...

What can we do about the inherent bureaucratic spending spirals?

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to attend a meeting at the Cato Institute to discuss a new paper that explores why higher education is perpetually becoming much more expensive and what do about it. I was happy to attend; while my politics are pretty far from Cato’s and I often think they’re wrong, they tend to be wrong in interesting ways. And in this case I thought the paper was quite good (more on why below). Its top-line recommendations track closely with something I write about a lot: the need for more transparency and public information about how well colleges and universities serve their students and help them learn. The problem is that colleges aren’t just going to unilaterally release lots of new information on their own. Nor would it help matters much if they did; for data to matter it has to be...

A couple of years ago I wrote a magazine article about community colleges that scored unusually well on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. I also wrote a separate profile of one of them, Cascadia Community College, after spending several days visiting the campus. There was a lot to write about, but for me the single most fascinating part was that Cascadia is essentially brand new, having opened its doors in 2001. We tend to think of the time necessary to achieve higher education greatness in practically geologic terms, but I think this is a mistake. The problem is that new institutions competing in the mainstream public / private nonprofit sector open up once in a blue moon, and when they do they’re forged in the existing mold. Thus, our collective sense of possibility regarding how different higher-education institutions could be or how fast they could change is...

Let’s say you’re a governor or a legislator or a member of Congress or you run a large charitable foundation or you’re just generally interested in American higher education, and you have some kind of agenda or goal you want to pursue. Maybe you’re concerned about access for low-income students. Maybe you want graduation rates to be higher. Maybe you wish more people were getting degrees in math and science. Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you wish things were different, that colleges and universities would collectively be more focused and diligent and effective at pursuing whatever goal you care about most. What should you do? You could write a manifesto or letter to the editor generally exhorting the higher education sector to improve. “This is important!” you would say. “Our future depends on it!” But I think you’d be disappointed. Things are the way they are for a reason...

George Leef, vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, takes issue with a recent report I co-authored about college graduation rates. We criticized colleges with unusually low graduation rates compared to peer institutions with similar admissions selectivity. Leef is having none of it:

Even at schools with very low graduation rates, some students do graduate. They discipline themselves and work hard enough to earn the credits they need to graduate. It’s not that those who graduate were the “lucky” ones. Each student is in control of his destiny; either he does what is required, or he doesn’t. We’re not talking about dice here. We’re talking about human beings with free will.

That’s why I find it troubling that the authors repeatedly talk about schools “failing to graduate their students.” Colorado Christian College doesn’t “fail to...

Fie upon thee, climbing walls to damnation! We shall not succumb to thy decadent corruptions!

The two dirtiest words in higher education these days are “climbing” and “wall.” Seriously, if you spend enough time attending conferences, reading op-eds, etc., you come to realize that climbing walls have somehow come to symbolize all that ails postsecondary education in America today. People are constantly denouncing their proliferation, or loudly noting that their institution refuses to install one, or otherwise employing them as a symbol of consumerism run amok. Students today demand all manner of creature comforts, the thinking goes, forcing colleges to kowtow to their every whim, which is why college is so expensive and academic standards are in decline and the academy in general is a pale shadow of its former, greater self, back when students were students and professors were...

United States schoolchildren are not the highest performing in the world, on average. This is well known and constantly cited in various calls to arms, from the memorable “hostile foreign power” rhetoric of A Nation at Risk to garden-variety speeches warning of economic threats from brainy children in Beijing and Bangalore. The track record is spotty, to be honest — remember when the 240-day Japanese school year was going to lead to total American subservience under the yoke of the Rising Sun by the mid-1990s? There’s also plenty of controversy over tests and methods. But the underlying point seems fairly indisputable — children in some other countries learn more. For example, here’s how things look on the 2007 TIMSS 4th grade math test:

We do okay, indistinguishable from the mean among OECD countries and better than the average of all countries, but substantially worse than Hong...