In the course of a witty and poignant reflection on his daughter's college search, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes:

The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there's a glut of good kids -- excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We've all read the stories of the despairing admissions officers wading through applications from one overachiever after another, cursing the gods -- "No, not another valedictorian!"

It's true, we've all read those stories, because newspapers like the Post love to publish them. But the idea there's this new or problematic oversupply of superqualified high school students -- it's nonsense, really. The dirty not-so-secret of the American educational system is that a quarter of the kids don’t graduate from high school on time, and for black and Latino students it's closer to half.

Of those who do...

The Post reports a huge influx of highly-qualified students from China applying as undergraduates to elite American universities. At the University of Virginia, the number grew from 60 in 2005 to 816 in 2009. At Brown University, 166 to 500, and so on. This shows, once again, the huge advantage we have in being home to lion’s share of the world’s top-notch colleges and universities in the era of globalization. Assuming U.S. / Chinese relations stay reasonably stable and anti-immigration crazy people don’t get their way, increasing numbers of very smart, motivated students from the other side of the world will come to America to live, learn, start businesses, make important discoveries, and otherwise improve our way of life. But it won’t last forever. It’s clear that, given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that...

In a story about college admissions rejection letters and where they fall on the nice-to-mean continuum (really), The Wall Street Journal reports:

Most Discouraging: Boston University. To students who have family ties to the university, its letter begins: “We give special attention to applicants whose families have a tradition of study at Boston University. We have extended this consideration in the evaluation of your application, but I regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you admission.” Consideration of family legacies is common practice at many universities. But Rob Flaherty, 17, a North Reading, Mass., recipient, said he felt the wording in BU’s letter translated to “we made it even easier for you and you STILL couldn’t get in.” Well, yeah, that’s exactly what it means. Legacy admissions policies are morally unjustifiable. They’re basically a way for colleges and...

We all know the drill by now: Faced with a major financial shortfall, the university announces that it has no choice but to sharply raise student tuition once again. “We remain committed to providing an affordable education for all,” says the university president, in somber tones. “But we will not degrade the high academic standards that make this institution great. We continue to provide an excellent value to our students, and we call on all members of the university community to come together in this difficult time of shared sacrifice.” Students complain, while some of the more outspoken members of the faculty wonder aloud why “high academic standards” never seem to involve “paying professors more money.” They are ignored. I think this standard line of rhetoric is growing less persuasive by the year. And it’s really hard to pull off in light of the new NCAA report detailing the recent ...

Like many organizations, colleges and universities are feeling the effects of the battered economy — revenues are down or growing less quickly, forcing higher-education leaders to confront the possibility of layoffs and other painful austerity measures. A relatively small number of institutions, however, have the good fortune to be sitting on gigantic piles of money in the form of endowments that swelled to record size when times were good. There’s reason to think that, for some, the aggressive investment strategies that added so much lucre to the treasury are now shrinking the hoards of cash at an equally rapid rate. But they still have a lot of money left, much more than they had even 10 years ago. Yet, as Harvard freshman and ace blogger Dylan Matthews writes (via Matt Yglesias, an alum):

Harvard has tens of billions of dollars. How many tens of billions they won’t say, but it’s in...

I spent the last couple of weeks on vacation in Turkey, before, during, and after President Obama’s visit. They love him there and the fact that he came as part of a larger trip to Europe — as opposed to the Middle East — was seen as symbolically a very big deal. The visit included a Q&A session with local university students, which seems to have gone well (video here): Answering questions from Turkish university students at the historic Tophane-i Amire Hall in Istanbul at a session titled “Live and Online Discussion with President Obama” yesterday, Obama did nothing but solidify that image. At the end of the session, Obama took time to shake hands with the majority of the students, a scene a million miles from the previous U.S. president’s visit to Turkey. A few seconds before George W. Bush was shaking hands with the guests at the Galatasaray University in June 2004, his bodyguards...

The longer I work in public policy, the more I think about conventional wisdom. These little nuggets of thought – -some essentially correct, others partially so, others not at all — are the building blocks of a shared narrative that profoundly shapes how we see the world, and thus how we act within it. While some methods of changing public policy involve directly influencing key decision makers through persuasion, bribery, etc., most amount to engaging in a chaotic struggle to force ideas through the hourglass-center aperture that controls access to conventional wisdom and as such the public mind. It’s a low-success rate / high-payoff business. The vast majority of ideas and findings die lonely, anonymous deaths. But if, by dint of force or accuracy or plain dumb luck, you can maneuver an idea past the point of increasing returns, the result is close to miraculous. The web of human...

Frank Heppner, honors professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island, wrote a good column in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago that nicely illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of the problems. Heppner’s essential point is that because universities value research more than teaching, teaching suffers, hurting students and the university bottom line. It’s worth reading in full but here are some highlights:

In research universities, those faculty members who write and obtain grant proposals enjoy certain perks, including summer salaries, more travel, more space, and an extensive list of other benefits, great and small. … Large introductory courses therefore become orphans cast out into the snow, sustained only by the good will of the transients who are their temporary custodians. To the successful researcher (in the financial sense) come fame, money...

Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours talking to education officials from North Africa and the Near East who are in Washington D.C. as guests of the State Department, learning about our education system. Near the end of the discussion, I had the following exchange with an education official from a large but sparsely populated North African country, the gist of which goes a long way toward explaining why college rankings are an unavoidable reality of higher education in the 21st century and as such need to be embraced, not rejected. Official: Yesterday I was told that there are over 4,200 universities in the United States, is this true? Kevin: Colleges and universities, yes, although that’s a pretty broad number that includes a lot of small religous and occupationally oriented institutions; if you narrow the field to “traditional” four-year private nonprofit and public instituions...