The higher-education accreditation process is successful in a number of ways. If you attend an accredited instiution, it’s unlikely that your money will be outright stolen or that you’ll be given a fraudulent degree. Credentials and credits from accredited institutions are broadly recognized, portable, and non-expiring. The underlying confidence and flexibility this brings goes a long way toward making the American higher education system work as well is does. That said, accreditation is also opaque and insidery and only guarantees a minimum level of quality. Accreditors are also very reluctant to actually pull the trigger and de-accredit institutions because doing so cuts off the flow of money from the federal financial-aid system and as such consigns institutions to certain financial doom. But whose interests, exactly, are being served by that approach? Take, for example, Southeastern...

Myles Brand, president of the NCAA, argues against proposals to give college athletes the option of taking a salary in lieu of free college courses they don’t want in pursuit of a degree they’ll never obtain, because: Paying even a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.Yes, what a sad day it would be if our great institutions of higher learning were to compromise their academic ideals in pursuit of the fame and money that come with being in the sports entertainment business. Before you know it, they’d be paying the heads of their sports divisions multi-million dollar salaries while simultaneously raising student tuition and freezing faculty salaries, or — even worse — banding together to form some sort of national college sports entertainment monopoly, led by a former...

I don’t think Watchmen is a very good movie. I say this not because I’m a hater, like this guy. I first read Watchmen, the comic book, as it was published in 12 installments in 1986. A few years later, I bought the collected version so I wouldn’t wear out the originals. Then DC published an oversized hardback version, allegedly with new color separations or something; I bought that too. I’ve probably read it cover-to-cover 15 or 20 times. And that’s likely part of the problem. Watchmen is not a comic book adaptation like Spider-Man or The Dark Knight. It’s much more a translation in the vein of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, or 300, which got Zack Snyder the Watchmen gig. Like those movies, it repeats much of the source dialogue and, more importantly, the same progression of images that form the narrative backbone of the film. Good as a story might be, it starts to wear thin on the 21st...

What galaxy is he in?

Maureen Dowd approvingly quotes Senator John McCain’s Twittered mockery of $2-million in federal funding for the promotion of astronomy in Hawaii, because “nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” Last I checked, astronomy was a legitimate branch of science. To conduct the kind of astronomy that involves observation of light, you ideally need to put your observatory somewhere that is A) high in the air, and B) far away from artificial light. As such, there’s no better place in America to build an observatory than the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is A) nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, and B) in Hawaii, which is farther away from the rest of civilization than anywhere else on planet Earth. They take light pollution on the Big Island so seriously that individual light fixtures in restaurants on the...

Yesterday Dartmouth University College announced that its next president will be Jim Yong Kim, currently chairman of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Asian-Americans make up a much greater percentage of students in America’s elite colleges and universities than the population as a whole, to the point where there seems to be a pretty strong circumstantial case that Asian students are now subject to race-based admissions discrimination not dissimilar to the infamous “Jewish quotas” utilized by Ivy League institutions in the early 20th Century. (Dan Golden’s The Price of Admission has a whole chapter on this and is well worth reading in full.) But for a variety of reasons that hasn’t translated into representation in the upper reaches of higher education leadership, where Asian-Americans remain few and far between. So this is welcome news.

As the global economy continues its terrifying free fall into an abyss of undetermined depth, the demand for high-quality, government-subsidized services will naturally increase. But since government revenues are being dampened by the same world-wide economic meltdown, public institutions have less money to meet surging demand. To wit: Admissions officers at the State University of New York college campus here are suddenly afraid of getting what they have always wished for: legions of top high-school seniors saying “yes” to their fat envelopes. Students are already tripled up in many dorm rooms after an unexpectedly large freshman class entered last fall. And despite looming budget cuts from the state, which more tuition-paying students could help offset, officials say they are determined not to diminish the quality of student life by expanding enrollment at their liberal-arts college be...

“OK, folks, where’s the real aid? It’s here! No, it’s here! No, it’s here!” In an article titled “To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything But Aid,” the New York Times reports that: With the economy forcing budget cuts and layoffs in higher education, colleges and universities might be expected to be cutting financial aid. But no. Students considering a wide range of private schools, as well as those who are already enrolled, can expect to get more aid this year, not less. The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and they are anxious to prevent top students from going elsewhere. There’s nothing factually wrong with the article, but it’s also a good example of how language can obscure meaning. The practice the Times describes, which is used to...

President Obama’s Access and Completion Incentive Fund, which will help large numbers of low-income students graduate from college, is part of a larger package of reforms including the elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) — that is, the program in which the federal government guarantees and subsidizes student loans made by banks and other for-profit companies. Under the plan, the federal government would lend the money directly, as it already does for many students. The savings would be used to help fund the completion initiative and transform the Pell Grant program from a “discretionary” program subject to the whims of the annual appropriations process into a “mandatory” program with permanent funding and the grants indexed to inflation. All in all, this would be a huge boon for college students in need. But early word is that the past 24 hours have...

President Obama’s FY 2010 Budget Proposal includes the following:

Focuses on College Completion. It is not enough for the Nation to enroll more students in college; we also need to graduate more students from college. A few States and institutions have begun to experiment with these approaches, but there is much more they can do. The Budget includes a new five-year, $2.5 billion Access and Completion Incentive Fund to support innovative State efforts to help low-income students succeed and complete their college education. The program will include a rigorous evaluation component to ensure that we learn from what works.If enacted, this could be a very big deal. The federal government provides higher education with a lot of money, but nearly every penny comes in the form of tax preferences, research funding, and student financial aid. Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was talk...

One of the most important education lines in President Obama’s speech was: “We will expand our commitment to charter schools.” This is best understood not in terms of any particular public policies but rather in terms of the awesome power presidents have to define the boundaries of public debate. To see evidence of this in education, we need go no further than Obama’s predecessor. Education was one of the most important issues in the early pre-9/11 Bush presidency, with intense negotiations around the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which ultimately led to No Child Left Behind). As Nicholas Lemann described in a terrific New Yorker article, in mid-2001 the press was mainly focused on one issue: vouchers. This was understandable; the standard conservative Republican line on federal education policy had been, since at least the Reagan era, mainly about...