It's often hard to predict the future. But not always. For example, I'm certain that in 2050, barring global catastrophe, there will be a place called "the University of California, Berkeley" where exceptionally bright student will come to live and study. Eminent scholars will be there too, working with one another and teaching students face-to-face. People will drink too much on weekends, go to football games, say things they'll look back on with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, and complain about parking.

I'm just as certain that in 2050 the University of California will be granting bachelor's degrees to students who have never set foot in the state of California in their entire lives. The only question is how many such students, and when UC gets there. Christopher Edley, dean of the Berkeley law school, thinks it should be more rather than less and sooner rather than later. That...

I never thought becoming an education policy analyst would lead to crazy people accusing me of treason. But that's what happened last week, as a result of the controversy over "Journolist."

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about—well, let me offer my congratulations. You have a good filter for the absurd. The controversy is a kind of unholy combination of inside-the-Beltway myopia and journalistic solipsism. In short: a few years back some left-of-center bloggers, journalists, pundits, college professors, and think-tank wonks started a private, off-the-record email listserv called Journolist.

Over time, the group grew to about 400 people. I was one of them. It was basically a place to shoot the breeze about things such people find interesting—politics, policy, sports, music, themselves. You'd probably recognize a few of the participants like Paul Krugman, Katha Pollitt,...

A couple of weeks ago the mailman dropped a thin envelope with a St. Paul, Minnesota return address through the slot in my front door. It contained a check from my wife's student lender, Northstar T.H.E. Loans, in the amount of $27.30. In that my extensive personal experience with student-loan companies has very consistently been one in which the checks flow in the opposite direction, this made me curious. The check was accompanied by nothing in the way of explanation, other than a single line directing me to a website, www.northstarloansettlement.com.

It turns out that Northstar was returning money it had stolen from us a couple of years ago. When we were choosing a lender all the way back in 2001, Northstar made a big deal out of it's "Bonus Program" whereby we would pay a lower interest rate if we made our monthly loan payments on time. This seemed like a good deal, so we picked...

It was good timing, having Senate hearings on Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court begin on the same day as the Court's 5-4 ruling that the University of California's Hastings College of Law acted reasonably in refusing to recognize a Christian group that denies membership to homosexual students. The Senate hearings are premised on the idea that Court nominees should be chosen and interrogated based entirely on their "judicial philosophy" and ideas about the law. So nominees dutifully say things about modesty and justices as umpires and so forth, even as we all understand that the Hastings decision had nothing to with the law and everything to do with the justices' personal convictions about homosexuality.

Some people believe that sexual orientation is a fundamental element of personhood. From there, it logically follows that a college's obligations to nondiscrimination...

Earlier this month I wrote some blog posts and a column focused, in part, on the European "Tuning" process and the possible virtues of its use in the United States. Reasonably enough, some people think  Tuning sounds like one more bureaucratic assessment mandate that will waste everyone's time, think tank people may be enthusiastic about this kind of thing but they don't know what it's like to be in the trenches with actual students, and so on and so forth. So I held off writing about tuning until I had a chance to talk to actual American college professors who have worked through the process themselves and could explain to me why it's a good idea for faculty to sit down together and work through what students in a given field ought to learn, based on the consensus of the discipline and the job market.

Surprisingly, their testimony didn't seem to hold much water. So I'm going to try...

Last month, for-profit Kaplan University and the California Community College Chancellor's Office announced a mutual course articulation/transfer arrangement whereby CCC students who transferred to Kaplan would be able to bring their credits with them and get a 10-percent price discount on Kaplan courses, while students who stayed enrolled at a CCC while taking Kaplan courses would get a 42-percent price discount and be able to count those Kaplan credits toward their CCC degree. The arrangement was spurred by the fact that incompetent politicians and feckless voters in California have run their state into utter financial ruin and are thus unable/unwilling to provide space in public colleges and universities to tens of thousands of students despite the fact that economic down times are precisely when such access is needed the most.

Jane Patton, President of the Academic Senate for...

Citing improper benefits given to former star running back Reggie Bush, the NCAA this week announced that the harshest sanctions in a generation would be levied against the USC football program, including loss of scholarships, a two-year ban on post-season play, and a requirement that the entire population of North America be subjected to a "Men in Black"-style mind-wipe that will erase all memories of the Trojans' national championship-winning victory over Oklahoma in the 2005 Orange Bowl. Bush denies the allegations of being paid to play football for USC prior to being paid to play football for the NFL. In a press release, the NCAA noted that "the violations in this case strike at the heart of the NCAA amateurism principal, which states that intercollegiate athletics should be motivated primarily by education and its benefits."

In other, wholly unrelated news, the University of...

Donald H. Pfister, Dean of Harvard Summer School, has sent a letter in response to my recent column and follow-up blog post. It is reprinted in full below.

Dean Pfister is right to note that Harvard Summer School has been operating successfully for a long time, since 1871. This is important context that I should have provided to readers.

That said, nothing in his letter contradicts anything I wrote. Harvard Summer School is an open admissions program taught by a combination of Harvard professors and people who are not Harvard professors. It markets itself as an opportunity to pay thousands of dollars to live in Natalie Portman's old dorm, which is kind of creepy. And Harvard College does not accept credits earned from Harvard Summer School's online courses.

Dean Pfister explains this last fact as simply a function of general university policy. "No online credit from any institution...

Matt Yglesias, the other guy who's interested in the  Bologna process, linked to my column about the potential virtues of deciding what college students in a given course of study should learn and then finding out if they actually learned those things. Because Matt has a bazillion more readers than I do, his post generated various responses, mostly critical, along these lines:

Matt, ever heard of “assessment of learning outcomes” in higher education? Almost all institutions of higher ed have to do a boatload of assessment already in order to stay accredited, as part of the ‘accountability’ movement. So this doesn’t sound terribly new to me, except for the attempt to create cross-institution metrics. Most academics, with a lot of justification, view assessment as a waste of time—a bunch of stupid hoops to jump though, largely devised by dim educrats, that feeds an extra layer of...

I've gotten a few e-mails today complaining about the use of the word "fake" in my latest Chronicle column:

Harvard has the opposite of a brand deficit. It has a brand surplus. The name is so strong that Harvard can run a side business selling fake Harvard credits and nobody bats an eye.

Here I'm referring to Harvard Summer School, an open admissions operation that Harvard runs over the summer where people can pay thousands of dollars to live in dorms once occupied by actual Harvard students. (The Web site says, for real, "JFK slept here … And so did Henry David Thoreau, Natalie Portman, and Al Gore." This seems like kind of a dated and uncreative list.) I assume it's a reasonably lucrative program since the university advertises in venues like The New York Times Education Life section. Students can also take some Harvard Summer School courses online. If you're wondering if these...