The official inquiry into the Binghamton University basketball scandal has revealed rafts of damning new information. We already knew that, in its eagerness to make the jump to Division I, the university admitted a bunch of academically unqualified players who eventually brought down the program in wave of academic misconduct and criminality, including assault, thievery, and sale of crack cocaine. Now we learn that assistant coaches helped players plagiarize, illegally gave one cash to pay off a court fine incurred for stealing condoms from Wal-Mart, and prepped players on how to answer questions from the police. Failing grades were changed to passing, players dropped regular courses for "independent study," and some were allowed to transfer in courses with titles like "Bowling I" and "Theories of Softball." The athletics department's stated position on this was, “Why do you care if we...

The New York Times reports (as did the Washington Post last week) that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that's given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds they've received in the past and use them to hire lobbyists and former Congressional staffers to advocate on behalf of receiving additional tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds in the...

There's a pretty good comment thread running underneath my latest Chronicle column, which describes my less-than-auspicious career as an undergraduate. While many of the criticisms are perfectly fair, a few are worth a longer discussion. 

Several commenters referred to the title: "How I Aced College -- And Why I Now Regret It." One thing I didn't know until I started writing columns and magazine articles a few years ago is that authors don't write the titles of their pieces. As a rule, the first time you see them is upon publication. Titling falls to the editorial staff, and it's not easy -- they have to describe the essence of the piece in a small amount of space, in a way that will make people want to read it. Usually, I'm grateful that someone else has been able to sum up my thesis in a smarter, more succinct manner than I could have managed. In this case, "Aced" probably isn't the...

The newly-released Sloan Consortium Report on online higher education finds that the number of college students taking at least one online course increased from 3.9 million in Fall 2007 to 4.6 million in Fall 2008, a 17 percent jump. The overall number of college students grew 1.2 percent during the same time. In 2002, less than 10 percent of students were taking an online class. Today, more than 25 percent do.

The report didn't get a great deal of mainstream media attention, because the media has a terrible bias toward unpredictable short-term change. Coverage of the stock market is a perfect example. On any given day, nobody knows if the market will go up or down. So it's always treated as news, along with various vague and largely-fabricated explanations, e.g. "Investors reacted to uncertainty over XYZ Uncertain Thing today by buying and/or selling stocks and bonds. Back to you in...

What with the AP courses and extracurricular activities and personal essays and tenths-of-point differences in grade point averages that feel like the distance between life and death, American high-school students vying for entrance into elite colleges and universities probably think life is pretty tough. But as is increasingly the case in all walks of life, China is raising the stakes to a whole new level:

Despite what their PE teachers might have told them, for many of those who competed in a Chinese marathon earlier this month, it was not the taking part but the winning that counted. Almost a third of the runners who finished in the top 100 have since been disqualified for cheating in the race in the southern port city of Xiamen. Some of them hired imposters to compete in their place. Some competitors jumped into vehicles part way through the route, Chinese media reported, while...

Remarkably, George Will read the same New Yorker article I discussed in an earlier post and concludes that the University of California financial crisis is the inevitable consequence of too much -- wait for it -- liberalism.

This is very strange. Proposition 13 was a historic victory for conservatism. It helped launch an anti-tax ideological movement that continues to have a great deal of power today. The so-called "starve the beast" strategy of reducing government spending by cutting taxes was a failure at the federal level, because the federal government can print and/or borrow money, and Republicans in the White House and Congress proved to have no appetite for spending cuts.

But in states like California, the long-term erosion of the state's financial foundation has resulted in deep cuts to social services, thousands of unionized teachers being laid off, and the loss of hundreds of...

A long New Yorker article on a subject you care about always feels like a gift. So I read Tad Friend's recent piece on the University of California financial crisis with much interest. But while it's interesting to see the situation from the ground level of organizing, teaching, and protesting, Friend leaves some of the most interesting 30,000-foot questions unanswered.

University of California president Mark Yudof, the object of the protesters' ire, has been in the job for less than two years. The collapse of governance in California began decades ago, when tax revolts led to a spectacularly foolish decision: making public dollars very hard to raise and very easy to spend. Voters can mandate spending via popular referendum, but it takes two-thirds of both houses of the state legislature to raise taxes. Robust economic growth masked the essential stupidity of this for a long time, but ...

In Time magazine, here.

One thing about being interviewed is that you're really at the mercy of the interviewer. A verbatim transcript of someone talking extemporaneously tends to be very different from a written essay, full of fragments and digressions and lots of "um," "er," and so on. Interviews of this type also tend to be edited for length, so you never know if your most cogent thoughts and observations will make the cut or if you'll be left on the hook for some ill-considered aside. With the possible exception of quoting me as saying, "They're like the same thing, basically" -- and don't get me wrong, I'm sure that's exactly what I said -- Gilbert Cruz was generous and fair. Particularly with the part about snowflakes.

Writing for Positive Liberty, libertarian D.A. Ridgely critiques "That Old College Lie," an article I recently wrote for Democracy arguing that the key to holding down college costs in the long run is to increase transparency in the higher education market. Says Ridgely:

I think Carey has a point regarding the data resulting from various recent attempts at objectively measuring academic achievement at the university level, the point being that such data should be available for public consideration. But I mean “should” in the sense that the schools should as an ethical matter release the information, not that government should require its release. And, of course, I disagree completely with Carey’s calls for more government spending and more government regulation of higher education.

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the libertarian perspective. But stuff like this makes me wonder if ...

As Randall Stross described in The New York Times yesterday, Amazon.com has a long and ignoble history of refusing to collect sales taxes on the things it sells. Originally the company argued that it was only obligated to collect taxes in states where it had a physical presence, like Washington. The advantage to Amazon is obvious: If I walk up Connecticut Avenue to Kramerbooks and buy a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire for $25.95, I have to pay 5.75% sales tax, or $1.49. If I order the same book from Amazon from my office computer, I don't. So Amazon gets a significant price advantage over its terrestrial competitors, which is crucial when you're competing to sell exactly the same low-margin product. This makes zero sense from a policy standpoint -- I'm in D.C. in both cases, so in both cases I should owe D.C. sales tax.

As time went on and Amazon became more successful, it...