A generation ago Charles Sykes wrote a controversial, provocative, but I think 90 percent correct book, ProfScam. I think a better than decent case can be made for a new book, a sequel if you will, called CollegeScam. Professors are not the only ones engaged in using higher education for personal power and glory.

“Is College Too Easy?” is the headline of a superb story by Daniel de Vise on page one of today’s Washington Post. In it, de Vise presents in substantial detail data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that show students study relatively little. Average total time on all academic work amounts to about 27 hours a week, the story says.

Since the typical student is in class at best 32 weeks a year, the total annual hours spent “learning” is on average about 864 (27 x 32), less than one-half the time the student’s parents are spending on their jobs, partly …

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The news last week makes my prediction that student-loan debt would be a political hot potato for the duration of the presidential campaign a certainty: The Senate Republicans picked up enough Democratic votes (52 to 45) to block a vote on student-loan debt. The bill, as most of us now know, would extend interest reductions on Stafford loans. The current extension, which fixes rates at 3.4 percent, is set to expire on July 1, at which point they would double to 6.8 percent. Earlier, the Republican-controlled House had rushed through a bill that would extend the reduced rate, but would pay for it by defunding part of Obama’s health-care plan. That bill passed 215-195. Now the Senate has essentially decided not to act, so there will likely be no bill for Obama either to hold his nose and sign or to veto.

First of all, there’s a reason why neither the House nor the Senate vote fell…

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The New York Times made a huge statistical error in their overwrought article about higher education borrowing on Sunday. They reported that 94 percent of bachelor’s graduates leave college with educational debt. The correct number is around two-thirds. Few people will see the correction tucked into Wednesday’s Times – certainly not nearly the number who saw the lead sentence on the web version “Nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing money …”.

Everybody makes mistakes, but this one is revealing in several ways. First, the “New York Times analysis” cited as the source was incompetently done. They actually calculated the following figure: among students who borrowed while in college, what percentage still owed money when they graduated? Not surprisingly, very few college students pay off their student debt while in college. Sarah Turner, a professor …

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For all the lip service about universities being “market places of ideas” and havens for unpopular thoughts, three stories over the last week or two drive home the reality that there is a clamor by many  in the academic community for either ideological conformity or resistance to “interference” from the Real World that feeds it.

Naomi Riley puts up a blog that said what I believe many people in higher education have long believed but were largely afraid to say: Black-studies programs in the United States are weak academically; moreover,  employers have apparently not clamored for black-studies graduates, and enrollments are stagnant or falling in many institutions. Ms. Riley did not spend a lot of time researching the issue (which, in her defense, is not terribly unusual with blogs), and she could have eased the uproar a good deal by noting that academic weaknesses are not…

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On Thursday of this week, K-12 educators will commemorate the 58th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision recognizing that separate schools for black and white are inherently unequal.  Even after de jure segregation was officially dismantled, K-12 educators acknowledged that de-facto racial, ethnic, and economic segregation of schools is harmful to student outcomes.  Low-income students stuck in high-poverty elementary schools, for example, are two years behind low-income students who have the opportunity to attend more-affluent schools.

At the elementary and secondary level, educators devised a number of strategies to address economic and racial isolation, including programs to allow low-income students to transfer out of high-poverty schools into higher performing middle-class schools, and “magnet” programs to attract middle-class students into higher…

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More nuanced information about the difficult-to-pin-down numbers of student-loan debt appeared in a front-page article in Investor’s Business Daily. Conservatively biased, IBD has long been a reliable source of technical, statistical financial analysis, so I was glad to see the newspaper address the subject of student loans. First, they break down the public/private divide. The article notes that student-loan debt overall has skyrocketed from “about $440-billion in late 2008 to about $1-trillion today.” It then breaks down the numbers: Of that, $500-billion is owned directly by the Education Department, according to Sallie Mae data. Another $350-billion was originated by private lenders with a government guarantee under the now-defunct Federal Family Education Loan Program. Sallie Mae estimates that the DOE will originate $113-billion in student loans this year vs. just $7-billion …

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On Sunday, the Washington Post declared that Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had the “Worst Week in Washington.” News came to light that Warren, a Harvard Law professor, touted her Native American heritage (she is reportedly one-32nd Cherokee) in legal directories from 1986 to 1995, and that Harvard Law School claimed her status added to faculty diversity. Conservatives charged she had gamed the system to use affirmative action to advance her career.

Warren denied the charge—and there is no evidence that she in fact benefited from a racial preference in hiring—but her weak responses only dug the hole deeper, Chris Cillizza of the Post noted. Her case highlights four weaknesses in affirmative-action policies—and also suggests a way out.

First, Warren’s explanation for why she listed herself as a Native American—which denied any…

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After the recently passed House bill that extends the reduced interest rate on Stafford loans for a year—and pays for it by taking money from Obama’s healthcare program—student-loan debt is likely to be in the limelight, I think, for the duration of the presidential campaign. So I want to touch on this topic from as many angles as possible. First, the tragic. My friend Martin Kich, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio, forwarded me a letter from the family of Ryan Bryski, whose brother, Christopher, died after an accident in 2006. The letter details a policy of unimaginable cruelty. While major student lenders such as Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo, and Citibank, routinely forgive the loans of deceased students, Christopher Bryski’s lender, KeyBank was still trying to collect $50,000 of his student debt. His father had been forced to come out of retirement to make the monthly …

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