One of the scandals about American higher education is its complicity in creating the mediocrity in our K-12 schools. American primary and secondary education students do so-so at best in standardized international testings. They have a lot of self esteem but know relatively little. Large numbers are functionally illiterate or semi-literate after a dozen or more years in school.

There are two major factors in higher education’s role in this mediocrity. First, colleges train the teachers, and there is nearly universal feeling within many universities that the colleges of education are disasters—teaching mush, applying low standards, with research that is mostly embarrassingly bad in quality and sometimes in quantity. The great American universities (say the top 25 schools as measured by magazine rankings of US News & World Report or Forbes) generally do not even have an undergraduate…

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The House of Representatives is going to pass today a bill (H.R. 2117) that would forbid two regulatory initiatives of the Obama administration. The first relates to the definition of a student credit-hour, while the second deals with the requirement that all online programs must get authorization in each of the 50 states to operate. The only interesting thing about today’s vote is how many Democrats will vote with the GOP. The number could be very substantial, since virtually the entire higher-education establishment, led by the American Council of Education, wants the bill passed. The Obama administration is “strongly opposed” to the measure, but has not explicitly said it would veto it if it were the pass the U.S. Senate.

This is a classic case of regulatory overreach. The definition of a student credit hour has long been an elusive matter, with most persons agreeing that “clock…

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I am writing this missive from the campus of Urbana University, a liberal-arts college founded in 1850 that serves an audience of generally first-generation students mostly from nearby its Urbana, Ohio campus. A goodly proportion of those enrolled (41 percent of first-year students) are on Pell Grants. I find the students vastly different than those from the last couple of campuses I visited (Princeton and Dartmouth): probably not as knowledgeable, certainly not as polished, but arguably every bit as much inquisitive.  While the Ivy League may be educating the best and the brightest, I suspect that at the margin, a dollar spent at Urbana has a far greater return to society than an additional dollar spent at Princeton. Princeton’s per-student endowment is north of $1.5-million; Urbana’s is less than $3,000. Because of this Princeton will be alive and well 50 or even 100 years from no…

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Joe Biden admitted at a talk at Florida State University the other day that, yes, federal student-financial-assistance programs probably did contribute to rising college costs. That was newsworthy, and I suspect a statement that was not vetted by the White House (not the first Biden rhetorical faux pas from the Administration’s perspective.)

The Biden statement flies in the face of the generally perceived wisdom among supporters of the federal student-loan and grant programs, namely that these programs really have little impact on college costs. The Biden admission, however, implicitly agrees with those who argue the gains from these programs to college students are significantly dissipated by the fee-raising behavior of the schools enrolling the affected students.

Biden, in effect was embracing an idea first vocally proclaimed by Bill Bennett, then Secretary of Education, in 1987…

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One of the major rationales for public subsidies of higher education is that colleges are supposed to make students more virtuous–better persons. We are told a college education strengthens awareness of the difference between right and wrong, enhances the impulse to help one’s fellow citizens, and reinforces a respect for the rule of law and the negative consequences of corruption. Some cite statistics showing lower crime rates amongst college graduates as evidence of the effectiveness of colleges as purveyors of virtuous behavior. Early in my odyssey in higher education, say around 1960, these civic virtues were reinforced at liberal-arts colleges by mandatory attendance by students at chapel, even at nonreligiously affiliated institutions. Still earlier, the instilling of civic virtues was the ostensible major purpose of higher education.

Yet today, not only is virtue downplayed,…

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Whatever else one might say about President Obama, he has good political instincts, so the heavy emphasis he is placing lately on college costs suggests this issue is breaking through the minimum threshold level of interest to make it a topic in the coming presidential/congressional campaigns. His suggestion that colleges should lose federal aid if they raise tuition too much will probably resonate well with many of all political persuasions; a former top GOP member on the House Education Committee, Buck McKeon once proposed something very similar.

I found myself in a little mini-debate with University of California President Mark Yudof about this last Friday on the PBS “NewsHour.” President Yudof, whom I greatly respect, made the usual argument about falling state appropriations being a major cause of rising college costs. I conceded that point, but argued that College Board data…

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The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith’s StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments. A little economics explains why this is so.

In the first week of beginning economics courses, professors usually make this fundamental point: If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes. Resources (dollars) are scarce, and individuals want to make the best use of them. They “maximize their utility” by shifting away from high-priced good or service A to lower-priced good B.

With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes–the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at…

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Below is an abstract of a speech summarizing my thoughts on some of the shortcomings of American higher education today, although let me note that in the speech (which I gave at St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota), I also talk of the strengths of our system of colleges and universities:

Let me enumerate in a very sketchy way what I believe are 12 “inconvenient truths about American higher education,” which will be forming the basis of longer writings over the course of the year, some of which probably will be mentioned in this space. While not all of these truths are self-evident, I think they all have enough basis in fact to suggest cumulatively American universities have a lot of problems.

Inconvenient Truth #1: College Costs Are Rising Both for Students and Society

We all know that tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, are rising a lot over time, even after allowing for…

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When one thinks of geographic concentrations of greatness in American higher education, one probably starts with Massachusetts, which is probably the home to more top-flight elite private schools per square mile than any other state. After all, in a relatively small area are located the likes of such great universities as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Brandeis, etc., as well as some extraordinarily highly regarded liberal-arts colleges, including top ranked Williams and Amherst.

Thinking of public universities, people look to California with its world-class University of California, as well as its large network of community colleges and other state universities. Rivaling California  qualitatively is Virginia, whose top state schools, such as the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, are amongst the nation’s best by almost any reckoning.

But I think …

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Paraphrasing Dickens, “These are the best of schools, the worst of schools.” Higher education in America is to be both rightly praised and damned.  It has both saints and sinners, angels and demons. If forced to give it a grade, using the more rigorous grading standards of the Golden Era (the 1950s and 1960s), I would give it a “C+.”if I were in a good mood, a “C” if I were in a bad one. Using today’s grading standards, it would do better, maybe a “B-.” But it is certainly not the “A+” sector of the economy that university presidents would lead you to believe.

On a positive note, in some ways the claim that America “has the best universities in the world” is true, as international rankings agree. We seem to be able to do cutting-edge research very well in American universities, albeit at a high price. The fact that we are a significant net importer of students, despite inane …

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