Free Republic

Michigan State University is now mandating that its students be covered by health care insurance, a requirement being phased in with the current freshman class. The mandate has caught the attention of some in the Michigan House of Representatives. A Feb. 15 hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education has been scheduled to examine the issue. “We're really concerned about this," said House Subcommittee Vice Chair Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant. "This policy is not uncommon with private colleges, but it hasn't been the policy at state universities. A big concern is that MSU would just be the...

Personal assistants with impressive credentials are more available due to the tough job market for college graduates. This is according to Jill Glist, who opened Lambert Services in 2006. “The current economy gives us access to amazingly qualified people who are interested and available to work,” she said. What are their qualifications? Lambent Services employees are an elite group of intelligent, motivated, and personable individuals and top university graduates who help make clients’ lives run more smoothly. How nice. What do these assistants do? They can handle the minutiae of our lives, helping us deal with the most mundane of...

American universities tower high above China when it comes to producing human capital, by far America’s greatest comparative advantage.Consider two major news stories prominent in American discourse recently. First, China is rising. Second, American universities have had much abuse heaped upon them: declining standards, “neoliberal” corruption of academia and worries about universities exacerbating class divides.Both of those stories might be overblown. An American only a few years separated from college life and now a lecturer at China’s top university, I suggest that when it comes to higher education, American institutions are leaving China’s in the dust.No ComparisonThe weaknesses of the...

Financial aid, whether it's a cheap loan, a work-study job at the campus library, or a grant, is supposed to make college more affordable and accessible for students. But what if, by handing money out to undergrads, the government is simply encouraging schools to spend more and jack up tuition? Meet "the Bennett hypothesis," the dismal notion named for Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett, who suggested it in a 1987 New York Times op-ed diplomatically titled "Our Greedy Colleges." Generous student-aid policies had "enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion...

The federal government will no longer forgive student loans in exchange for public service if that service is related to religion, according to a new Education Department rule from the Obama administration. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program announced the change Jan. 31 with little fanfare, while most of Washington was focused on the new ObamaCare rule requiring religious organizations to provide free birth control through health insurance. “Generally, the type or nature of employment with the organization does not matter for PSLF purposes,” reads the new language. “However, if you work for a nonprofit organization, your employment will...

.....At the same time, the president’s foreign aid request includes an entirely new $770 million account in 2013, described as the Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund with the purpose of advancing democratic and economic reforms in the region after the turmoil of the past year. The two initiatives come on top of the budget’s plan for an almost 50 percent, six-year increase in transportation spending, $231 billion of which would be financed not by gas taxes but war savings attributed to Obama pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservatives are sure to challenge this assumption and...

‘Race to the Top� federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees, despite President Obama’s bluster in his State of the Union address. If only it were that simple.The truth is that over the next decade, many universities may bankrupt themselves by clinging to an educational approach that confuses lecturing with learning and protects highly paid, tenured faculties and administrators from a tsunami of technological change that soon will deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs.There’s a word for business models that have high and increasing...

In a speech delivered last Friday at the University of Michigan, President Obama said that the “largest factor” in tuition increases at colleges and universities is state budget cuts in higher education. But overall operating expenses at U-M and most Michigan public universities have risen substantially in recent years, regardless of state funding. In his talk, President Obama focused on preparing students for the 21st century economy and discussed what universities and government could do to meet coming challenges. During the speech, he said, "I was talking to your president (U-M President Mary Sue Coleman), and this is true all...

On January 20, Vanderbilt University announced that it will prohibit religious and political student groups from making leadership decisions based on their religious or political beliefs. University policy now holds that “membership in registered student organizations is open to everyone and that everyone, if desired, has the opportunity to seek leadership positions.”Vanderbilt’s decision follows months of controversy. Last fall, the Christian Legal Society chapter at Vanderbilt Law School was warned that it could lose recognition after the university found that the group’s constitution violated the university’s non-discrimination policy. The constitution required that all group officers must agree with the Christian...

Those opposing the unionization of University of Michigan graduate student research assistants will be left out in the cold. That's the gist of a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling. Attorney General Bill Schuette and the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation had separately requested to be party to a hearing on the potential unionization issue. Without their side of the argument being represented, the hearing in the question will only involve entities that favor the unionization. MCLF had filed an intervention request on behalf of a group of some 370-plus graduate student research assistants who opposed unionization. Now, however, those students will...

We got an interesting question from an academic adviser at a Texas university: could we tell what the top 1 percent of earners majored in? The writer, sly dog, was probably trying to make a point, because he wrote from a biology department, and it turns out that biology majors make up nearly 7 percent of college graduates who live in households in the top 1 percent. According to the Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey, the majors that give you the best chance of reaching the 1 percent are pre-med, economics, biochemistry, zoology and, yes, biology, in that order....

Since his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama has been campaigning in touring five battleground states. His final stop on that tour comes today. At a rally at the University of Michigan, the president plans to unveil a plan to increase federal “investment� in the Perkins loan program — from $1 billion to $8 billion — and to revamp the formula for distributing the money. The Washington Post has a few more details: Under the plan, colleges would be rewarded based on their success in offering relatively lower tuition prices, providing value and serving low-income students, the White...

EXCERPT ‘‘We are putting colleges on notice,’’ Obama said. ‘‘You can’t assume that you'll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.’’

In an article for today's FrontPage Magazine titled "Schools of Education: The Academic Slums," Walter Williams was right on the money.  Speaking about schools of education, he said, "Education professors drum into students that they should not 'drill and kill' or be the 'sage on the stage' but instead be the 'guide on the side' who 'facilitates student discovery.' This kind of harebrained thinking, coupled with multicultural nonsense, explains today's education. During his teacher education, Sand says, 'teachers-to-be were forced to learn about this ethnic group, that impoverished group, this sexually anomalous group, that under-represented group, etc. -- all under...

I haven’t had many lectures where terms like necrophilia or bestiality came up. That’s why, among all the classes I’ve taken over the past four years, the sociology course I’m taking this semester, Sexuality and the Law, stand outs. It wasn’t until the second class that the professor really delved into the ‘makes you feel uncomfortable and avoid eye contact with the other students’ material. Penis rings, polygamy, chastity belts, the Kama Sutra, and the lack of a female counterpart to Viagra were all discussed, in no particular order of uncomfortableness. Next, the professor gave a brief overview of popular...

Last month, the Obama administration issued important guidance to colleges and universities on how to increase racial diversity on campuses, explaining ways to navigate the narrow legal channel charted by the Supreme Court. The benefits of diversity, the Department of Education said, contribute to “the educational, economic and civic life of this nation.” The administration’s support for such efforts stands in stark contrast to the policy of the George W. Bush administration to discourage them. That difference has played out between the political parties for decades, as it will in this presidential election. Race-conscious programs in education — affirmative action...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is set to begin issuing free school identification cards to comply with a new state voter ID law. The university says students can pick up an ID Monday on campus. It pledged last year to offer the cards since the law has a two-year expiration for school IDs that make older IDs invalid. Colleges and universities across the state have debated how to comply with the law, which passed last year. Several UW campuses are taking a similar approach to Madison's policy. The university also launched a website Friday designed to help students on any voting...

Students drowning in their own student loan debt has caused massive amounts of public outcry because graduates have no way to pay off the cost of their education. Even though sometimes it is the student’s fault for pursuing and graduating with a worthless degree, the problem of the student debt cannot be ignored. The true source of the problem is government intervention in (what should be) a free market education system. As it stands right now, the Federal government is guaranteeing student loans so it looks like Old Uncle Sam is trying to invest in American students and the future...

Dr. Edward C. Smith, respected African-American Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C., told the audience in Atlanta, Georgia during a 1995 Robert E. Lee birthday event, ‘Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee were individuals worthy of emulation because they understood history.’

Are you going back to school in hopes of graduating to more job opportunities? You might want to avoid these degrees. If you're considering going back to school in hopes that you'll graduate to more opportunities, there are certain degrees that you might want to avoid. Consider the National Association of Colleges and Employers' (NACE) 2012 Job Outlook study, which surveyed almost 1,000 employers on their future hiring plans. Many areas of study, such as fashion design and the performing arts, didn't even make the list. On the other hand, majors like business had 83 percent of the surveyed employers...

In November 2011, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS reported $86 million in unused vacation pay, sick time, and other severance had been paid to departing state workers and MnSCU employees in the past three years. And the total is growing by the day. Now, the University of Minnesota has released its separate payroll records, showing it paid departing employees $30 million during the same time period. That brings the total to at least $116 million for all departing state workers in the past three years.

[Soros is crusading] to re-shape the entire discipline of economics, which he believes suffers from “market fundamentalism.” As Neil Maghami reports, Soros has promised to funnel $5 million a year for ten years through Central European University, a Budapest school he founded in 1991 and to which he’s donated hundreds of millions. Soros launched his economics project in 2010 at King’s College, Cambridge, where 200 academics were exhorted for three days “to develop new paradigms that explain market imbalances and uncertainties and that reject ‘static’ concepts such as rational expectations and market equilibrium.” (Video here.) Now grants have begun to...

DURHAM — Black students at Duke University are angry over a university research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones. “The implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating,” wrote the officers of Duke’s Black Student Alliance in an email sent to the state NAACP. The letter from Nana Asante, president of the alliance, challenged the faculty members involved in the research...

In a letter to President Barack Obama, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman blamed the rising costs at state colleges on “declining state support.” “Higher education is a public good currently lacking public support,” Coleman wrote in her Dec. 16 letter. “There is no stronger trigger for rising costs at public universities and colleges than declining state support. The University of Michigan and our state’s 14 other public institutions have been ground zero for funding cuts.” The state is scheduled to give the University of Michigan and its two satellite campuses about $54 million less in 2011-2012 than the...

150,000 women die each year from anorexia nervosa. The jarring statistic is essential to The Beauty Myth, an international best-seller written by feminist spokeswoman Naomi Wolf. Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, linked the figure to a newsletter citing an estimated 150,000 sufferers (not fatalities) of anorexia.[1] Wolf assured Hoff Sommers that her next book would correct the mistake, but the datum and its implications had already been smuggled into college textbooks and individual minds worldwide. Did Naomi Wolf, a graduate of Yale University and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, really believe it likely that three...

[ed note: Found! In a dumpster behind Hamburg Inn, the first draft of University of Iowa professor Stephen G. Bloom's anthropology dissertation for Atlantic magazine explaining the bizarre cultural mores of the primative Aborigines who pay his salary.] IOWA CITY -- On January 3, Iowans will trudge through snow, sleet, sludge, mud, ice, corn, beans, pig feces, flaming lakes of ethanol, gale-force blizzards -- whatever it takes -- to join their neighbors that evening in 1,784 living rooms, barns, community halls, recreation barns, silos, wigwams, and public-school Corn God sacrifice altars in a kind of Norman Rockwell-meets-HR Geiger old timey...

Say it with me, readers: College is worth it.For all the bellyaching about wasted degrees and the many indebted grads stuck on their parents’ couches, recent college graduates are still doing a lot better than their less-educated counterparts. Unemployment for new graduates is around 8.9 percent; the rate for workers with only a high school diploma is nearly three times as high, at 22.9 percent.That’s according to a new report [PDF] from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. The report also had some fascinating statistics on earnings and jobless rates by college major, something we’ve written about before.The...

Call it low-brow or populist if you wish, but Rick Santorum took aim at Barack Obama this weekend in the arena of education and reminded the president of one aspect of social development which often gets lost in the shuffle. While an admirable goal and extremely important under the right circumstances, not every high school student will wind up going to college. And for those who don’t, not all of them are “losers� in any way shape or form. Roll 212. Former Sen. Rick Santorum expanded his populist message into education Saturday, accusing President Barack Obama and others of “snobbery”...

Most Americans still believe any good student can find a way to get into college, and if a student is accepted at a college but can't afford it, a sizable number of adults think the government should pay for it. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults finds that 60% of adults believe that just about any good student who wants to attend college can find a way to do so in America today. That’s up from 54% in early May 2009. Twenty-nine percent (29%) don’t believe this to be true, while 11% are not sure. (To...

Economics Professor Jack Chambless of Valencia College in Florida had his sophomore students write a short essay on what the American dream means to them and what, specifically, they wanted the federal government to do to help them achieve that dream. The results demonstrate the sheer magnitude of the idiocy of a public education system dead set on indoctrination rather than education: I took the essays from three classes – about 180 students… About 10% of the students said they wanted the government to leave them alone and not tax them too much and let them regulate their own lives....

College kids may choose to spend their campus days studying the glories of Plato, Shakespeare and Le Corbusier. But, as a new study points out, there may be a steep price to pay. Recent college graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the arts, humanities and architecture experienced significantly higher rates of joblessness, according to a study being released Wednesday by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Among recent college graduates, those with the highest rates of unemployment had undergraduate degrees in architecture (13.9 percent), the arts (11.1 percent) and the humanities (9.4 percent), according to the study. The recent...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Columbia University will offer a new course for upperclassmen and grad students next semester. An Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field and will be taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, a veteran of the Occupy movement. The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom. The course will be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” it will be run by the anthropology department. Appel is...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here .

Have the youth given up on Obama? By Brad Chase - Special to CNN In 2008, the youth vote helped sweep Barack Obama into office.  Americans 18-29 spread the word on social media, energized fundraising and went to the polls. In 2012, the youth vote is moving on and throwing those omnipresent “Hope” bumper stickers and t-shirts in garbage bins.   Not because of apathy.  Not because another candidate generates more enthusiasm.  Not because of his character.  Not because they think voting is pointless.  The 18-29 vote is up for grabs in 2012 because youth can’t afford cars to put...

Michael Lewis has a column in Bloomberg today called Princeton Brews Trouble For Us 1 Percenters. The satirical article refers to the following video posted earlier this month by Occupy Princeton.In this brilliant prank, around 20 students masquerading as job applicants disrupted a JP Morgan recruiting session. One student in a suit stood up and shouted "Mic Check" and the other Occupiers repeated after him. Then he led the Occupiers in a recitation of this script:"Princeton's motto is: In the nation's service and service of all nationsJP Morgan-Chase, your actions violate our mottoYour predatory lending practices helped crash our economyWe've...

Obama “won’t release his college transcripts” campaign criticizes Mitt Romney...The chutzpah is strong in this one. Posted by Moe Lane Thursday, December 22nd at 11:32PM EST …for declining to release his tax returns: A spokesman for President Obama‘s re-election campaign blasted Mr. Romney and questioned whether he had something to hide in his finances. “Why does Governor Romney feel like he can play by a different set of rules?” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign. “What is it that he doesn’t want the American people to see?…”

As tuition costs skyrocket and graduates walk away saddled with ever-rising amounts of debt, American colleges now face a choice: Remain a part of the problem, or begin contributing to a solution. The average cost to attend a public university shot up 8.3 percent this year, while private institutions raised their prices 4.3 percent. Over the past decade, tuition rates have risen 72 percent, and universities are now taking more heat than ever from government officials, education specialists and middle-class families, all of whom think the higher-education sector hasn’t done enough to reverse the trend. If the current trajectory continues,...

MERCED, Calif. — Heather Alarab, a junior at the University of California, Merced, and Jill Foster, a freshman, know that their sudden popularity has little to do with their sparkling personalities, intelligence or athletic prowess. “Hey, what are you doing?” throngs of friends perpetually text. “Hot tub today?” While students at other colleges cram into shoebox-size dorm rooms, Ms. Alarab, a management major, and Ms. Foster, who is studying applied math, come home from midterms to chill out under the stars in a curvaceous swimming pool and an adjoining Jacuzzi behind the rapidly depreciating McMansion that they have rented for...

I kind of suspect some of you are going to like this. It's an offshoot from the "Advice Animals" web trend where someone puts a ridiculous message over the overused picture of some critter. This time, it's all about a College Liberal, with quotes like "Afraid of hormones in milk - takes acid from strangers" and "Fills schedule with women studies and english courses - is upset at lack of women in science and math courses". Quite amusing, in my opinion better than the average web meme.

For the 31st consecutive year, The University of Alabama’s Office of Media Relations offers predictions from faculty experts for the coming year. While these “educated guesses” don’t always come true, our track record over the years has been good. So, what’s ahead for 2012? Look for President Barack Obama to face, and defeat, a surprise Republican nominee, online doomsday groups to spike, the Occupy Movement to re-emerge, fuel prices to remain unstable and much more. Obama to Battle, Beat Late-Entry Republican President Obama is likely to win re-election in 2012, but his Republican opponent will not be one of the...

“At Hamline, students collaborate with professors invested in their success. They are challenged in and out of the classroom to create and apply knowledge in local and global contexts, while cultivating an ethic of civic responsibility, social justice, and inclusive leadership and service.” – From the Hamline University website Hamline University is not a liberal arts college as it claims to be. It is an illiberal arts college that has just disgraced itself in the national court of public opinion. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer was hired to teach at the school but then abruptly canned by those who...

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT, in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, narrowly upheld the use of racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School, it emphasized that such preferences were barely tolerable under the Constitution. They could be used only as a last resort, the court ruled, they must not unduly harm non-minorities, and public universities had to start finding ways to phase them out. "We are mindful … that '[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,'" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for a 5-4 majority....

After it was revealed yesterday that an increasing number of women are using the sex industry to pay their way through university, one woman has told her story of stripping while studying. Emma Green, of Glamorgan, Wales, turned to stripping on a webcam for men and earned £200-a-week to fund her studies. The 25-year-old, who studied multi-media design at Glamorgan University before spending another year at a beauty therapy college in 2009, says a normal part-time job was out of the question because of her intense course workload.

Hundreds of students at the University of Michigan who object to being forced into a union were denied their right to be heard in court. The Michigan Employment Relations Commission by a 2-1 vote yesterday assigned the controversial unionization issue involving graduate student research assistants at U-M to an administrative law judge while at the same time rejecting a motion filed by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation on behalf of the 370-member “Students Against GRSA Unionization.” The administrative law judge will conduct a hearing to determine if the Graduate Employees Organization, a government union affiliated with the American Federation of...

Dear Massachusetts Moms and Dads: When your kids come home from college this Christmas season and you’re gathered around the tree in the warm glow of an open fire, take a moment to lean over, put your arm around them and ask: “What the hell are you thinking!?” It’s called the “Higher Ed Bubble,” and it’s about to burst. For years the costs of college have been rising much faster than the rate of inflation while the vast increase in the number of degrees — particularly low-brain-wattage bachelor of arts degrees — has lowered their marketplace value. As a result,...

College Republicans at Iowa State University encouraged students to send gifts to American men and women in uniform serving overseas. Bad idea, says one faculty member. Do I really need to say anything about these absurd comments from Thomas Walker at Iowa State University, where he is a lecturer “in the intensive English and orientation program”? I read in Tuesday’s Iowa State Daily that the College Republicans have begun collecting sundries for U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Doesn’t the U.S. Army victual its soldiers? Don’t their families send them yuletide goodies? Aren’t GIs paid enough to buy...

In the fall of 1993, 25-year-old Maury Kennedy enrolled in a new course being offered at Kennesaw State University, located 20 miles north of Atlanta. “Renewing American Civilization” was its title, and its instructor was Newt Gingrich. “Being new to Atlanta, I wanted to make friends,” Kennedy remembers, and the ten-week course was a practical option. On Saturdays, he and hundreds of other students would gather in a large auditorium to hear the congressman lecture for two hours. Although Gingrich was a notorious firebrand, “nobody dreamed he would become Speaker.” But Kennesaw was a public school, and Gingrich’s critics griped...

Dear African American Center: Season’s greetings! I wanted to write to you today to share a heartwarming story that will help kick off your annual celebration of Kwanza. It involves a young woman of color who recently finished one of my classes in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. She told me that she thoroughly enjoyed the course and was glad she did not drop it as she was advised to do. Sadly, the people who advised her to drop the class were supporters of the campus African American Center. You are doing a fine job of instilling the values...

Alert reader Dan Shea drew Via Meadia‘s attention to an unusually depressing article in the Boston Globe. It is one of those fluffy and airheaded “lifestyle� pieces, the print equivalent of empty calorie junk food and like many such articles it provides a horrifying glimpse into the vacuous nature of the modern American mind. In this particular case, the reporter, who hopefully is affecting rather than spontaneously producing prose redolent of relentless stupidity, shares her view of 10 “awesome� classes at Boston area colleges that she thinks her readers would like to take.A couple of them, we hasten to...

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a big tent of concerns and deliberately so. Keeping the flaps open draws in as many people in as possible, even if it does prevent the movement from issuing a list of demands. But a visit to its Manhattan base in Zuccotti Park quickly reveals that a binding hardship for many of the younger protesters is their student debt. It’s an impression strengthened by “ We are the 99 Percent”, a slogan invented by the movement, and the address of a website that’s an online home for hundreds of people’s stories. Debt taken on...