Free Republic

By the time Ken Ilgunas was wrapping up his last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Buffalo in 2005, he had no idea what kind of debt hole he'd dug himself into. He had majored in the least marketable fields of study possible –– English and History –– and had zero job prospects after getting turned down for no fewer than 25 paid internships. "That was a wake-up call," he told Business Insider. "I had this huge $32,000 student debt and at the time I was pushing carts at Home Depot, making $8 an hour. I was just...

American colleges and universities are so flushed with cash that among the top ten schools in terms of the ratio between their endowment money and enrolled students are three schools most of us have never heard of. Colleges are businesses and will grab money from wherever they can. For decades they have worked hand in hand with Congress, (mostly Democrats) to raise tuition and fees knowing student loan money would keep coming from the US Treasury. College presidents have become experts in whining about not having enough money no matter how much they have. They NEVER lower tuitions and fees...

In recent columns, I've mentioned a disturbing trend involving the lack of due process in the adjudication of campus rape cases. The fact of the matter is that rape cases are rarely handled properly on university campuses. They are usually either a) taken too seriously or, b) not taken seriously enough. That is unsurprising, given that rape is both the most over reported and under reported crime in America. To say that rape is the most over reported crime in American is to say that there are more false allegations of rape than of other serious crimes like robbery, burglary,...

An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4 to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts...

Jim Crow may be dead in most of America — but not at Columbia University. Almost 50 years after the Civil Rights Act ended legal discrimination, the bastion of liberalism is finally trying to change one of its scholarships, which is restricted to “whites only.” The Ivy League school’s Lydia C. Roberts Graduate Fellowship stipulates that the funds be given only to “a person of the Caucasian race.”

If you're like me, your college alumni association floods your inbox with email invitations to contribute, often adding invites to football games and lectures by famous alums or popular professors. Except for the moment when an appeal made directly by an administrator turned out to be a multi-page swoon over Obama, most of these imprecations are politically content-free and were designed to play on my nostalgic memories of a college as it once was, not as it is today. Both my husband and I are very grateful to our university. Without scholarships neither of us would have had an opportunity...

Pittsburgh high schooler Suzy Weiss has a 4.5 GPA, an SAT score of 2120 (out of a maximum 2400), and a slew of rejections from Ivy League colleges. But unlike most unsuccessful applicants, Weiss didn’t accept her rejection meekly. Instead, she penned a sarcastic open letter to those who spurned her — and got it published in the Wall Street Journal. Weiss’s letter lampoons the in-vogue collegiate-admissions practice euphemistically known as “holistic” review of applications. Holistic review “frees” admissions officers from the old-fashioned practice of relying heavily on objective measures of academic success (such as grades and standardized-test scores) to...

The hypocrisy of American academia centers on a craving for donated, capitalist dollars but with no caveats. The miserable state of university and college intellectual achievements runs parallel with the stream of leftist ideology which began back in the 60s, interestingly enough the years when the Bill Ayers, Bernardine Weatherman group began its reign of in-country terror. When philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein got the drift of how Bowdoin College President Barry Mills felt about the evils of conservatism, the wealthy realist took action. ”Diversity of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility and for our educational...

In Memoriam: William Van Cleave, 77 by Pamela J. Johnson The former professor of international relations in USC Dornsife is remembered as a Cold War expert with a warm heart. William Van Cleave, former senior adviser to President Ronald Reagan, the United States Department of Defense, Department of State, and former professor of international relations in USC Dornsife, has died. He was 77. Van Cleave died of natural causes at his Idyllwild, Calif., home on March 15. Professor of international relations and director of the Strategic Studies Program in USC Dornsife from 1967 to 1987, Van Cleave had vast...

Sex Week and Spring Break are two phenomena happening each year on America’s college campuses for which struggling parents pay hard earned tuition dollars as alums glorify abject debauchery parading as the latest form of academia’s political correctness. The Sex Week displays at six major universities including Yale and my alma mater, the University of Illinois, held this past February in Champaign, leave me utterly speechless. When an undergrad degree is now criticized as being little more than an eighth grade diploma, why on earth would we support such decadence, decay, and destruction of the coming generations which...

Graham Greene’s observation has lost none of its salience in 50 years: innocence remains “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The latest illustration comes from Wisconsin, where the state’s Department of Public Instruction website devotes a page to “Power and Privilege.” Caucasians who volunteer in the state’s AmeriCorps VISTA antipoverty programs are instructed to “set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege works”; “put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege”; and, in order to underline white guilt, “find a...

Wayne State University officials say the state's right-to-work law helped the university get a better deal from its faculty union. However, university officials don't specify what they actually got in return. Last month, WSU reached an agreement with the union on an unprecedented eight-year contract. The deal was struck as the clock was ticking toward the state's right-to-work law going into effect. At stake for the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers was the ability to keep collecting dues and fees from all members through 2021. The state's right-to-work law goes into effect March 28 and gives union...

Dan Meyer, writing (Warning: link contains offensive images) for Boston’s homosexual publication the Edge, reports that the homosexual community is making gains on Catholic college campuses. As examples, he cites changes to the student handbook, providing protection for people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, at San Antonio’s Our Lady of the Lake University, as well as examples from Boston College, The Catholic University of America, and Fordham University. An increasing number of Catholic colleges and universities have seen the addition of student-run homosexual advocacy and support groups and resource centers. “The Jesuits, who have been historically regarded as...

Conservatives should welcome the decline of academia as we know it. I, for one, will celebrate its death by engaging in the same activity that characterized my four years at what some call its pinnacle– drinking a lot of Coors Light. There is still nostalgia among conservatives, especially older ones who have forgotten what college is really like, for the idea of higher education as a rigorous venue for intellectual growth, an environment of exciting and vibrant ideas shared by wise, caring educators dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Today, it is nothing of the sort. For the vast majority...

We’ve heard a lot about the “higher education bubble” recently, and for good reason: the higher education establishment is on a path of gaseous unsustainability. College fees have been rising at a rate far above the cost-of-living for decades — currently, all-in fees at many elite institutions top $60,000. Think about that the next time you look at your paycheck and contemplate paying for little Johnny’s tuition a few years hence.But the bubble is not only fiscal. It is also intellectual, social, and moral. As rich and prestigious and powerful as American universities are, they have, in aggregate, lost...

Remember when the mainstream media mocked a politician who had to attend five colleges to graduate, whose academic record was less than outstanding, and whose subsequent success was proof of nothing? Remember how that was supposed to be a threat to national security, the economy, and so much else? That was so 2008, so Sarah Palin. It turns out that former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who is now awaiting confirmation as Secretary of Defense, attended five colleges and was a "D" student. He volunteered to serve in Vietnam,

With a year left on its contract, the Western Michigan University's professors' union is trying to get a 9-year extension done by the March deadline that would give union members the right to not pay dues or fees as a condition of employment at the school. That would lock everyone represented by that union into paying dues or fees until 2023. Michigan Capitol Confidential obtained a draft of the proposal of the plan, which was verified by union members. It was drafted Jan. 23. The agreement would be a collective bargaining agreement known as a “union security agreement” (USA) that...

With a surplus of middle-tier state universities offering four-year degrees whose value is coming under increasing scrutiny by students and families, Michigan is ripe for a revolution described by an article in the current American Interest online, “The End of the University as We Know It” by Nathan Harden. If it hasn't already, this broad overview of a higher education system on the cusp of a transformation brought about by online learning should be sending chills up the spines of high-paid university presidents and their legions of administrators. "The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a...

Four public colleges and universities: Florida’s Palm Beach State College, Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County, Ohio’s Youngstown State University, and New Jersey’s Kean University, are all planning to move adjunct and “contingent” faculty members to part-time status in order to avoid an Obamacare provision requiring businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for at least 95 percent of their workers. **SNIP** Teachers’ associations like AAUP and AFT are bracing for the shift. Next week, AFT will host a webinar for its members addressing “the implications of the Affordable Care Act for contingent faculty.” In the...

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished, and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. Mail or the Internet. Fretting over deadlines morphs into waiting, and yearning, wishing and praying for coveted letters of acceptance. This is the annual crisis in thousands of homes with ambitious high school seniors -- the high school seniors and their parents who still believe that college is the route to the American Dream. But wait. While they play the conventional game of aspiration, certain scholars and economists, and hundreds of thousands of "concerned citizens" have initiated...