In this Forbes article, my Pope Center colleague Jay Shalin argues that federal student-aid programs subsidize waste and redistribute income — redistribution in a way that “progressives” shouldn’t like, namely toward wealthier people. Absolutely right.

In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, John Maguire explains how he gets his students to write well. Rather by accident, he tossed aside the book on writing and started by teaching his students how to use active verbs and build good sentences.

Why don’t youngsters learn that early in grade school?

In this Forbes article, I argue for a simple, commonsensical fix to our wasteful system of financial aid. By combining merit and need criteria, rather than having aid programs based on criteria of pure need (such as Pell Grants) or pure merit (such as Georgia’s Hope Scholarships), we could cut a lot of expense, waste, redistribution, and bad incentivizing. Obviously, there are lots of people who will hate the idea, particularly entrenched interests, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about doing it.

Also, I accept any abuse hurled my way for the title of this blog post.

As we read in this Boston Herald editorial, UMass-Dartmouth, the school where the Tsarnaevs and their friends were, um, studying, is hiding behind its “interpretation” of FERPA to refuse to reveal information pertinent to them.

Hat tip: Doug Schneider

Five years ago I remarked that the highly touted Voluntary System of Accountability (by which major universities were going to reveal “student outcomes”) had not caught fire.

Some measures exist, such as the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Productivity, but many schools are reluctant to reveal their scores. At least that seems to be a major reason why “College Portrait,” the online version of large universities’ Voluntary Accountability System, is not yet available.

Progress is still slow, as Inside Higher Ed recounts today. Indeed, the resistance by large universities to posting student outcome data is almost breathtaking in its effectiveness. Doug Lederman reports that “scores” of schools have opted out “primarily because they did not like the system’s dependence on standardized measures that allow for comparability across colleges.”

Not much has changed since the then-president of the University of California system, Robert C. Dynes, explained why the university decided not to join in 2007 (as quoted in the IHE story): “The university has concluded that using standardized tests on an institutional level as measures of student learning fails to recognize the diversity, breadth, and depth of discipline-specific knowledge and learning that takes place in colleges and universities today.” Q.E.D. 

As recently as a few months ago, UNC–Chapel Hill also declined to post its Collegiate Learning Assessment results, even after having been instructed to by the UNC system. Why? Because “campus leaders/faculty believed the test results weren’t representative,” the university said. This, even though the study used statistically sound and publisher-recommended sample sizes, as Jenna Robinson pointed out earlier this year. Under pressure (possibly from our reporting) the university recently posted its finding with this disclaimer: “We posted the results to our College Portrait, but didn’t find them useful in contributing to campus discussions about student learning outcomes.”

By the way, I sympathize with the view that a single test can’t capture the full panoply of impacts of four years of college. But to resist revealing assessments that could inform students about the value of their potential investment is something that only a cartel of socialistic enterprises can get away with.

That’s the message in the letter by some professors at San Jose State, with reference to online courses. Roger Kimball has a good take on it in a PJ Media post.

Hat tip: Geoff Hawkins

It seems that every time you blink, there is a new front-runner in the annual contest between the “Studies” departments to come up with the least objective, most politically inspired, most anti-intellectual nonsense. By becoming the first academic unit to officially support the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement, the Association for Asian-American Studies might have edged into the lead against perennial favorites Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, and African-American Studies.

As Ursinus professor Jonathan Marks points out in Commentary, the thing that makes the AAAS decision especially egregious is the inclusion in their resolution of language written by 9/11 “Truther” (and emeritus Princeton professor) Richard Falk, who recently got himself back in the news for suggesting that the U.S. had it coming in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Of course, we still have a long way to go before this year’s winner is decided, and the competition is fierce.

The Chronicle post in question makes much ado over “a series of racial incidents at Oberlin College.” While the author acknowledges that Oberlin is “historically progressive,” it does not occur to her to doubt the truth of the supposed incidents. Peter Wood does so in this NAS article.

There is good reason to think that the Oberlin administration made a mountain out of a molehill, if even that. But, assuming that the Oberlin situation were entirely true — that a liberal college with a 28 percent “minority” student body finds itself plagued by racial antagonism — are we to believe that Oberlin could solve this problem by further increasing its minority “representation”? That would seem to follow only if the few whites who were responsible for the alleged incidents were the ones who were filtered out by the move to increase the school’s diversity. And if Oberlin could recruit more minority students, that necessarily means fewer of them for other schools, thus making the situation worse for their remaining minority students.

A recent Chronicle post by a Cornell professor (of African, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies) makes one of the most ridiculous arguments for continuing racial preferences that I have ever seen and John Rosenberg tears it apart on his blog.

Cornell grads should weep.

There’s a sharp piece today at The Freeman. The writer, who got through college without going into debt, is opposed to transferring the debts of students who borrowed lots to the rest of America (or those of us who pay taxes, anyway). If we must “forgive” student debts, he suggests that the cost fall on Warren Buffett. But even if he liquidated his entire portfolio, that wouldn’t make more than a small dent in the vast accumulation of student debt.

The writer says that we need to find a solution, but the only solution I can see is for the feds to stop financing higher ed.

A well-paid high-tech job is the goal for many college students (and tech-school students and community-college students). Dan Carpenter got one right out of high school — but wanted something more. He took courses at his local commuter school (UA-Anchorage), hoping to find some subject that he could study and learn passionately. Only he couldn’t figure out what that “something” was. He gambled on quitting his job and attending a Great Books program in another state. You’ll have to read the rest of the story to find what he discovered there and what lessons he has to offer.

Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, writes, “My college actually took me away from logical thinking.” He laments that so many young American exhaust themselves trying to get into an elite college (and drain the family’s resources if they succeed), when they’d learn more and spend much less at a community college. (He earned his degree in political science at Stanford.) Karlgaard foresees fruitful collaboration between community colleges and online education. “This affordable alliance will be a fantastic blessing for late bloomers — and America.”

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran an article by Michael S. Roth entitled “My Global Philosophy Course.” Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and found that while many students who signed up for his course (on Coursera) dropped before the end (only 4,000 of 30,000 stuck it out), there was remarkable intellectual energy among those who persisted. He writes, “I am sure that many of those enrolled in the online version have also discovered texts and people that are having profound effects on their lives.”

I was struck by the remarkable diversity of the students who wanted to learn philosophy with Roth. “Study groups in Bulgaria and India, in Russia and Boston made me giddy at the reach of this kind of class.” Ah — the invisible hand at work. Without any official trying to guarantee “diversity” (on account of ancestry), Roth got a remarkably diverse group of students who had one crucial thing in common, namely the desire to learn what he wanted to teach. Officials at Wesleyan and elsewhere should keep that in mind. Bring together a group of students who want to learn and “diversity” will take care of itself.

One thing I love about research is finding golden nuggets in unexpected places. Consider this quote from management guru Peter Drucker’s 1957 book of societal forecasts, Landmarks of Tomorrow:

Society must [also] demand that education be considered by the educated as a responsibility rather than a right, and as a high responsibility by the highly educated.  It must demand of them commitment and dedication, the attitude “What can I contribute?” rather than “What’s in it for me?”

Drucker was not writing as a socialist; he saw the ability of education to prepare students for work that does not yet exist – through providing the ability of learning how to learn, not through vocational training for jobs (that already exist). 

While this position is given lip service today, it’s largely lost when exorbitant tuitions force students to see schooling in terms of the college wage premium.

Drucker’s book contains a whole chapter titled “The Educated Society” that is a must read for anyone interested in education reform, as it provides another example of how the problems we face today are not unique to the 21st century. 

In this piece (posted at Minding the Campus and SeeThruEdu) I write about an interesting NYT article about academic fraud. I suggest that we stop subsidizing academic research and let it pass the test of the market; that would get rid of not only most fraudulent research, but also most of the non-fraudulent research that is useless.

The retrial of Amanda Knox is a judicial catastrophe. She is the American student who was accused, along with two young men, of murdering her roommate in some kind of Halloween sex orgy in Perugia, Italy, in 2009. Her trial was a travesty to begin with, and the guilty verdict was thankfully eventually overturned, although not before she had spent four years in an Italian prison. That should certainly have been an end to it, but the prosecution and the lawyers for the parents of the murdered girl, Meredith Kercher, have succeeded in getting the case reopened.

Because of extreme mishandling of evidence and the hysterical and quasi-religious delusions of the prosecutor, the idea was planted that more had to have happened to Meredith than actually happened, and her parents were baffled when the killing turned out to be more “ordinary” than at first projected. Meredith surprised a local wastrel who had broken into the apartment she shared with three other girls. He expected that no one would be home the night of November 1, the day after Halloween and a holiday in Italy, and that cash would be around due to rents coming due at the first of the month in the student-saturated city. He then attacked, raped, and killed her. Awful, awful enough, but no sex orgy gone awry. The killer fled the city and was captured some days later. He was tried, convicted, and imprisoned; his sentence an unjustly short 16 years. That too should have been an end to it.

Part of the scenario cooked up by the prosecutor depended on the brief foray into free and casual sex that Amanda had undertaken abroad, and had written about in her journal. This somehow fit into the idea that she lured the two boys to force Meredith into sex and they wound up killing her when she wouldn’t comply. There is quite an irony in the idea of free sex being held against an American college girl, when everything in our campus and popular culture practically dictates it. Here, for example, from the preface to What Does Bowdoin Teach: How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, the extensive report on Bowdoin College from the National Association of Scholars,  is the conclusion of a play presented during an orientation of new students in 2011:

Whatever you decide you want your relationship with sex to be about there are opportunities out there. Whether you want to have sex or you don’t, you’re looking for love or a one-night stand, you’re gay or straight or somewhere in between, it’s all possible. And whatever happens remember to be safe, get consent, and watch out for your friends.

As NAS president Peter Wood observes of this passage:

The crude content leads to an emphatic message that the only requirement for “any healthy sexual encounter” is “consent.” To help things along Bowdoin makes sure that a generous supply of condoms is conspicuously available on every floor of every dorm and in other public places as well. This is not just encouraging safe sex, it is encouraging sex.

Indeed, as Wood adds, it is “market[ing] sexual promiscuity to . . . students.” And yet in a different cultural context, this same kind of behavior takes on an almost gothic coloration, is coupled with murder, and is used to destroy lives. The postmodern and up-to-date meets the pre-modern and primitive. In no way did Amanda deserve what has happened to her, but clearly young people are owed a better “sex education” that is currently on offer.

Statistics show that Asians (including Pacific Islanders) are underrepresented when it comes to administrative positions in higher ed. This Chronicle post conveys the disturbing news. Will this lead to an immediate response from the higher-ed establishment, seeking to eliminate this distressing gap? Do we not need to study this social inequity to find its causes? If this were some other group, we know there probably would be lots of hysteria over the data.

Why aren’t there more Asians — a proper representation — among higher-ed administrators? I would guess that most of them prefer actual academic work to the life of an administrator.

As we read here, many teachers and school administrators in Wisconsin recently met at a conference where “white privilege” was a key topic. Some teachers are upset that not all students buy this ridiculous notion and feel the need to “crush resistance.” Where do such ideas come from? I think that ed schools play a big role.

In a new SeeThruEdu post, Jeremy Kee writes about the weaknesses of college students in job applications. One of the most often noted problems is that they can’t even spell correctly. Pretty sad state of affairs — college grads can hector you all day about social justice, sustainability, environmentalism, and so forth, but they can’t spell words.

A friend who was no fan of George W. Bush read his memoir and was impressed. I asked him if Bush addressed in the book the many puzzling questions left by both his actions and his rhetoric regarding the promotion of freedom and democracy around the globe, especially in the Mideast. Did he show himself thoughtful about all that? I asked. My friend said yes, but only to a point.

The recent opening of the Bush Library in Dallas sparked numerous articles on the ex-president and his legacy. Many of his supporters insisted, as they have before, that while Bush may not be generally favorably viewed by the American people at present, he will eventually be vindicated by history. But instead of encouraging Bush to rest on the vindication of history, which would seem to feed his natural tendency to intellectual complacency, why not encourage him to vindicate himself now, rethinking and reexamining the ideas he promoted as president and answering the questions that remain about his actions?

For example, how might the chaos in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq have been avoided; why was the looting of government offices allowed to take place with the American Army looking on; is the idea of freedom burning in every human heart really sufficient for the formation of  liberal self government everywhere right now, or must civic and cultural institutions precede it; is it possible that the universal vision he promoted made it impossible for him clearly to name the enemy we were fighting in the two wars we spent so much blood and treasure to wage; why was he so enthusiastic about the possibilities for democracy everywhere in the world when many of  our wisest leaders have tended more to caution in that regard? Ronald Reagan, for example, spoke of freedom as “fragile and rare” and as never more than one generation away from being lost.

Revisiting these questions, together with the debate they would undoubtedly arouse, would constitute a tremendous civic education for the American people about the nature of their government and of the values their country upholds.

North Carolina governor Pat McCrory took a lot of heat for suggesting that education isn’t about “butts in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs.” Some conservatives rushed to defend his comments — which were, in fact, merely the logical extension of the “college grads make more money” justification given by liberals to further subsidize college loans — but Gene Edward Veith, professor of literature and provost at Patrick Henry College, asks us to step back a moment and look at students’ choices through the lense of vocation:

[Vocation] has become a synonym for “job,” so that colleges debate the extent to which higher education should be primarily vocational training or whether it should have higher goals, such as cultivating the intellect. But vocation is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” It is one of those theological words—like inspiration, revelation, mission, and vision—that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling.

Some conservatives like Nathan welcome the rise of MOOCs as a solution to the problems that plague higher education. Veith offers a (heavily) qualified defense of how higher ed is currently structured:

Part of the genius of higher education is that its structure usually allows you to try things. Most people come to college with little sense of what fields even exist and have only a slim idea what they are good at. Here the much-maligned liberal arts requirements can be enormously helpful. . . . Studying history and your cultural heritage can help you in your vocation of citizenship. Learning to read, write, and think deeply can make you better at whatever profession you are eventually called to. And taking courses with so many different methodologies — hard science and social science, literary analysis and quantitative research — can give you a sense of what intellectual activities you find most rewarding, which can help direct you toward a major, perhaps one you never even knew existed.

Read the rest at the Intercollegiate Review.

The story begins with 50 freshmen girls starting out at the University of Indiana. Exactly how many of them finished their senior years, we don’t find out. But in a new book by a pair of sociologists, entitled Paying for the Party, we get a good idea of what happened to them the next few years, and with some exceptions it wasn’t pretty.

Many of them got sucked into the party culture that dominates almost all large state flagship campuses and either dropped out or graduated with near-worthless degrees. George Leef reviews the book for this week’s Clarion Call and adds a few thoughts of his own about students who would be better off at smaller regional public schools but just can’t resist the allure of the flagships, where every night is Friday night.

Jill Biden – or, as she prefers “Dr. Biden” — provided fodder for Charles and Kevin on the “title-inflation” beat. As Solomon put it, there’s nothing new under the sun. Back in 1903, William James identified vanity and the “love of titles” as two of the motivations that fed the “Ph.D. Octopus.” It’s worth remembering that the Ph.D. as we know it today was a German import in the 19th century. Soon thereafter, universities saw this new credential as a “mere advertising resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public’s eyes” — basically, nothing but signaling. Something to bear in mind as the chorus for reform grows louder and louder.

The cost of college students’ switching majors is high: for them, for taxpayers, and for the economy. It often extends their education by one, two, or more semesters — prolonging the time before they start their careers and the time that taxpayers or parents must subsidize them.

One possible solution is to have them take tests to assess their abilities and interests at the start of their college careers, writes Jenna Ashley Robinson. She took one such test recently — called the Birkman Method — and found it to be a worthwhile exercise that accurately predicted her professional interests (at least in hindsight) and recommends that colleges adopt it or some similar assessment tool.

In fact, high schools might want to start using such tools as well to determine whether students should go to college in the first place, or whether they should enter apprenticeships, join the military, or just go to work until they have a better idea what they want to do. Right now, it seems they often get no serious direction at all.

To pick up on Nathan’s and Robert’s earlier discussions, there does seem to be a difference between conservatives and liberals on the issue of campus rape. Conservatives tend to sympathize with unfairly accused males, while liberals worry that women won’t speak up. But both sides have a lot to agree on. One is that those “honor court” proceedings are all wrong. As Harry Lewis and I wrote at the Forbes website, “The Office for Civil Rights should get out of the business of dictating the terms of college sexual assault trials. Colleges should stop the practice of ‘he-said-she-said’ trials.”

But there’s a more fundamental issue, and that is the fact that “acquaintance rape” (sometimes called date rape, but dating is rare these days) is caused by a troubled campus environment. Two specific factors foster acquaintance rape — alcohol and the hookup culture. University administrators encourage both.

They generally look the other way when it comes to alcohol. As for sex, see the latest report by the National Association of Scholars on the once-staid Bowdoin College, where a “generous supply of condoms is conspicuously available on every floor of every dorm and in other public places as well,” and where “‘consent’ is the central ethical vision of sex and sexuality,” say Peter Wood and Michael Toscano. “The overarching message of the performance [Speak About It, an explicit play about sex at Bowdoin, mandatory for new students] “is have sex freely, in the form that you deem desirable, but make sure that your sexual partner or partners agree that this form of sex is agreeable.”

In this environment there will be instances in which the question of consent is impossible to answer.

There is broader cause of acquaintance rape and its aftermath, however: immaturity. College students tend to be immature. Since colleges have given up serving in loco parentis, there’s no voice of caution or reason and, afterwards, little suggestion that their experiences should teach them a lesson.

Rather, the honor court is there to spur you to litigate — to blame someone else. The last person you are taught to blame is yourself. As Harry Lewis and I wrote (and his book Excellence without a Soul has much more about this): “Part of growing up is learning to avoid situations that should not be dangerous but are. The fairest and most sensitive judicial process is no substitute for responsible choices made in advance.”

Unfortunately, the adults who are supposed to help students learn this lesson have abdicated any role in doing so.

Nathan: I think we’ve both made our points and I don’t want to drag this out, but I would like to note a few things.

First, there’s a simple explanation for the statistical anomaly you point out: The number for college-attending Hispanics is starred in the report, meaning it’s based on a tiny sample size (ten or fewer crimes reported, meaning each report swings the outcome substantially). When you’re looking at a crime with an annual incidence rate of 2 in 1,000 for women ages 12 and up, and then breaking the data down so far you’re looking at Hispanic college students in a narrow age range, even a huge sample size like the National Crime Victimization Survey’s won’t always do the trick.

Further, it’s a survey, not a collection of actual crime reports. It includes crimes that were not reported to police, though some respondents still might fail to report crimes against them or claim crimes occurred that didn’t.

Finally, I’m not sure that conservatives have ceded this issue: We’re the tough-on-crime people. Not only are we the people encouraging women to put hollow-points in rapists’ foreheads, we’re the people saying the Surpeme Court was wrong to take the death penalty off the table, the people clamoring for longer prison terms, etc. There is no reason we can’t also be the people pointing out the utter ridiculousness of defining all drunken sex as rape and then churning out statistics based on that definition. Defining rape down is not a sign that one takes rape seriously.

So this happened . . .

SAN DIEGO – The University of San Diego – a large, private Catholic college – hosted a drag show in its campus theater Thursday night, prompting a protest by students and local residents who called the event an aberration to Catholicism’s values, while others on campus defended the performance.

“A drag show is not consistent with Catholic teaching,” student protestor and sophomore Ailsa Tirado, 20, said in an interview with The College Fix. “Why call yourself a Catholic school? It’s in direct contradiction with explicit Catholic moral teaching.”

Tirado said more than 4,000 students across the nation signed a petition against “Celebration of Gender Expression – Supreme Drag Superstar 2,” which was organized by PRIDE, the college’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer student-support group…

It’s the second consecutive year the university has hosted the show. Posters advertising the event that peppered the campus boasted bright, glossy red lips and a Vegas-inspired font, an image that looked starkly out of place next to statues of the Virgin Mary and ornate white buildings adorned with large crosses.

The performance starred Manila Luzon, described on his personal website as an “Asian Glamasaurus” drag queen…

Read the full story here.

Robert, there are a lot of ways to slice and dice the statistics, made more complicated by the fact that many cases go unreported. And there are odd anomolies. For instance, the study you cite that shows college-attending women are a bit less likely to suffer rape than non-college attending women actually shows that that’s true for all ethnic groups save one. For some reason, the study shows that Hispanics are more than twice as likely to be raped if they go to college than if they don’t. Does that make sense? I can’t even begin to guess why or why not, or what conclusions one should draw from that. Plus, that study leaves out cases of “attempted rape,” which were included in the CDC study.

My main point is that I wish conservatives, as a group, would balance their rhetoric. By all means, let’s aim for accurate statistics as best we can. But let’s not merely talk about the need for accurate statistics. Let’s also talk about the ineadequacies of the criminal-justice system, as well as training that might help young women to be shrewder and better at self-defense, for instance. Let’s talk about the disintegration of the family structure and societal morals, the new kinds of sexual scripts and confused sexual expectations established by the modern college hookup culture — all things that contribute to sexual assault.

Sexual-assault prevention is one of those issues, like environmentalism, that conservatives have almost completely ceded to the left out of a partisan reflex. In reality, conservatives care just as much, but the conversation is dominated by the Left. That’s a shame, in my view. We saw conservatives briefly bucking this trend during the recent gun debates, during which conservatives did a good job of pointing out how handguns can offer women critical protection against assault. I’d like to see much more of that kind of message coming from the political right — and not merely when, conveniently, there happens to be a gun-control debate raging in Congress.

When the topic is rape, if nearly all conservatives have to say about it is “it’s not as common as liberals and feminists say it is,” then that’s a big mistake. The end result is that liberals end up with all the public credibility on the issue, when in fact, as I argued in my original post below, they are doing more than anyone else to radicalize the sexual culture on campus and ultimately put women at risk.

Here’s the last paragraph in the editorial:

Universities that want to improve their selection procedures by identifying talented people (of any colour or creed) from disadvantaged backgrounds should be encouraged. But selection on the basis of race is neither a fair nor an efficient way of doing so. Affirmative action replaced old injustices with new ones: it divides society rather than unites it. Governments should tackle disadvantage directly, without reference to race. If a school is bad, fix it. If there are barriers to opportunity, remove them. And if Barack Obama’s daughters apply to a university, judge them on their academic prowess, not the colour of their skin.

Nearly a year ago, Jay Schalin argued in a three-part Pope Center piece that there really isn’t the shortage of STEM (science, technology,engineering, and mathematics) graduates that everyone assumes exists (and that the government has been  pouring in money to correct). While the article received plenty of comment, the topic didn’t get much traction in the larger media world.

That changed this week when the Washington Post revealed a study showing the same thing. As the Post said, “A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.” Basically, the study says, wages are flat and some technically trained workers can’t find jobs.

The politics of this are murky, with a number of players. Why does a “left-leaning institute” study this? Certainly, high-tech companies such as Microsoft are trying to expand the H-1B visas that bring in foreign workers on the grounds that there aren’t enough technically trained people in the United States. And those companies are trying to distinguish themselves (the Post says) from “out-sourcing” companies that re just looking for people “who will work for less.”

It’s hard to see through the multiple veils of self-interest, but the numbers do show that Microsoft’s (and other companies’) claims may, at best, be incomplete.