More than half think a college degree isn’t worth it: Looks like more than 60% of 18-34 year-olds feel that way as well: Paulo Eskitch, a 47-year-old violinist who lives in Tulsa, Okla., is less emphatic about whether his daughter, now 7 years old, should enroll in college when the time comes. Mr. Eskitch has a master’s degree in music and earns about $30,000 a year playing in several...
ASU to enroll 100 million students!
Arizona State University is aiming to enroll an additional 100 million students by 2030 through a free global education initiative to be launched in April. The program, to be announced Thursday, will translate into 40 languages and put online the materials for five business courses, with the aim of reaching students in every corner of the globe. The program will use machine learning and...
Yale has almost as many administrators as undergrads!
According to the article, 5,907 undergrads versus 5,000 administrators: In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45...
Glenn Loury on the state of American universities
BW: You’ve been on campus for several decades now and you're now at Brown, which has a reputation of being, for lack of a better word, one of the most “woke” campuses in the country. What changes have you seen on campus since the time that you began teaching at Harvard to what you're seeing at Brown today? GL: My, that’s a very large question, which I'm loath to answer off the cuff. I think...
Unskilled and entitled students will “eat you alive”
Students who can’t get into elite schools through the front door based on academic merit don’t change once they’re in class. They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of...
NY Times: College students really are snowflakes
Avoid sending your children to college: besides the racism and rape culture, there is sauce. The bribery scandal has “just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can be,” said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of “Teach...
Thiel: “Universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church of 500 years ago”
“Universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church of 500 years ago,” Thiel said. During his speech, he spoke of an academia that has shut down debate, excommunicated conservative scholars, and insisted a college degree is the only way to “salvation,” that being a good job and solid future. “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come from within, but from the...
Are there too many PhDs?
Apparently, 90% of all scientists that ever lived are alive today. And many of them need jobs!
“These 3 NC colleges drastically dropped tuition. The result was like a ‘booster rocket.’”
A new, lower tuition rate is drawing more students to three UNC campuses, resulting in record undergraduate enrollment growth this fall. The NC Promise program, funded by the legislature at $51 million this year, allowed Elizabeth City State University, UNC Pembroke and Western Carolina University to decrease their tuition to $1,000 a year for in-state undergraduates and $5,000 a year for out-of...
Beware the algorithm
[UPDATE: Aviso Retention was purchased by Watermark, and one of their media specialists has been harassing me to update my post to reflect that. I’m not sure why, because as the post below makes clear, the product is worthless; they claim they can predict student performance before classes begin, but his analysis showed that their model sucked. You’d almost be better off flipping a...