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| Can higher education be saved in California? | In California, 80% of community college students were being sent to remedial courses in English or math, and only 16% of them earned a certificate or associate degree within six years, according to the PPIC. In response, in 2017, California’s community colleges began putting less-well-prepared students into credit-bearing introductory courses with extra tutoring. The CSU system, too, started doing this last year, and now also funnels students with low high school grades or standardized test scores into special preparation programs in the summer before their freshman years. Though some faculty members have objected to the changes, early studies suggest they’ve led to big improvements: 63% of community college students who went directly into transfer-level English composition courses with tutoring successfully completed them, compared to 32% who went to remediation.Continue Reading

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| The Dangerous Myth of the Student Loan | In the US, the groundwork for the present loan-dominated system goes back to 1972 with the Student Loan Marketing Association, which was created with the intention of servicing federally insured loans. By 1986, a market-based credit system was the system of choice for the World Bank, which advocated it in order to fund the rapid gap in higher education demand and supply that was occurring in the developing world.Continue Reading

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| Is international higher education just an elite club? | [A]s we draw near the end of the second decade of the new millennium, it is difficult to see how international higher education has evolved into a phenomenon which is ‘good’ and ‘meaningful’ for everyone. On the contrary, it has remained a tiny club based on physical mobility which is accessible only to the healthy, wealthy and brainy.Continue Reading

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| A Public Higher Ed Primer for Politicians | The annals of political philosophy teem with pieces on the tension between expertise and democracy. Plato’s philosopher-king made sense if you assumed that most people were just staring at shadow puppets. It’s a straight line from the “noble lie” to “you can’t handle the truth!” When democracies failed, or morphed into tyrannies, the lesson that political thinkers drew was that the masses can’t be trusted to govern themselves. They needed experts, often appointed directly by God. America’s great contribution was to demonstrate that if you have a large and diverse enough group involved in politics, each group’s distinct idiocies are largely canceled out by those of other groups.Continue Reading