The for-profit higher-education sector is routinely smeared in the media and established universities as low-brow, unproductive, pedestrian, a scam. Of course, the University of Phoenix isn’t Yale, and doesn’t pretend to be. But Hyundai belongs in the automobile market as much as Mercedes, and the market for higher education is no different — at...
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In Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign ad against big government, the narrator warns a young boy who’s parking his bike at grandma’s house, “Don’t look now young man, but somebody has his hand in your pocket. It’s the hand of big government. It’s taking away about four months pay from what your daddy earns...
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Finishing college shouldn’t be so hard. Completing challenging classes and mastering advanced material plus working to pay for increasingly expensive degrees is tough enough. But some institutions make it even harder for undergraduates because of their own shoddy administration. Sacramento State undergraduate Starlight Trotter is starting her fifth year and shared her travails in...
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The headline to a Washington Post editorial by Lisa Guisbond caught my attention: “New school year: doubling down on failed ed policy.” But I was quickly disappointed. Guisbond echoed the common complaint that a decade of the federal No Child Left Behind Act focuses too narrowly on testing. Looming national Common Core standards will...
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What do you do with a public school district that spends more than $16,500 per student, runs deficits upwards of $11 million, and where student performance has stalled? Outsource school management, according to officials in one Michigan city. Highland Park City Schools are among the lowest ranked schools in the state. Highland Park Community...
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“Con game,” of course, is slang for “Confidence trick,” which Wikipedia describes as: Confidence tricks exploit typical human characteristics such as greed, dishonesty, vanity, honesty, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, desperation and naïveté. As such, there is no consistent profile of a confidence trick victim; the common factor is simply that the victim relies on the...
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In late June Congress acted to freeze the interest rate on certain college loans at 3.4 percent for an additional year, claiming this move would help make college more affordable. Of course, a relative handful of college students saving a few dollars each month doesn’t translate into college affordability—and the Obama administration knows it....
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The U.S. Department of Education will soon be handing out federal paychecks to teachers across the country. On July 18 President Obama unveiled his $1 billion Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Master Teacher Corps. According to the White House: The STEM Master Teacher Corps will begin with 50 exceptional STEM teachers established in...
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Children get dumber over the summer, says Peter Orszag, vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. He points to several research studies documenting fade-out among students when they’re away from the classroom during the summer months. But school...
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Many readers will be aware that last week in a speech President Obama said “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” There have been many comments on this already — most of them I’ve seen have been negative — but I’m still going to add a...
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