Free Republic

This trend may be individually smart, but it makes our society dumber and ultimately undermines the potential educational value of a college education. College students admit to lying about or hiding their views on family, faith, politics, and other socially contentious issues, such as gender ideology, in order to "fit in" at their colleges. At least, in this case, at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. Almost everybody is living a lie, to avoid bullying by the other 10% of students and, of course, the college professors who act like the old Soviet Political Officers in the Soviet Union's...

Last month, a Republican Congress and President Trump achieved, if that is the word, a massive budget-reconciliation bill. As is more and more common, a Congress averse to accountability for particular votes crammed the measure full of many agenda items that the majority and the president wanted but chose to vote up or down on them as a package. Several provisions are relevant to American higher education. They involve the student-loan program, in which the federal government provides both subsidized and unsubsidized loans to both graduate and undergraduate students. Federal grants to needy students, e.g. Pell grants, are only modestly...

Some years ago, I saw in a friend’s kitchen a sign meant to place the house’s terms of engagement beyond dispute: “My dogs live here. The rest of you are just visiting.” Little did I know then that a bit of mass-produced kitsch could explain the higher-ed reformer’s central dilemma. Consider this year’s attempt by the UNC System to bring its schools in line with Trump Administration anti-DEI guidance. As recent events make clear, that effort may fail precisely because the public’s representatives cannot possibly turn over every campus rock or smoke out every defiant faculty member. Why not? As...

“In most college classrooms,” wrote Alison King in a seminal 1993 article, “the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the ‘sage on the stage,’ the one who has the knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students. […] In this view of teaching and learning,” King argued, “students are passive learners rather than active ones.” And, she continued, “such a view is outdated and will not be effective for the twenty-first century.” Instead of the transmittal theory described above, King championed a constructivist theory of learning according to which “knowledge [is]...

When Professor Catherine D’Ignazio isn’t running the “Data + Feminism” lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or organizing “reproductive justice hackathons” she is fighting Donald Trump’s “state terrorism.” The urban studies professor, and “data feminism” scholar, recently explained “how U.S. universities can survive state terrorism” in an essay for Academe Blog. “What distinguishes state terrorism from other routine uses of force is that the violence is designed to ‘send a message’ —to reverberate out into the population, to engender fear, and to shift behavior,” Professor D’Ignazio (pictured) explains. “The US government’s detentions of students such as [Tufts University doctoral...

The SAT has been called many things. Too consequential. Too stressful. Too long. But in its 100-year history, no one ever called it easy. But lately, a claim that the SAT has been “dumbed down” has ricocheted across social media and lit up education blogs. It’s a hot take that makes for an irresistible retweet but ignores a more important truth: The SAT—in its paper-and-pencil past and in its digital present—remains the gold standard for reliable and rigorous measurement of college readiness. The SAT was created by College Board a century ago to give college admissions officers a consistent standard...

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education, Indiana’s public-university-system leadership, has announced that the state’s public colleges are responding to a new state law by eliminating or merging more than 400 degree programs on the different university campuses, about 20 percent of the total number of degrees offered. Inside Higher Ed summarizes: The announcement came just before a new state law took effect … setting minimum requirements for how many graduates individual programs must produce at the universities and Ivy Tech Community College, or face termination. […] [The law] says institutions can ask the commission for approval to keep offering degrees...

Students don’t have the same incentives to talk to their professors — or even their classmates — anymore. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have given them a new path to self-sufficiency. Instead of asking a professor for help on a paper topic, students can go to a chatbot. Instead of forming a study group, students can ask AI for help. These chatbots give them quick responses, on their own timeline. For students juggling school, work and family responsibilities, that ease can seem like a lifesaver. And maybe turning to a chatbot for homework help here and there isn’t such...

The Department of Justice said Tuesday that UCLA violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students who reported harassment and intimidation during a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian campus encampment... In a letter addressed to UC President Michael V. Drake, DOJ officials said “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment.” The letter faulted UCLA for not taking down the encampment until after it was attacked by pro-Israel group. In addition, the department found UCLA was “inadequate” in its response to complaints from Jewish...

One in four Gen-Z workers wishes they had skipped college or picked a higher-paying major, and only about a third are happy with the choices they made, a new ResumeGenius poll, carried out this month, finds. What Happened: The online survey of 1,000 full-time Gen-Z employees shows 23% regret going to college, 22% would pivot to fields like tech or finance, and just 32% say they'd change nothing about their education. Career coaches say that shift reflects a market where degrees no longer guarantee jobs. "Many older generations had the luxury of living in a market where their college degree...

The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude.. One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well. In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers. According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that...

see this interesting post on X:Male college grads are now just as likely to be unemployed as people who never went to collegeSame is not true for women, who are much more likely to land a job once they graduate collegeThe data is just eye opening. We are leaving young men behind like never before pic.twitter.com/JTnEgO1Vls— Boring_Business (@BoringBiz_) July 18, 2025Young men tend to study subjects that are more relevant/needed for the global economy, whereas women tend to study the esoteric, questionable fields (besides nursing/health) that do not require much rigor...so I'm surprised by this. What's the culprit here?

A Harvard sophomore, Alex Bronzini-Vender, had a NYT op-ed published Tuesday morning lamenting the changing fashions in college application essay questions. Even though he’s already in, young Mr. Bronzini-Vender has evidently heard from incoming freshmen what they had to endure to get in. What changed? Well, evidently the essay question is no longer on DEI, which he, a self-described “white” kid, apparently knew how to “game.” (His word.) Now? Now the essay question is to describe a conflict you once had and how you resolved it.It’s known as the disagreement question, and since the student encampments of spring 2024 and...

The best time for a university to perform a civil-rights audit was two full years ago, right after the Supreme Court announced its decisions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases. The next best time is now. In short, the Supreme Court wrote in 2023, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” That means ending discrimination not only in admissions but across the entire university. Furthermore, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has long been interpreted to ban racial discrimination across all of a university’s programs and activities. Even the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)...

Before I wrote about Second Amendment stuff most of the time, I wrote a lot about education. From Title IX abuse to woke administrators and teachers, I covered a lot. AdvertisementThen I came here and started writing about this, which is at least as important as reforming our educational system.Yet I always knew there would be some opportunities to return to talking about colleges. After all, they're notoriously anti-gun, too, as we see from a situation in Maine.A Christian student in a class apparently talked previously about finding Jesus. So far, so good, apparently.Yet the student wanted to talk about...

Millions of federal student loan borrowers are just weeks away from default as serious delinquencies surge to record highs after the Trump administration resumed debt collections, economists say. Nearly one-third (31%) of federal borrowers with a payment due were at least 90 days late in April, according to a new report from TransUnion released on Tuesday, June 24. That's nearly triple the pre-pandemic rate of 11.7% and the highest figure on record. Just 0.3% of borrowers were in default by April, but with nearly 5.8 million now more than 90 days late, many are on the brink of defaulting. Once...

Over 2.1 million Americans have dropped out of college without earning a degree, a troubling trend that raises concerns about whether universities are prioritizing politics over academic achievement. Universities hire more DEI staff than history professors while millions of students leave without degrees ... Over 2.1 million Americans have dropped out of college without earning a degree, a troubling trend that raises concerns about whether universities are prioritizing politics over academic achievement. A June 4 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that college non-completers rose by 2.2 percent in the past year. Citing a lack of direction,...

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee on Wednesday seeks to end a program designed to funnel tens of millions of dollars to colleges and universities with a large percentage of Hispanic students, charging it is racist and unconstitutional. The suit was filed by the state of Tennessee and advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions against the U.S. Department of Education. In 2023, the advocates’ suit against Harvard University led to the Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions. A federal funding program designates schools as “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” if they have at least 25% Hispanic-student...

After enjoying many decades of high public support, higher education in the U.S. is in serious decline. Polls show that a sizeable percentage of the populace now doubts that college is worth the cost and that it contributes to the public good. Enrollments keep falling, and the luster that a college degree used to confer on graduates has become tarnished, especially since recent events indicate that, instead of helping them mature, college turns them into ideologically obsessed activists. What has gone wrong? In his latest book, Let Colleges Fail, economics professor Richard Vedder employs his insights to answer that question....

It takes me about eight minutes to walk across the campus of the New College of Florida, where I just concluded a year as a visiting professor. There are rare sightings of students, a grand total of 800, who dart in and out from under the palm trees like white ibises. The clock bell on the astroturf in front of the library can be heard from the waterfront all the way to the student dorms. The all-faculty email list for the 100 or so scholars emits messages such as: “Is anyone having trouble with the Internet?” Despite its minuscule size,...