Free Republic

Jason Collier, a special education teacher in Virginia, often needs to wait until payday to fill up the gas tank of his car — and in the meantime hopes he doesn’t run out. “Money is tight when you’re a teacher,” Collier, 46, said. Now he’s afraid that the U.S. Department of Education will soon garnish up to 15% of his wages because he’s behind on his student debt payments. Collier said he hasn’t been able to meet his monthly bill for years, while juggling the expenses of raising two children and medical expenses from a cancer diagnosis. If his paycheck...

Last spring, I coauthored an AEI report examining the taxpayer-subsidized Truman Scholarship program, founded in 1975 to identify “aspiring leaders” during their college years and encourage “their commitments to careers in public service.” We found an overwhelming left-wing bias. Among the fellows selected between 2021 and 2023, just six of 182 winners expressed interest in even a single conservative issue. Meanwhile, 72 had explicit interest in “woke” areas like “LGBT+” advocacy, DEI, or immigration rights, while dozens more had biographies readily recognizable as left-leaning. The Truman Foundation recently named its 2025 winners, and nothing has changed. The College Fix reported,...

Over the last several years, we have seen many colleges and universities make aggrieved statements in response to current events, from the election of President Trump to the death of George Floyd. The social implication is that if a school doesn’t speak out on an event, it is agreeing by omission. Many argue, however, that when colleges get involved in political issues, it only makes the political divide on campus grow larger. In fact, a recent survey from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that the majority of students don’t want colleges to make statements about political events at...

The Trump administration’s flurry of action on education reform creates space for states to chart their own paths. Efforts to abolish the Department of Education aim to “return education to the states.” Yet most conservative states have mostly been timid in embracing and building a better future for higher education. This is partly a fault of imagination, partly a lack of will. Florida led the way in both imagination and will. Many acts of the DeSantis administration presaged those of the Trump administration. Florida banned DEI offices, while the Trump administration is using national civil-rights laws to root them out....

The Georgia college student in federal custody who could be deported after she was pulled over by local cops should have never been stopped, officials admitted Monday. Mexican national Ximena Arias-Cristobal was wrongly accused by Dalton police of making an illegal turn at a red light after an officer confused her with another driver on May 5, city leaders said in a press release. During the stop, authorities said the 19-year-old, who is in the country illegally, didn’t have a proper driver’s license and was taken into custody at the scene and later detained by immigration enforcement authorities. While all...

The scamdemic is the gift that keeps on giving, and it’s only a matter of time before we the taxpayers are called upon to settle the student loan bill for robots too.According to a report from SFGate, “ghost” students are on the rise at colleges across the nation, particularly in California, a dramatic increase seen after much of the education sector transitioned to remote learning during 2020.Here’s the story:When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not everyone was...

For years, would-be higher-education reformers have warned that America’s higher education crisis—soaring tuition, crippling student debt, and weak learning—was rooted in a dangerous myth: every high school graduate should go to college.In 2025, the proof is glaring. Public confidence in colleges has crashed to 36%, down from 57% in 2015. The college-for-all dream, though well-intentioned, has inflated costs, buried millions in debt, and watered down education. Built on sand, its reputation is collapsing before us.But you wouldn’t know any of this from many media accounts, according to which, as in this breathless headline, “Trump’s Demands of Harvard Escalate His War...

I'm referring to not just the curriculum or majors offered, but also the administration and staff roster. My guess: 75-80% can be eliminated without material impact to the American economy (in spite of the insistence by liberal arts professors that this won't be the case).

Police arrested nine protestors, including seven agitators, while breaking up a pro-Palestinian encampment on Swarthmore College’s campus in an ugly scene Saturday — a “terribly difficult” decision the school’s president says was in part prompted by FBI scrutiny. One current and one former student of the private liberal arts school in the suburbs of Philadelphia were arrested, while the seven others were activists who were not affiliated with the college. “The promotion of the protest on social media drew the attention of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, who urged us to bring the encampment to an end as quickly...

College students don't work very hard these days, write Rick Hess and Greg Fournier of the Manhattan Institute. Full-time students say they average 20 to 25 hours of class time and studying each week, and some estimates are even lower. Thirty-five hours a week would be a reasonable amount of time, according to traditional measures. They're not more likely to have paying jobs than earlier generations, research shows. In 2024, the average first-year student reported spending 5.3 hours per week in campus activities and clubs, 9.3 hours working for pay and 11.9 hours relaxing and socializing. Yet most think they're...

Ohio colleges and universities should prepare students for their roles as good citizens, promote diverse academic thought on campus, and give graduates the basic skills they need to succeed at a price they can afford. Regrettably, many of the state’s schools have failed to meet these rudimentary goals. Despite paying lip service to the seemingly relevant notions of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” university campuses breed contempt for dissenting views that stray from liberal orthodoxies, with 80 percent of college students recently saying that they self-censor their views for fear of retaliation. This is the case despite universities investing huge resources...

Universities are currently experiencing a full-blown assault from the federal government and from red-state politicians. Tired of subsidizing universities as a hotbed of ideological activism, Republican leaders are cutting budgets, forcing reorganizations, asserting control of university governance, and taking control of the general-education curriculum at state universities. Republicans have generally been more skeptical of generous funding of public education, including at the postsecondary level, but this is different. According to Gallup, 56 percent of Republicans in 2015 had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. In 2024, only 20 percent of Republicans did, and 50...

Like many students, I waited months after graduation before receiving a job offer. Why this delay for many of the nation’s recent graduates? The answer, in part, is that most “entry-level” positions now require candidates to have one to three years of experience. In fact, roughly 61 percent of entry-level job postings now demand at least three years. How is a fresh graduate supposed to gain experience without years-long internships, which many students don’t pursue? A potential solution to this problem is for universities to adopt the “co-op” or cooperative model, in which students alternate between working for a company...

Earlier this month, I got the chance to be a student again for just one morning. It was an opportunity offered to all members of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Visitors, and I jumped at the chance to go back to campus to observe two classes. Among the options were two courses in the new School of Civic Life and Leadership. My first class of the day was “Practice of Civic Life and Leadership,” taught by Professor John Rose, which the course catalog thus describes: This course focuses on the ideas and practices necessary to analyze arguments and disagree in...

It is a low bar to clear, but college accreditation has never been so hotly commented on as at present. Many in the higher-ed world fear for its future. Two recent columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education are typical. In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise...

By now, most North Carolinians are at least somewhat familiar with Generative AI (GenAI). As tech journalist George Lawton explains, GenAI “uses sophisticated algorithms to organize large, complex data sets into meaningful clusters of information in order to create new content, including text, images and audio, in response to a query or prompt.” It is the foundation of numerous platforms, including Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, as well as Google’s Gemini. And it is either a bane or a boon, depending on one’s perspective—especially, perhaps, in the field of education. Since OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022, students have...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Campus mentors. Move-in events. Scholarships. Diversity offices that made them feel welcome on predominantly white campuses. As U.S. colleges pull back on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, students of color say they are starting to lose all of these things and more. The full scope of campus DEI rollbacks is still emerging as colleges respond to the Trump administration’s orders against diversity practices. But students at some schools said early cuts are chipping away at the sense of community that helped open the door to higher education. “It feels like we’re going back. I don’t know how...

Subtitle: Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis. When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before. “Teachers get excited when there’s a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, ‘Great, I’m going to have a...

For the entire existence of the James G. Martin Center, we have been arguing that, due to governmental policies, higher education has been badly oversold. That is, many students have been lured into college even though they have little interest in or aptitude for advanced academic studies. The notion that a college degree was a sure-fire investment that would pay off handsomely after graduation was erroneous, but great numbers of students and their families were taken in by that siren song. Moreover, a stigma somehow attached to students who didn’t go to college—if you had to “settle” for working after...

(2024) On Nov. 4, Dartmouth Dining began enrolling students in a palm biometric recognition scanner system at the Class of 1953 Commons. Starting this winter term, students will be able to use palm biometric technology to enter the Class of 1953 Commons instead of swiping in with a physical ID card. The biometric technology is created by IDEMIA, a technology company that specializes in biometrics and cryptography. According to Dartmouth Dining director Jon Plodzik, any student who wants to utilize the new system in the winter term can complete the enrollment process by visiting the signup area in ’53 Commons....