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Employers across a range of industries are dropping a job requirement once considered a ticket to a higher paying job and financial security: a college degree. Today's tight labor market has led more companies instead to take a more skills-based approach to hiring, as evidenced on job search sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter. "Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that," Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director...

Bureaucracy raises the cost of higher education while clamping down on speech.. Ignited by Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel, divisive domestic conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have driven a new wave of campus censorship. But the problem of stifled speech on campus for both students and faculty has been around long before Oct. 7. ... 1 in 10 college students say they have been threatened with disciplinary action – or worse, actually disciplined – for their speech. ... About one in six professors report that they have either been threatened with punishment or actually investigated for their academic freedom or...

Approximately 20.4 million students headed off to college campuses in the United States last year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And of those 20.4 million, it's a good bet that, come course selection morning, about 20.3 million weighed just how fun a class in calculus or Renaissance poetry would actually be. Yes, it's no secret that some college courses can be rote and—dare we say—total snoozers. But the flip side is also true!Digging through the curriculum guides of American universities will reveal a treasure trove of fun, exciting, downright ridiculous-sounding courses. In other words: If you've ever...

Well, this is undoubtedly a net positive! Yesterday, The Daily Mail reported that the “sun is setting on liberal professors in the Sunshine State” as Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke initiatives in education have begun to take effect. From the article:The sun is setting on liberal professors in the Sunshine State as Ron DeSantis’s war on woke starts to bite, with some accusing the governor of ‘open hostility’ to higher education. Turnover has jumped by a quarter in the last two years at the University of Florida after a slew of new laws cracked down on diversity, trans rights and jobs for...

This is not a good time for American higher education, but as bad as this may seem, matters are even worse. The students themselves are part of the problem when they seek admission to top schools with tactics that are at best questionable and at worst dishonest. Dishonesty is rampant. Students will even misrepresent their race or ethnicity. This is hardly a surprise in today’s academic world that prizes diversity, and admissions officers willingly lower standards to achieve it. According to one study, some 34% of white students admitted lying about their ethnic identify for purposes of admission or financial...

1: Michigan 2: Washington 3: Texas 4: 'Bama

The Nightmare in Grapevine is upon us. What is often a formality — making four obvious choices for the four-team College Football Playoff — is anything but for the committee this year. The 13-member group, huddled in a hotel in Grapevine, Texas, will have to make the most consequential and controversial decision in its 10-year existence — and in the final season before the playoff expands to 12 teams. Their decision will be revealed at noon Sunday on ESPN. Big Ten champion Michigan (13-0) and Pac-12 champion Washington (13-0) are assumed to be safely in. They’ll almost assuredly be the...

We are now well into the 2023-2024 school year and many high school seniors are either finalizing their college application plans or have already done so. But some of those plans are now changing at the last moment. This is particularly true in Jewish families and those of people who are closely affiliated with them. After seeing the massive outbreaks of antisemitic activism and even violence taking place, particularly at Ivy League schools, some Jewish students have withdrawn their names from consideration at universities such as Harvard. Once seen as the crème de la crème of collegiate destinations, the institution...

A dead longhorn cow was found on the lawn of an Oklahoma State University fraternity house Friday morning, a day before a championship game between the school and the Texas Longhorns football team. The longhorn carcass was found around 6:39 a.m. in the front yard of the university’s FarmHouse fraternity, a spokesperson for the Stillwater Police Department told CNN. The case is being investigated by the department, said spokesperson Terry Low. The person responsible could face an an animal cruelty charge, at minimum, which is a felony, Low said.

Just days after Hamas’s brutal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, students around the country shocked observers with their condemnation of the state of Israel and full-throated support for Palestinians and Hamas. At Harvard, students wrote that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and called for “a firm stand against colonial retaliation.” Student protesters around the country chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for the elimination of Israel. The organization responsible for many such statements and protests is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which describes itself as a...

The latest ranking of America’s best universities is here, perfectly timed for the approaching admissions season.“Best” is of course subjective, and U.S. News and World Report has compiled 19 metrics on which they evaluated more than 400 national universities. Some of them include:Graduation rates & performance: A four-year rolling average of the proportion of each entering class earning a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. Performance is measured against predictions made by the publishers, and when beaten, the university gains a higher scoring.Peer assessment: A two-year weighted average of ratings from top academics—presidents, provosts and deans of admissions—on academic...

Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed. And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November. It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans. The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12806053/companies-ax-college-bachelors-degree-requirements-walmart.html

For years, there has been an ever-widening gap between the values and behaviors of contemporary America (“the Real World”) and those on college campuses (“the Ivory Tower”). Since, ultimately, the Ivory Tower is dependent on the Real World for the resources necessary to conduct its operations, whenever universities engage in behaviors that are perceived as outrageously inappropriate, they jeopardize their special status as highly subsidized academic villages. Virtually every university in the United States is dependent on the broader public for the money needed to pay the bills. Yet polling has demonstrated a sharp decline in public support for universities....

An exclusively female Catholic college will now allow men who identify as women to enroll, with the school's revised non-discrimination policy stating that an "inclusive campus experience" is essential to empowering women through education.Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, will allow men who present themselves as women to apply for undergraduate admission in the fall of 2024. Notre Dame's student newspaper, The Observer, first reported the news about the change last Tuesday. College President Katie Conboy told the faculty in an email last Tuesday that the institution will consider trans-identifying applicants. However, the school is still considering how to...

As anti-Israel protesters swarmed college campuses, MIT president Sally Kornbluth drew a line in the sand: Any student engaged in an unsanctioned protest would face expulsion. On Nov. 9, students decided to try their luck and hold a "die-in" at a campus location that explicitly bars protests. Kornbluth said the demonstration got so heated that she feared it "could lead to violence," but she did not enforce her prohibition. Students involved in the protest simply received a "non-academic suspension," a slap on the wrist that allows them to continue attending class. Kornbluth's about-face was an attempt to protect foreign students,...

The New York Times is on a tear about “economic diversity.” It’s got a naughty-and-nice list, defined by the number of students with Pell Grants, and it’s stapled a scarlet A (for Affluent) to Duke University, which hasn’t managed to buy as many Pell mascots as its peers. The Times has sent out the memo: Get on the economic-diversity bandwagon now! The call for “economic diversity” is yet another sign of colleges abandoning the pursuit of educational excellence. But even if you do think colleges should serve an economic purpose—and public universities, at the very least, ought to provide taxpayers...

It was a Saturday of scares to end the 2023 college football regular season. No. 2 Michigan held on to beat No. 3 Ohio State by six thanks to a late interception. No. 8 Alabama needed a miracle fourth-down conversion to avoid an upset by unranked Auburn. No. 4 Washington had to have a field goal as time expired to stay undefeated. No. 5 Florida State overcame a 12-0 deficit at Florida to move to 12-0. Outside of No. 10 Louisville's loss to Kentucky, there weren't any surprising results at the top of the College Football Playoff rankings in Week...

In August, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) filed an amicus brief alongside the faculty union of Nevada public universities in support of the gender-discrimination claims of Alice Wieland, a former University of Nevada, Reno, business professor. Wieland, whose research is on gender discrimination, claimed that her tenure committee based its decision on her poor teaching evaluations from students, which reflected not her teaching but widespread sexism against women. The lower court tossed the case out on summary judgement. Wieland appealed, and the AAUP jumped in. In the brief, the AAUP insists that “a sizeable corpus of empirical research...

TV host Mike Rowe said that eight years ago, he was switching the news channels on his television and saw several college students setting fire to the American flag and dancing around a pile of burning flags. They were telling reporters in interviews they were disgusted with Old Glory and “fearful” of the flag. “It wasn’t lost on me in the moment that all of these events were happening at what is considered the best of the best elite universities across the country,” Rowe told me. Among supposedly non-elite students, though, the situation wasn’t and isn’t as bad. Rowe said...

Once a rarity, research fraud is on the rise at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. What is most disturbing is that the fraud in question too often involves tenured professors with sterling reputations who betray the public’s trust. Most recently, the venue was Florida State University, where Professor Eric Stewart was terminated for “research misconduct” and for the unprecedented number of his articles that were retracted. Next in line was the City University of New York, which found “egregious misconduct” in data management and recordkeeping on the part of Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor in its School of Medicine...