Free Republic

The University of Saint Katherine, a small nonprofit in North San Diego County, recently announced it will close May 18, citing “financial pressure due to unprecedented inflation and rising state-mandated labor costs.” It’s not alone. Nationwide, universities face financial hardships that appear to be getting worse. More than 100 colleges and universities have closed or merged, or announced plans to, over the last eight years, according to a tracker updated this month by Higher Ed Dive. The list, which does not include for-profit colleges and also omits mergers among public institutions, totals 108 since 2016. The closures span the spectrum...

New analysis finds 1 in 4 students in college programs earn less than high school graduates, ten years after enrollment ... Famed former Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort commented on the diminishing value of a college education, after a new report found some college students learned less than high school graduates a decade after their enrollment. College is a "complete waste of time" for most students, ... "If you want to be a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant or something that really requires a degree then yes, you should go to college ... "But all of these other...

Course instructor Jennifer Pollitt claimed the course will help fill in gaps in students' sexual education. Temple University in Pennsylvania has started its first "porn-studies course" this semester, aiming to teach students about sex outside of a moral, "right vs wrong" framework. Additionally, the new course, which has become popular at the school, will serve as a "jumping off point" to talk about woke issues like "race, ability, and the patriarchy," the Business Insider reported after talking to the course’s instructor, Professor Jennifer Pollitt. The Insider piece described the course, titled "Social Perspectives and Digital Pornography: The Other Sex Ed,"...

Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.We haven’t yet reached the spectacle in which woke workplace zealots demand that NBA teams suit up at least one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic player in their starting line-ups, but some private workplaces are coming close. The human resources protocols of one of the world’s largest financial investment firms are taking woke quotas to a surreal new level.According to the Times of London, hiring managers at State Street Global Advisors will need to seek...

American liberal arts colleges used to provide a solid education at fairly low cost. Today, the education is often weak and the cost is astronomical. Professor John Seery of Pomona College offers some reasons why in this piece.

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life. But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous. The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education. Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university. But if the recent examples...

Universities are an ecosystem, and when faculty are poached and grant money dries up, everyone suffers If you’re from Wisconsin, the Friday night fish fry is a big deal, and the fish you want on your plate is a yellow perch you caught yourself. But for years, the population of yellow perch has been in serious decline. Now on the verge of collapse, the future of this iconic fish is looking grim. Kind of like what is happening right now with the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, under siege from a legislative agenda that has been steadily decimating its...

University of the People is a tuition-free online institution that aims to reach all students that wish to obtain a college education. It is fully accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, a national accrediting group. It offers courses that include business administration and computer science programs.

So as conservatives rally behind Cruz for taking on the establishment and doing such a great job trying to prevent the statist from destroying health care, I have figured, soon after it will be time to turn the same attention to the gov't's attempts to take over our education and gov'ts attempts to use education to enslave the people. Student loans are pretty close to being as dire a crisis as saving health care from gov't tyranny. The following are solutions that conservatives have suggested for student loans: 1. Privatize student loans entirely 2. Cap the amount students can borrow...

University of Florida student Michael Joseph Silecchia was wandering around campus apartments when Gainesville police responded to a reports of a suspicious person. When police arrived, Silecchia took his clothes off and said he was “God” and “straight,” according to The Independent Florida Alligator. The student told officers, “Don’t cut my penis off,” then changed his mind and said, “Cut my penis off,” according to the police report. Officers say he also yelled that he had taken acid, the hallucinogenic drug LSD, though police haven't confirmed if Silecchia was under the influence at the time. Silecchia was told several times...

Over the past 10 years, I have written columns variously titled "Academic Cesspools," "Academic Dishonesty," "The Shame of Higher Education," "Academic Rot" and "Indoctrination of Our Youth." Therefore, I was not surprised by David Feith's April 5th Wall Street Journal article, "The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World." In it, Feith tells of a golf course conversation between Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein. Klingenstein voiced disapproval of campus celebration of diversity and ethnic differences while there's "not enough celebration of our common American identity." Because Klingenstein wouldn't help finance the...

Our children’s opportunities to learn based on technological advances has been more than offset by the loss of appreciation of literature and the humanities – including history, theology, philosophy and even economics. Our old friend Jon T. Barton, a classical violinist wrote an 800 page 2 volume work called “The Bible in Western Literature.” He co-authored with attorney John Whitehead a 1981 book, “Schools on Fire” – a prophetic work warning of the now deplorable and unnecessarily expensive condition of American education. I met a young man recently with a degree in “Environmental Studies” from screwball UCal/Santa Cruz, home of...

Author’s Note: If you are concerned about this kind of spending in higher education, please contact Governor Pat McCrory at http://www.governor.state.nc.us/. His remarks about liberal arts education have been right on target. He gets it. I think the time has come for a line item veto in higher education. The people of North Carolina are being bankrupted by higher education spending that is simply not academic in nature. The problem was once confined to UNC’s flagship campus in Chapel Hill. But now it has spread like a cancer throughout the entire UNC system. For example, this week (February 4-8,...

"No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don't have the money," President Barack Obama told the Democratic National Convention as he accepted his party's nomination in Charlotte, N.C., this month. That sentence -- key in Obama's "college affordability" agenda -- says everything about this administration's approach to selling itself to the American voter. What's wrong with the message? Let me count the ways. --It ignores reality. There is no reason a qualified poor kid cannot get into college in the United States simply because of money. Richard J. Vedder, director of Ohio University's Center...

For the first time, young Hispanics outnumber blacks on college campuses. A study released today by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that enrollment of Hispanic students aged 18 to 24 rose by 24 percent in a single year, reaching 1.8 million in October 2010. That’s 349,000 new Hispanic students. By contrast, black enrollment rose by 88,000 and Asian American enrollment rose by 43,000. White enrollment declined by 320,000. These crisscrossing numbers amplify the shift in the overall makeup of the college population. There are now 1.8 million Hispanics enrolled in American colleges, 1.7 million blacks and 800,000 Asians. White enrollment...

The link I posted is to Part One. This talk, held at the University of California, Berkeley, contains 7 parts. Each part is about 11 minutes or so long, so once the NCAA games are over, and you take a break from your tax preparation, give it a listen. It's not a particularly visual report; you can put it on in the background while doing other things.

Felix Salmon was nice enough to pick up my recent post on the Creative Economy (Note: Felix blogs for Reuters and I am doing video commentaries for the new Reuters Insider service, which makes us colleagues of a sort). However, he does put in a plug for a college education: The long-term trend is inescapable: the returns to education are large and growing, and if you’re not a college graduate and you don’t own your own company, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. He’s certainly right about the long-term trend, and I’m paying big bucks to put...