The tax bill approved by Congress and signed into law by President Trump last December included a precedent-setting provision that deserves much more attention outside higher education circles, even though it initially has direct impact on only 32 institutions.  The bill includes a 1.4% excise tax on investment income at private colleges with an enrollment […]

At the beginning of the year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released its ninth annual survey and guide for college academic standards ratings known as What Will They Learn?  ACTA analyzed publicly-available course catalogs of over 1,100 public and private four-year institutions to survey which of these put a well-designed core curriculum […]

The leadership of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, an organization that represents 47 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), is coming into contact with reality and it isn’t pretty.  The push for “diversity” in college admissions, led by the failed policy of affirmative action, is resulting in the cannibalization of the admission pools of these […]

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos found a couple of ways to meaningfully step forward over the past few weeks.  First, and most important for correcting bad policy, she struck a blow for due process by withdrawing the lawless Obama administration directive about how colleges should adjudicate sexual assault accusations on campus.  The 2011 directive will […]

Several years ago, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter spoke at the New Hampshire School of Law on the subject of what he called “civic ignorance”, in which he said, “I don’t worry about our losing our republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion, I don’t worry about it […]

As printed in the Wall Street Journal, an excerpt from Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn’s remarks at the Atlanta National Leadership Seminar, February 15: Why would a bunch of 19-year olds rage and take over college campuses?  The answer is they have been taught to do that in the classroom where they are taught….that their […]

The silencing of social scientist Charles Murray at a scheduled speech at Middlebury College in Vermont and the response to it seem to have legs unlike most recent free speech violations.  Daniel Henninger has called it “a major event in the annals of free speech” and there have been several very striking essays in response […]

It should by now be obvious to most reasonable observers that left wing censorship has put higher education in a position that threatens to destroy our best universities.  The recent outbursts at California – Berkeley and New York University, supposedly protests against invited speakers, are merely the latest evidence of the totalitarianism that has been […]

The Texas Association of Business and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce are touting a new resource to add significant transparency to the costs and benefits of various degree plans in higher education.  The name of the initiative is Launch My Career, a web site built and maintained by College Measures.  The site calculates how […]

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, […]