The defining characteristic of a bubble is unsustainable growth that eventually reverses. Bubbles typically arise when uncertainty leads to unsustainable trends, and the authors argue that there are two areas in which higher education has experienced what appear to be unsustainable trends, namely, college costs (the costs to students, parents, and…

The author expresses his doubt that the general higher education bubble will burst anytime soon. Although tuition, student housing, and book costs have all increased substantially, he believes it is still likely that the federal government will continue to pour billions into higher education, largely because Americans have been persuaded that it…

This author is best known for her 1998 book "Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism," in which she defended a woman's right to choose the role of homemaker, despite feminists' depiction of this role as parasitic and inferior. In this article, Graglia revisits these themes, and explains why she feels that many of the attributes of the…

Liberal education has been disappearing, and what remains is diminished and compromised. At Temple University, the largest department in the college of liberal arts is criminal justice. The second largest is counseling psychology, and the humanities disciplines have become left-veering sociology. While islands of traditional learning survive, the…

"Service-learning" has been adopted by many colleges and universities as a way of instilling in students an ethic of community service. Its advocates typically distinguish it from simple volunteering, which lacks an academic component, and from internships, in which students acquire practical skills. The author argues that the rationales for…

In May 2005, university administrators were rudely awakened from their civic slumbers by a "notice of implementation" from the U.S. Department of Education. With little advance comment from the academy, Congress had passed and the President had signed into law a requirement that "each educational institution that receives Federal funds for a…

An article by Lois Roman, which appeared in the December 25, 2005 issue of the "Washington Post" under the title "Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline: Survey's Finding of a Drop in Reading Proficiency Is Inexplicable," gives the results of a study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the story "Only 31…

A report from the National Endowment for the Arts, among much other such research, reveals that literacy is in serious decline in America. Ramifications of this decline extend beyond English and language departments to affect all other disciplines, ultimately raising the question of how a democracy can function when its citizens abandon the…

When the Supreme Court pronounces on race and education it makes headlines. On 28 June 2007 the Supreme Court revealed its long-anticipated decisions on "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and "Meredith v. Jefferson County," proving that maneuvering the minefield of America's race relations is just as difficult…

In this carefully documented essay, Russell K. Nieli outlines the major transformation in American higher education that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Today's research- and vocation-driven private universities began as Christian institutions founded by zealous evangelizers, while public colleges embraced a watered-down version of the…

Three papers are included herein: (1) Pernicious Politicization in Academe (Luann Wright); (2) Victims of the One-Sided Campus (Mike Ratliff); and (3) Advocacy in the College Classroom (Anne D. Neal). Each paper was delivered on April 22, 2006 at a California Association of Scholars conference at the Annenberg School on the campus of the…

James E. Hartley tracks the rise of American Studies early in the twentieth century as a scholarly effort to draw distinctions between American culture and things European. The radical impulse for relevance in the 1960s brought an end to that and to the quaint concept that great books allow an easy summing up of our values and ideals. Professor…

We are universally testing children to see if elementary schools are doing their job. So, too, in high school. Only in college is a person deemed educated merely for having collected enough hours. Open admissions, the absence of a required core, and ubiquitous indoctrination have so devalued those credit hours that today's degree reliably…

Diversity researchers are in demand, Mark Bauerlein explains, because administrators at schools like U-Michigan need all the bogus support they can fabricate. The researchers ask students how they feel about minorities and somehow conjure their answers into a measurement of cognitive development. Those data are gathered and further processed into…

How to civilize our young people? Enforcing a pedagogy of virtue is a waste of time. PC curricula reek of Stalinism. Nor does it make much sense to teach popular culture. The media perform that civilizing function all too well. The goal is to impart wisdom, but you can't know it all, so we talk about it as best we can. Fortunately, writes Robert…