Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts school nestled in the foothills on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County, dishonored itself and defrauded the public in a cheap effort to bolster its national rankings in U.S. News and World Report. But if that weren't bad enough, Claremont's deception calls into question the very worth of its students, faculty, and graduates.

Richard Vos, Claremont's dean of admissions for 25 years, resigned in disgrace this week after admitting to systematically manipulating the college's SAT scores since 2005. Vos evidently altered the mean, median, and range of SAT scores to boost the college's position on the influential list of college rankings.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal plugging his new book "Coming Apart" (which I haven't read yet), Charles Murray writes about a new American divide: "We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions."

Conservatives like Richard Vedder see this as the inevitable result, not of a system rigged to favor the elite, but of bad government policies, particularly in education: because of government-sponsored grants and students loans, too many people are in college who shouldn't be there; decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and other legislative actions have virtually eliminated employment testing, which paved the way for certification inflation and the need for a college degree; laws protecting labor unions have virtually allowed them to put a choke-hold on the K-12 public school system.

These points have merit. But will less (or no) government support and more "vouchers and other pro-competitive measures" at all levels of education reverse the decline of real opportunities that Professor Vedder finds so disheartening? Should the free market determine who has access to higher education and can advance economically, culturally, even socially?

Cross-posted from Open Market.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just "sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates 'burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.' The lawyers . . . said they planned to file 20 to 25 new lawsuits every few months . . . the lawsuits had been filed on behalf of a total of 51 graduates, and each suit was seeking class-action status. The targets of the latest round of lawsuits" include  "Brooklyn Law School (N.Y.)," "Chicago-Kent College of Law," DePaul University College of Law," "Golden Gate University School of Law," "Hofstra Law School," "University of San Francisco School of Law," "Widener University School of Law," and several others.

In an ideal world, Richard Perez-Pena and the New York Times would have been subjected to widespread condemnation, even shame, for the character-assassination frame the paper gave to the Patrick Witt story. Kathleen Parker, most prominently, has spoken with moral clarity on the issue, translating the Times argument as, "We don't know anything, but we're smearing this guy anyway." But far more common have been defenses of the Times--or even claims that the Times should have done more to portray Witt in a negative light.

In his January 29 Forum piece, Peter Sacks says that I engaged in "nitpicking" in a blog post expressing disdain for President Obama's higher education agenda. He's free to call my skeptical view about federal initiatives to lower the costs of college whatever he wants. But in my opinion, it is naive to believe politicians (not just Obama) when they claim that they are going to make any good or service less costly. That's just glittering rhetoric.

Mr. Sacks does raise some important issues in his piece, however and I'd like to address them.

The denouement of the Times' coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom Jolly apologized for the paper's guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it's become clear that the Times' mishandling of the Witt story was, in two specific ways, even worse than originally believed.

Cross-posted from Open Market.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble.  This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions.

For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to comply with a new federal regulation requiring them to charge enough over federal financial aid so that at least 10 percent of education costs don't come from financial aid.  For example, Corinthian College had diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a year or less.  Until 2011, many of those programs had a total cost of about $15,000, which meant that federal grants and loans could cover nearly 100 percent of their cost.  In response to the Education Department's rule, the college raised tuition to comply with the 90/10 rule.  The net result of the Obama Education Department's rule was to "create a perverse, no-win 'Catch-22' that could prevent low-income students from attending college," by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising financial aid by more than ten percent.  Administration allies like Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) are now pushing a new rule, the 85-15 rule, that would require low-cost institutions to further raise tuition so that at least 15 percent of education costs aren't covered by financial aid.  (With this kind of mentality, it is no wonder that college graduation rates have actually "fallen somewhat since the 1970s" "among poor and working-class students").

Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties organizations against the Obama administration's infamous "Dear Colleague" letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities receiving federal funds employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard (in other words, a 50.1 percent degree of certainty) to determine guilt on allegations of sexual assault.

Given that campus judicial procedures already are tilted, often wildly so, in favor of sexual-complaint accusers, the letter has produced a guilty-unless-proven-innocent standard for accused students. In at least one case, that of Caleb Warner at the University of North Dakota, the standard (before FIRE's involvement) amounted to guilty even when proved innocent by the local police.

Mark Emmert, the head of the NCAA, is a man with a mission. A series of unprecedented scandals has eroded confidence in big-time college sports. In fact, some critics contend the NCAA is an enabler that is compromised by the billions of dollars colleges earn through football and basketball programs. Mr. Emmert is intent on changing that perception.

Some contend that the so-called student-athlete should be paid and, at the very least, have called for "extra money" for athletes. Others argue that those who violate recruitment regulations and the maintenance of minimal academic standards should be prohibited from Bowl games and March Madness tournament participation. With 338 Division I members, whose budgets range from $5 million to $155 million consensus is not easily achieved. And some, Joe Nocera of the New York Times for example, contend that "Many NCAA infractions consist of actions that most people would consider perfectly appropriate - and entirely legal - but that the NCAA has chosen to criminalize."

An overwhelming majority of provosts agreed--71 percent from public doctorate universities, 72 percent from public masters universities, and 65 percent from private doctorate universities. This finding is important, not because it marks a major trend of recent times, but because of the opposite--at least that is the case in my area, the humanities. The rising standards have been in place since the mid-1970s, when the job market started to tighten up after massive hirings in the late-60s and early-70s. When I came out of grad school and hit the job market in the late-80s--a bad time to look for a tenure-track post--I and my peers grumbled about how little sympathy we got from 50-year-old professors who were able to snag a job before they even finished their dissertation, and were able to earn tenure by completing their dissertation and publishing an article or two.

That question was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC Johnson's excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians.  It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant financial-business-political site, The Fiscal Times, and my youngest daughter Alex, a technical whiz at Reuters, have been telling me (a dedicated non-techie) that to attract comments on Facebook and other social media sites, it's always best to start with a question. Sure enough, my item drew a lot of comments. The  15th and best came from Alan Charles Kors, an outstanding professor of history at Penn, co-founder of FIRE and co-author of "The Shadow University." He wrote: " Not the most corrupted department on campuses---try English, Comp Lit, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, and on---but the most tragically corrupted department." I agree--his list is worse. But history matters and reform of our wayward history departments is urgent.

A recent study by Harvard's School of Public Health concludes that a third of all American campuses are now officially "dry"--no beer or booze allowed for students. This policy has drawn a lot of support from those who believe it creates communities less focused on drinking. But opponents claim it forces binge-drinking underground, restricts student freedom, and probably will prove no more effective than the original Prohibition of 1919 to 1933.