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.

Continue reading "The Cheating and Fraud at Claremont McKenna" »

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?

Continue reading "How To Bridge the Educational Divide" »

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.

Continue reading "12 More Law Schools Sued for Defrauding Students" »

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.

Continue reading "Media "Watchdogs" Foul Up the Mess at Yale" »

The Chronicle of Higher Education had a cover story last week by Peter Schmidt on Angana P. Chatterji and Richard Shapiro, two anthropology professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies who have been fired, according to the school, because "they had breached student confidence, falsified grades, misapplied funds, and otherwise engaged in unprofessional conduct, generally to ensure the loyalty and obedience of those they taught and advised."

Continue reading "The Worst College Professors Ever?" »

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.

Continue reading "Our College Graduation Rate Doesn't Matter" »

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.

Continue reading "Will The NY Times Apologize to Patrick Witt?" »