The Five Biggest College Myths | The Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance

One of them being that community college is for losers.

Why I hate school but love education

Pop Quiz: Why Are Tuitions So High? | Investor's Business Daily

Hint: Think Division of Highways.

The Higher-Education Bubble Has Popped | Mises Daily

Like the tech and housing bubbles before it, higher education has been fueled by cheap credit says Doug French.

A warning to college parents and grandparents | The Daily Caller

Academia today bears no resemble to either "Animal House" or "The Paper Chase" and that's not good says Robert Shibley.

Academically Adrift: How College Students and Professors Aren't Making the Grade | Ideas In Action

The Education Bubble Is Fuel for Revolt | Mises Daily

What happened in Tunisia and Egypt could be in the works for the U.S. says Joshua Fulton.

Overthrow the Universities (and the Public Schools, too) | The Lew Rockwell Show

162. Overthrow the Universities (and the Public Schools, too)

What's wrong with the American university system? | The Atlantic

Plenty say Queens College professor Andrew Hacker and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus in their new book "Higher Education?: Why Colleges Are Wasting Our Money, Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It."

Dear University Alumni Office | LewRockwell.com

Recent grad student takes alumni office to school on economics.

Is a college degree still worth it? | latimes.com

Economists, and students, are having their doubts.

College Degrees More Expensive, Worth Less in Job Market | Yahoo! News

The four-year-degree glut has officially arrived

Why College Could Be a Bad Investment-Minyanville

'Critical thinking shouldn't cost $200,000'

M.I.T. Calls Academia's Bluff by Gary North

How the Internet has provided a low-cost way of getting a "higher" education

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College Is a Rip-Off

The Degree-System, That Is, Not Higher Learning

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Colleges Flunk Economics Test as Harvard Model Destroys Budgets

by Yalman Onaran

On a Thursday morning in March, the $32 million School of Management building at Simmons College in Boston is all but deserted. Three students lounge in armchairs facing floor-to-ceiling windows that look over the quad with its winding walkways and greening lawn; another makes photocopies.

“This building is always empty,” says Raya Alazzouni, a sophomore from Saudi Arabia who’s studying graphic design and taking courses in the management school.

Simmons, home to 4,700 students, opened the 66,500-square- foot (6,200-square-meter) center in January, two months before the U.S. stock market hit its lowest point in 12 years. Even before the ribbon cutting, enrollment in the management school had been dropping.

Now, the vacant halls are reminders of the new math confounding U.S. colleges. Students, pummeled by scarce loans and savings plans that have fallen as much as 40 percent, are heading for less expensive schools. The perks designed to lure them during boom times -- from hot tubs to dorm-suite kitchenettes, to in-room cable TV -- are crushing universities with debt. Even projects like Simmons’s “green” management building, with its rain-absorbing roof patio and toilets with two flushing modes, can turn into burdens as schools struggle with rising expenses, plummeting endowments and needier applicants.

For more on this story, go to Bloomberg.com

FIRE's open letter to Pres Obama on speech codes

January 20, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Sent via U.S. Mail and Facsimile (202-456-2461)

Dear President Obama:

I write to you on this historic day to offer my heartfelt congratulations on your inauguration. Your achievement is a testament to the enduring promise of our great democracy and the constitutional ideals upon which our nation was founded.

As President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), I write also to request your assistance in ending abridgements of free speech on our nation's college campuses. Because you have taught constitutional law, you are particularly attuned to the importance of the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. We therefore sincerely hope that you will help to eliminate censorship on college campuses and restore respect for robust expression in higher education.

Like most Americans, you likely would be surprised to learn how often the right to free expression is violated at our nation's colleges and universities, despite the fact that the vitality of these institutions relies upon the free and open exchange of ideas. In just the last year, FIRE has defended basic constitutional freedoms in some truly remarkable cases at both public and private schools.

To read the rest of this letter, go to FIRE's Web site

Are universities above the law?

by Peter Berkowitz

Three lawsuits--against Dartmouth College and Duke and Princeton universities--may be the best things to happen to higher education in decades. The Dartmouth suit, though recently withdrawn, focused attention on the role of alumni in college affairs. The Duke case raises the question of the extent to which courts will require universities to observe their own rules and regulations. The Princeton case puts at issue the enforceability of restricted gifts. All three expose the often opaque governing structures under which colleges and universities operate and bring into focus the need for transparency and accountability in higher education.More than the scope of universities' legal responsibilities is at stake here. That's because upholding the rule of law on campus can contribute to the reform of university governance--and the reform of university governance is an indispensable precondition for the restoration of a liberal education -worthy of the name.

For more on this article, go to The Weekly Standard

Why Wal-Mart should get into higher ed

by Gary North

I earned my Ph.D. in 1972. What I am about to describe is academically feasible. It is surely economically feasible.

Wal-Mart should start a college. As with virtually all colleges, it would be called a university. Why? Because of higher perceived value by the consumers.

Why should Wal-Mart bother? Here is a good reason. The total expenditure in the United States on higher education is in the range of a third of a trillion dollars a year. That is a great deal of money. Wal-Mart is not a company to let a large profit opportunity drift by.

You would be hard-pressed to find any industry with this level of income that is less efficient than higher education. If Wal-Mart gets into the field, this will change.

Wal-Mart could offer far lower tuition than any other private university, and lower than 80% of tax-funded universities. All it needs to do is offer what is already available, but which almost no one knows about.

For more on this op/ed, go to LewRockwell.com