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How to judge a college? USA Today - Opinion August 31, 2010 College rankings are not evil. Students and families need information. But the rankings game is on the verge of parodying itself. Worse, it threatens to drive strategic decisions on campuses in ways that have little to do with what should be important.

In college, students can explore new possibilities Morning Call, Allentown, Pa. - Opinion Piece August 30, 2010 As freshmen, you have arrived on campus, fully formed, intellectually mature, with impeccable values and perfect judgment.  Just kidding.  You are not in college because you already know everything you need to know but because you are unfinished. In college you will live with, work with, argue with, and perhaps even fall in love with people whose norms and worldviews are very different from your own.  This is extremely hard work - and it is normal for anxious people to retreat into the reassuring womb of those deeply embedded certainties with which your upbringing has equipped them.  But this is what you must not do.

Expand students' global experiences Politico - Opinion Piece August 24, 2010 Through a federal Higher Education Act grant program called cooperative education programs, Northeastern University is doing its part to meet President Obama's goal for the US to have the highest number of college graduates in the world by 2020. Cooperative education, or co-op programs, offer students alternate classroom studies with long-term, paid internships in a wide array of settings. Northeastern University president believes the co-op experience offer students a competitive advantage by helping them master the demands of the professional workplace.

Why Johnny’s College Isn’t What It Used to Be New Yokr Times - Book Review August 19, 2010 In Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have written a lucid, passionate and wide-ranging book on the state of American higher education and what they perceive as its increasing betrayal of its primary mission - for them, the teaching of undergraduates. That both are academics provides them with memorable, often acerbic anecdotes that neatly offset their citations of statistics and (it must be said) their sometimes rather sweeping generalizations.

College Costs Are Dollars Well Spent U.S. News & World Report - Opinion Piece August 17, 2010 At our best private institutions, if you can't afford the sticker price, you won't pay it. These colleges and universities are deeply committed to bringing the most promising young scholars to campus, no matter their families' wealth or income.  In fact, they are more committed than ever. Even in the face of the Great Recession, the nation's top private research universities and liberal arts colleges are awarding larger financial aid packages to more students. Over the past five years, the median need-based aid grant at those schools has increased in size by a third; more than half of last year's freshmen received aid.

College consumers should compare track records Erie, Pa., Times-News - Opinion Piece July 13, 2010 As with any investment, borrowing for a college education should be done carefully and with knowledge of the market. This has been particularly true for those who plan to borrow to attend for-profit colleges.  It is, of course, unfair to paint the for-profit college sector with a broad brush. There are excellent for-profit institutions that provide a solid education and do an excellent job of training people.  However, it behooves everyone who is interested in attending for-profit colleges to carefully review tuition and loan requirements, and to seek hard data on the employment rate of graduates.

Protect Unpaid Internships Inside Higher Ed July 13, 2010 In April, the Department of Labor crafted a six-part "test" that employers, students and colleges must satisfy to ensure that unpaid internships qualify as legal. Among the six criteria is that "The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern."  Whether or not the Labor Department's proposal would have a direct impact on most college internships is the subject of debate.   However, just the threat of increased regulation could have a chilling effect on the willingness of employers to offer internships - paid or unpaid.

Good and Risky: the Promise of a Liberal Education Chronicle of Higher Education - Opinion Piece July 11, 2010 Notwithstanding their theoretical and ideological differences, the scholars cited here all urge that we not abandon the humanistic foundations of education in favor of narrow, technical forms of learning intended to give quick, practical results. It's an important and timely plea because the pursuit of so-called useful educational results continues apace, and because the threats to humanistic education are indeed profound. But "uncritical groupthink," to use Nussbaum's phrase, isn't to be found only among the test designers evaluating No Child Left Behind statistics. Groupthink can also be found in humanities departments.

For-Profits Buying Nonprofits: Salvation or Suicide? Chronicle of Higher Education - Opinion Piece July 7, 2010 Mergers and acquisitions are occurring with greater frequency now as a byproduct of the continuing global recession. Why would nonprofit organizations be immune to the laws of solvency and fiscal responsibility?  Ultimately, the possibility of such mergers and acquisitions does not augur well for the future of higher education as we know it. Whether we recognize it or not, we risk eroding the academic quality that has made our higher-education system the most desirable in the world. It is one of our country's greatest assets.

Liberal arts are more relevant than ever Rockford, Ill., Register Star July 3, 2010 I enjoyed an undergraduate education at a small private college in Ohio that is grounded in the liberal arts. Those having this experience recognize the outcomes of enabling critical and creative thinking, developing social responsibility and spurring a desire for lifelong learning. Joseph Urgo, dean of the faculty at Hamilton College (N.Y.) summarized in his recent article “Concerning Value: A Small College Liberal Arts Education” in University Business magazine, that the value of a liberal arts education, like the value of life itself, “cannot be monetized.”

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