You’ve made it- your PhD is bright and shiny, so now getting a scholarly career off the ground should be easy right? Well, as many of you know, not necessarily. Many departments in tertiary institutions are suffering from budgets slashed to ribbons and there are fewer and fewer jobs out there for early career lecturers/researchers, […] … learn more→

Britain’s university entrance system, in which students are selected based on their academic grades, is the main reason why efforts to widen access to higher education beyond the country’s upper and middle classes have had only modest success. In England, 18-year-olds from the most advantaged areas are still three times more likely to enter higher […] … learn more→

Amplify, a much-heralded push by News Corporation into digital education, led by Joel Klein, a former New York City schools chancellor, is nearing an inglorious end. News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, said on Wednesday that it would take a $371 million write-down on the education division and would move to wind down the production […] … learn more→

It is no secret: Culture in the West has become progressively more practical, materially oriented, and skeptical. When I look out at my students, I see people who are in the process of choosing a way to make money and succeed, a strategy for getting on in life. We’re more and more a worldly, money-based […] … learn more→

On Monday, we got some color on Hillary Clinton’s $350 billion plan to make college more affordable.  As we recently noted, students and former students across the country owe more than $1.2 trillion in college loans – doled out by our government in the name of helping high school graduates further their education, and as […] … learn more→

With tens of millions of people now being victims of student loans, the country is finally starting to ask “Who created the victims?” A recent article examines how the student loan scam has transferred wealth from human beings that can’t afford to lose their wealth, but fails to manage to find any human beings responsible […] … learn more→

Since the 2008 “Digital Education Revolution”, when the government funded laptops for secondary school students, there has been a growing impetus to increase young people’s screen time both in school and for homework at home. Now that the government funding has ceased, schools are moving toward “Bring Your Own Device” policies so that students can […] … learn more→

Phyllis Wise, former chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, issued a statement claiming the board of trustees of the University of Illinois reneged on a promise to pony up $400,000 upon her resignation that took effect on August 12. She claims the $400,000 that she had negotiated with new President Timothy Killeen, was […] … learn more→

More on trigger warnings. Here\’s a good piece from The New Republic. If you take away the media hysteria surrounding trigger warnings, you’re left with a mode of conversational priming that we all use: “You might want to sit down for this”; “I’m not sure how to say this, but…” It’s hardly anti-intellectual or emotionally […] … learn more→

Getting a degree wasted five years of my life. I got an undergraduate degree in Computer Science in three years. Then I went to graduate school for Computer Science but was thrown out after two years after failing four courses in a row. I wrote three or four novels during that time. Which had nothing […] … learn more→