Donald Trump, the most perplexing candidate for the GOP presidential nomination this cycle, doesn’t think the federal government should profit from federal student loans. “[It’s] one of the only things the government shouldn’t make money off,” Trump told The Hill in July, saying that students in college are “doing well but they’ve got student loans […] … learn more→

Once servers loaded with information about who we talk to, where we go, what we do, what we buy, which websites we visit, how we behave on them, etc. Edward Snowden got in a huge amount of trouble for hinting us the level of surveillance watching over us. It can feel pretty creepy and oddly […] … learn more→

Last month, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square. It was the first time we’d met in person; he first emailed me nearly two years earlier, and we eventually created an encrypted channel to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden would disclose overreaching mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and […] … learn more→

November is academic writing month (AcWriMo) – an annual academic write-a-thon aimed at uniting people around the world by a common goal of developing better and sustainable writing habits. It is just one of a number of research writing events to have gained traction in the US and Australia in particular over the last five […] … learn more→

I’ve covered a few times the adjunctification of higher education, which is the replacement of full time faculty by “temporary workers” with no benefits, minimal pay, and the expectation that these temporary workers will remain as such indefinitely. I’ve also covered a few times how much administration really, really, wants to get rid of faculty, […] … learn more→

Amid all the talk about fixing accreditation, a new education consultancy based in Silicon Valley is proposing a new model for assessing educational quality. The model, from Entangled Solutions, calls for evaluating traditional institutions and other education providers based on students’ opinions of the programs once they’ve left, and on “valid, reliable, and appropriate” tests […] … learn more→

Learning and education can be impacted by a variety of different things. Often sports are dissected to the most simple of levels so each and every fundamental can be worked on individually or combined with another fundamental. These fundamentals then become so ingrained in the athlete’s brain that they seem to come naturally when the […] … learn more→

As I wrote in my last column, Washington University in St. Louis is in the midst of a five-year plan to become more socioeconomically diverse. The university plans spend at least $25 million a year for five years to increase the share of students receiving Pell Grants, the government’s primary source of aid for financially […] … learn more→

In the years after South Africa became a democracy, the country’s universities began a tough process of change. They worked to improve access for students across the board of race and gender. They introduced a number of “accelerated development” programs designed to diversify their staff bodies. It was correctly deemed important that universities did not […] … learn more→

One way of predicting the future is to look back at the past. The global role English plays today as a lingua franca – used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages – has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe. Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical […] … learn more→