During a recent lecture, I purposefully antagonized students. I belittled one student by criticizing him in front of others. I favored another student by telling other students they should be more like her. I responded impatiently to questions. I told one student his contribution to class was incompetent. Yes, I felt like a jerk by […] … learn more→

To embark on a doctorate is to accept to question one’s certainties and achievements to venture on previously unexplored fields. In this face-to-face three to five years at once exciting and challenging that engages with his subject, the young researcher is however not alone. As stated in the decree establishing the national framework for doctoral training in […] … learn more→

It is an intriguing coincidence that just as the Augar Review plunges England into yet another round of introspection on tuition fees, the biggest idea sweeping higher education finance across the globe is one that England itself abandoned for no particularly good reason about a decade ago. Between 1998 and 2006, the headline tuition fee […] … learn more→

“Sub-prime” refers to loans which basically should never be made, because the borrower has no legitimate chance of paying it back. The sub-prime real estate crash of 2008 came very close to revealing the fundamental fraud of the entire economic system, only the last minute printing of trillions of dollars and handing it over to […] … learn more→

According to the recently published Natwest Student Living Index, 64% of university students rated the stress of studying for their degree as seven or above out of ten. Other studies have estimated that up to 82% of UK university students suffer from stress and anxiety, and the number of students dropping out of university due to mental health problems […] … learn more→

Turning your PhD into a book is a mark of success in many disciplines, especially the humanities. Many people pursue this goal immediately upon finishing their PhD as part of an overall academic career strategy. I didn’t have to, because I already had a job and I wanted to start building a research reputation in […] … learn more→

“Discover what your professors never taught you in school,” an American white supremacist group’s website declares. Many of the site’s “education” links lead, predictably, to neo-Nazi and right-wing extremist publications. But tucked in-between a description of “white identity” and “the perils of diversity” is a link to Robert Putnam’s mainstream scholarly treatise, Bowling Alone – […] … learn more→

When nonprofit colleges and universities get federal funding for research and to support students, do government regulations make it difficult to fulfill their missions? As a professor who studies the organizational performance of nonprofits and government agencies, I’ve tried to understand if accepting that money has any downsides in terms of the main mission of many […] … learn more→

The suggestion that we should ditch assessed essays would once have been decried as heresy. Essays have been the mainstay of higher education assessment for many years, especially in the humanities, and have traditionally been thought of as the best way to assess a student’s ability to digest the literature on the topic in question […] … learn more→

Each year various magazines and newspapers publish college rankings in an attempt to inform parents and prospective students which colleges are supposedly the best. U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges” – perhaps the most influential of these rankings – first appeared in 1983. Since then, many other rankings have emerged, assessing colleges and universities on cost, […] … learn more→