The small Scottish town of St Andrews is home to one of the UK’s oldest and most highly regarded universities. The University of St Andrews has grown very rapidly in recent years, witnessing a threefold expansion in student numbers between 2002 and 2017. Today, there are 9,000 full-time students matriculated in a town with a […] … learn more→

Thursday the Department of Education made an announcement about the nearly 100,000 borrowers who have been waiting at least a year for the Department to consider their borrower defense to repayment claims: A whopping 21,000 or so of them will finally get an answer. In total, the Department officially approved 12,900 claims for former Corinthian Colleges students, […] … learn more→

The “unstoppable machine”. That is how Yiannis Gabriel, one of the UK’s leading social thinkers, labelled the academic-publishing complex in a recent piece for Times Higher Education (“We must rescue social science research from obscurity”, Opinion, August 10). His ire was directed, in particular, at social science research, which he sees as falling into aimless, […] … learn more→

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how our campuses are being mismanaged. Yes, many administrators have (bogus) Ph.D.’s in Leadership and Vision, but those degrees really don’t represent any actual knowledge of how to run a campus. One of the weird thing about the many hate crimes on campus is how often they are hoaxes. Nearly […] … learn more→

Last week I reached thirty two. Thirty two doctoral researchers who successfully defended their research. Thirty two Doctors let loose on the world. And two things are now on my mind. Not thirty two. Just two. The first thing I’m thinking about is how heavily the viva weighs on me as a supervisor – not nearly as […] … learn more→

There is a great deal to be said about the rise of the Alt-Right over this past year, and while I understand the argument for identifying its platform with the ascent of white supremacism, I’d argue that “Alt-Right” encompasses something far more ambitious and dangerous, especially with respect to the country’s most vital institutions: free […] … learn more→

In the world of digital education, massive open online courses (Moocs) are here to stay. It may have been five years since The New York Times declared 2012 to be the Year of the MOOC, but Moocs are still multiplying and branching out into new forms of accredited learning experiences. All the major Mooc platforms – […] … learn more→

Research is loss-making. This is perhaps the most frequently uttered mantra of modern university life in the UK. Vice-chancellors on headline-grabbing salaries, who claim to run today’s universities with the same precision chief executives employ to run multinational businesses, tell us that the only way that their institutions can afford to carry out their most […] … learn more→

A recent posting about official government predictions of growth in our higher ed system by 2025, despite the fact that the vast bulk of our high school graduates already go to college today and we’ll have fewer people in that age group in 8 years, got me to thinking about the future of higher ed […] … learn more→

The job of university president was, until recently, a gig reserved almost entirely for the seasoned professor battle-hardened by decades in academia. Today’s US university and college leaders, however, are increasingly a different breed: among their ranks you’ll now find a former Homeland Security chief, a four-star admiral, a sprinkling of retired congressmen and senators […] … learn more→