Ninth Level Ireland

“This past fall, Occupy Wall Street protesters around the country called for far-reaching changes in our society, including forgiveness of student-loan debt. While we believe loan forgiveness is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, we also think the protesters are right in calling attention to the nation’s Byzantine and inefficient system of student lending …” (more)

[Andrew Gillen and Richard Vedder,
Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 February]

“Over the past two decades in the United States, there has been a new wave of criticism of higher education. Much of it has condemned the rise of ‘academic capitalism’ and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt …” (more)

[Jeffrey J Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 February]

“The New York Police Department monitored Muslim students at universities far beyond the city limits, including the elite Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, it has emerged …” (more)

[Independent, 20 February]

“You may not have been aware of this, but one of the key dangers facing higher education, at least in America, is that it has come to the attention of Satan, and may indeed have already been taken over by him …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 20 February]

“Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work …” (more)

[Matt Ford, Ars Technica, 19 February]

“Difficulties in hiring and retaining women scientists and engineers are worrying universities. A study published in Science has tracked several thousand science and engineering faculty members over 19 years to unpick where the barriers lie …” (more)

[Natasha Gilbert, Nature News & Comment, 17 February]

“… The simplest explanation to describe this trend is that the library has lost its coveted position as the intellectual hub of the university; that administrators don’t think of the library anymore — after all, information that arrives on one’s desktop must be free; and that students value the library more as a quiet place to nap …” (more)

[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 15 February]

“On Tuesday, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum suggested that we don’t have effective copyright enforcement on the Internet because we just haven’t tried hard enough …” (more)

[Timothy B Lee, Ars Technica, 15 February]

“… A year ago, Obama proposed bold increases for science agencies, but a Congress intent on curbing government spending refused to back many of them. This time, the White House has scaled back in several areas but boosted overall funding for non-defence research and development by 5%, pushing it up to US$64.9bn …” (more)

[Ivan Semeniuk and others, Nature News & Comment, 14 February]

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology will begin enrollment today for the first course in its enhanced online platform, where students around the world can take classes and get a certificate upon completion …” (more)

[Business Post, 13 February]

“A US university has revealed that hundreds of degrees given out over the past 10 years should never have been awarded, and may be revoked …” (more)

[Independent, 12 February]

“In their follow-up to the book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and colleagues recently released a report of their follow-up study of 1000 of the students involved in their original study. Readers will recall that the book documented massive academic disengagement …” (more)

[Lowering Higher Education, 11 February]

“Scholarship and politics don’t mix. At least not according to literary theorist and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, who has been arguing for years that professors should ’save the world on their own time’. Just last week, he reiterated this point …” (more)

[PhD Octopus, 10 February]

“Higher education gives students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds the biggest boost in the labour market. But it has the opposite effect on their prospects in the marriage market, an American study has found …” (more)

[John Ross, The Australian, 11 February]

“The journal publisher Elsevier has hit back after being pilloried for supporting an anti-open-access bill in the US Congress. A row has been rumbling along for weeks over the publisher’s support for the Research Works Act introduced to Congress in December …” (more)

[John Gill, Times Higher Education, 9 February]

“Someone recently told me about this, and I was wondering if anyone has participated in something similar: A group of colleagues makes a specific effort to cite each other’s papers – those paper not involving the author/s doing the citing, so no self-citation is involved – to help each other get their citation numbers up. They don’t gratuitously cite a paper that is irrelevant to the topic at hand, but they proactively seek opportunities to cite each other’s papers …” (more)

[FemaleScienceProfessor, 9 February]

“Remember all that talk of how the supporters of SOPA/PIPA were ‘humbled’ by the protests of January 18th, and how they had learned their lessons about trying to push through a bill without actually involving the stakeholders? Remember the talk of how they hoped a new tone could be found in the debate? Yeah …” (more)

[Mike Masnick, Techdirt, 8 February]

“Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine US News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report. Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity …” (more)

[Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog, 1 February]

“Having just returned from China, where I was making a film about its higher education system, I shared some of my observations with a young friend who is working on her PhD in education policy at Stanford …” (more)

[Paula Marantz Cohen, The American Scholar, 5 February]

“When US News & World Report debuted its list of ‘America’s Best Colleges’ nearly 30 years ago, the magazine hoped its college rankings would be a game-changer for students and families. But arguably, they’ve had a much bigger effect on colleges themselves …” (more)

[Justin Pope, Huffington Post, 5 Febuary]