Tag: United States

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (II)

To continue with the occasional post on random books on the shelves at HESA Towers, today I want to talk about this book pictured below.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s one of the most intriguing things kicking around the office.  It dates from the summer of 1967 and is called “The Gourman Report” Most histories of university rankings will tell you that the first commercial ranking of undergraduate institutions was in a 1983 edition of US News &

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The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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From the Shelves of HESA Towers (I)

It’s Friday, so it seems like a good day to write about one of the crazy books I have on my shelves (which, as any of my staff can tell you, is a theme that could last for quite some time).  Here’s one that’s kind of relevant, given that it’s about an event that ended 50 years ago next week: Shut It Down!  A College in Crisis, which is about the strike at San Francisco State (SFS) College in 1968-1969.

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The Krueger/Card Studies

Very sadly, Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger died by suicide last week.  Krueger was much-loved in the profession. He produced an enormous amount of work on the minimum wage and for a couple of years served as Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.  He also thought a lot about education and famously declared in one paper (co-authored with Stacy Dale) that the effects of attending an extremely selective university (i.e. one of the top Ivy League Schools) on

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Best Higher Ed Scandal of the Year

The following statement was issued in a Massachusetts courtroom yesterday morning. Dozens of individuals involved in a nationwide conspiracy that facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and the admission of students to elite universities as purported athletic recruits were arrested by federal agents in multiple states and charged in documents unsealed on March 12, 2019, in federal court in Boston. Athletic coaches from Yale, Stanford, USC, Wake Forest and Georgetown, among others, are implicated, as well as parents and exam

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