Colleges and universities have been changing their entrenched, but weakened system of undergraduate disciplinary and vocational specialization at glacial speeds. So it looks like it’s going to take the major money interests–especially in industries most negatively affected by today’s partially trained, poorly educated graduates–to move that hopey, changey thing along in the academy.

The Gates Foundation announced Monday at the American Council on Education’s annual convention that it is going to insist on “transformational change” in how schools are doing business. Gates isn’t interested in backing the same failed approaches that pour money into schools which produce ill-educated widgets for industry.  Instead, the foundation is going to back a new initiative with $3.6 million to help students learn through more structure and fewer choices. Read more »

We just had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Nick Lantinga, executive director of the International Association for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education, here at New Saint Andrews College.  He was kind enough to speak at our Graduate Forum and at today’s Disputatio.

Nick and his IAPCHE colleagues are doing a good work, especially among our Global South Christian brothers and sisters and their communities, encouraging and even inspiring integrative Christian scholarship and education at a growing number of Christian colleges and universities around the world.

I commend Nick and IAPCHE to you.

The previous story on student debt requires this news from the San Jose Mercury be classified among the obscene. A decision by the Board of Trustees  to raise tuition 3.5 percent means that the cost of attending Stanford University in 2010-11 will surpass the $50,000 mark.  Tuition at Stanford is already obscene, Read more »

The average college graduate’s  debt topped $23,000, up 6 percent annually since 2004, according to The Project on Student Debt, based in Berkeley, Calif. The report, which appeared in the most recent Bulletin of Higher Education Administration (Vol. 16, No. 3,  March  2010), published by the Association of College Administration Professionals, had more bad news:

“graduates saddled with those loans likely are having a harder time finding a job to pay them off, given a third-quarter 2009 unemployment rate of 10.6 percent for graduates 20 to 24 years old. That’s the highest national rate for that group in the 10 years data has been available.”

According to the report, the average debt load in 2008 was as low as $4,781 at Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky, while others topped $50,000.  The institution burying its students with the highest debt load was St. Louis College of Pharmacy, which reported the average student red ink exceeding $105,000. As I’ve suggested before, do the math: Read more »

“Among the means that God has granted nobler peoples to defend their liberties, scholarship often stands at the forefront. Among the spokesmen of the Holy Spirit the man of Taurus was the academically trained, and it was from that Pauline treasure chest, not from the mystical John nor from the practical James, that Luther drew the freedom of the Reformation. Read more »