My family and friends now roll their eyes when I try to get a conversation going about behavioral economics. I can’t figure out why – it really is fascinating material. Ever since I read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I have been intrigued. Who wouldn’t be? Richard Thaler, a friend of Kahneman and Amos Tversky,…
Author: David Potash
Casual Style and Harbinger Colleges
Picture college life in the 1920s – perhaps young women dressed as flappers and men in oversize raccoon coats? Or are they formal, in dresses, coats and ties? Fashion – what people wear and where they wear it – can be a fascinating source of inquiry. Grounded in deep desires for social capital and acceptance, fashion is…
Meaning and Vocational Programming
Indianapolis’s Lilly Endowment, one of the world’s wealthiest philanthropies, focuses its grants on community, education and religion. More than fifteen years ago it launched a huge multi-year and multi-school project called Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV), allocating $250 million. The aim was to work with colleges and universities to help students examine the relationship…
Equity’s Bar is High
Like all worthy goals, equity sets a demanding bar. For higher ed, equity poses special challenges. Community colleges shoulder much of the burden of access. Most the millions who study in community college students enroll with needs and demands that extend well beyond the classroom. Two year students are poorer and more likely to have received a…
Who Decides
In more than twenty-five years of work in higher education, I have never seen or heard of a college or university that has shared governance definitively figured out. Regardless of structure, unionization, and a host of other factors, governance is consistently a site of debate and more often than not, confusion. William G. Bowen and…
Cheaters Never Win?
Students cheat. Surveys for the past 50 years have been disappointingly consistent: about 75% of all college students admit to cheating at least once. There is no shock or head scratching when we learn of plagiarized papers or purloined exams. What happened at the University of North Carolina, however, was different. UNC was home to institutionally…
Presidential Memoirs and Priorities
I am a higher education nerd. When I travel and spot a college campus, I explore it. When people tell me that their children are attending this school or that university, I actually am interested in hearing more their child’s college experience. When given the chance to read a book about a college, I usually do.…