The debate over education in America is high-stakes and high-stress. “Crisis” captures the mood as many argue that education in the United States as ineffective and inefficient. Some political and educational leaders demand wide-scale changes. Others, like Diane Ravitch in Reign of Error, believe that things are not that bad. Graduation and student success rates are improving.…
Author: David Potash
Retaking the Rudder: An Aspiring Adult’s Chase for Zeroes
Laura Newland is a 2010 alumna of Duke University. In her senior year, she started writing about her experiences seeking Wall Street internships. Shortly after graduation and finding a job outside of finance, she finished the ambitiously titled Chasing Zeroes: The Rise of Student Debt, the Fall of the College Ideal, and One Overachiever’s Misguided…
Are We All Poorly Directed? The Challenge of Aspiring Adults Adrift
Richard Arum and Josipa Roska shook the higher education world in 2011 with Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. A study driven curiosity and informed by data about how and what college students learn, the book raised a host of important questions about the primary function and utility of a college degree. Using that…
Higher Education Financial Aid Policy – Lessons Unlearned
In 2003, Edward P. St. John wrote Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal Opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers, an ambitious work explaining the failures and challenges of United States higher education financial aid policy. St. John, a distinguished professor education at the University of Michigan, charted at a macro-level the coalitions and thinking that led to shifting…
Being in/Being and Technology
As I write this on a laptop connected to a local wi-fi, I am sitting in a coffee shop, listening to global house music through a streaming site (Spotify). When I look around, I see other people focused on their phones, tablets, a laptops. People may be enjoying themselves, but they are not idle. The…
Failed College Presidencies – What Have You Done For Us Lately?
One of my favorite books around the age of twelve was True Tales of Terror. A nonfiction account of murders, mayhem, and disasters, it mixed gore and goth, leading to a fascination with unhappy stories. While I eventually I tired of reading about catastrophes, every now and then the sentiment returns and I catch the…
Who Has the Crook? On Excellent Sheep
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, is a cleverly titled dark manifesto from a former professor of English at Yale, William Deresiewicz. It is also, like so many other recently published books on academia’s failures, a critique that is about much more than higher education. Excellent Sheep is a…