Last week, The New York Times featured a front page story on an emerging battle over admissions to France’s elite universities. The article, “Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards,” is on one level deeply reminiscent of the battles over affirmative action in the United States, but it also contained interesting twists that may offer lessons to American educators.

Familiar to American readers was the choice between meritocracy, as measured by test scores and the need to diversify the “overwhelmingly white”student population at the “grandes ecoles,” France’s most selective 220 schools. In February, Times reporter Seven Erlanger noted, the Conference des Grades Ecoles adopted a controversial “Charter for Equal Opportunity,” in which schools committed to having 30% of the student bodies consist of low-income scholarship students by 2012, up from less than 10% today. ...

The story Wes Davis told on The New York Times Op-Ed page on June 16 makes sobering reading for those of us (we include ourselves) who advocate investment in higher education in significant measure because of the economic benefits it provides. Davis describes a program created by AT&T, back in the 1950s when it was “the” Bell telephone company, to provide a heavy dose of liberal education (complete with literature, architecture, music, and other humanistic subjects) to some of its most promising leaders, whose education was mainly technological.

In inventing the program, Bell judged, as reported by the prominent sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, that these well-trained rising executives “knew how to answer questions,” while those who were liberally educated might better know “what questions were worth answering.” The ambitious program was, by those standards, a considerable success. By...

Legend has it that six score and eight years ago, railroad baron William Vanderbilt said, "The public be damned." That thought came back to me as I perused the information displayed on an interesting new (to me at least) Web site, MyPlan.com. Students evaluate some 592 schools on a variety of criteria, including a "bottom line" question 15 that asks student to indicate their overall satisfacation with their school. If, as McDonald's, Coca Cola and Apple Computer so clearly demonstrate, having satisfied customers is key to business success, you might expect the nation's "best" colleges to be the ones where students are, roughly speaking, the happiest.

It is interesting to compare the perceptions of college and university leaders of the "best" colleges, as indicated on the peer-assessment component of the 2009 US News & World Report rankings with student perceptions of what schools they...

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As the majority of my research pertains to historically black colleges and universities, I constantly watch what's going on with these institutions. I have a Google alert on the term HBCU as well as the individual institutions so I can stay up to date. By and large, news stories tend to be negative when they are about HBCUs—a fact about which I have written a peer-reviewed article and about which I have spoken publicly. I think some of the media attention is a bit more balanced as of late—a bit—but it could still be better. That said, there are so many positive stories about HBCUs that we rarely hear because no one covers them. I thought I'd write today about an HBCU in Dallas, Texas, Paul Quinn College.

Most people wrote the institution off a couple years ago, but it, and its president Michael Sorrell, are survivors. The school is located in a low-income area of Dallas and has roughly ...

Debates about the for-profit education industry and the borrowing and default patterns of their students are generating analogies between the subprime mortgage debacle and students loans. Some commentaries use the “bubble” terminology to make this comparison. Questions of whether there is a bubble in higher education that parallels the bubble in the housing market have been around for quite a while. But the earlier analogies were based on rising prices for college, as opposed to fears of loan default.

Without weighing in on the pros and cons of any particular new proposed regulations, we think it is important to clarify some of the issues. Let’s start with the loans. There are good reasons to compare the student loan market—or at least the private student loan market—to the subprime mortgage market. The private student loan market—through which any student (and frequently anyone claiming ...

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Someone once told me that the theory of imperfect competition, usually considered one of the major theoretical advances in economics dating from the 1930s, was actually pretty much laid out two generations earlier in a footnote in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. I was reminded of that reading a superb paper by my former student and Center for College Affordability and Productivity employee, Matthew Denhart. It seems that two giants in economics, Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, both winners of the Nobel Prize, wrote a footnote on page 90 of a 1945 monograph for the National Bureau of Economic Research that contains an alternative way to finance college education.

Friedman (better known in educational-reform circles as the founder of the voucher financing idea in K-12 education) and Kuznets (better known as the father of national income accounting) thought it was peculiar...

In 2008, I co-edited a book with Benjamin Baez and Caroline Sotello Turner titled Understanding Minority Serving Institutions. One chapter in the book, authored by Robert Terenishi and Julie Park, focused on Asian American, Pacific Islander Serving Institutions. As a result of including this chapter, I was asked to serve as an adviser at a recent summit focused on these institutions. The summit took place this week in Washington.

One of the most interesting aspects of the conference was the diversity of the participants. The organizer, Neil Horikoshi, made sure to be inclusive when inviting speakers, advisers, and participants. He drew from the expertise of those who work with Hispanic Serving Institutions and Black Colleges and Universities. From my perspective, this was an important strategy. As there is much misunderstanding about the Asian-American student population and its needs, ...

The federal government contributes roughly the same share of the total revenues of elementary/secondary as of postsecondary education in the U.S.—somewhere near 10% in the recent past, pushed at least temporarily higher (especially in elementary/secondary education) by the current economic and budgetary conditions in the nation.

Yet the ambitions of the initiatives and the rhetoric of federal involvement have traced quite different paths over the last quarter century at these different levels of the system. As David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s important new book, The Ordeal of Equality (Harvard University Press), shows, the federal government has persistently raised the demands it places on K-12 schools and has over time moved its declared ambitions from providing funding for schools serving disadvantaged students to improving the quality, even of “transforming,” American education. As...

Sometimes we professors pride ourselves on not doing the things that "others" do. For a long time, many professors would brag that they didn't own a T.V. They were above that. I admit that I'm secretly proud that I own only one T.V. and I don't live and die by it. I'd much rather live life than watch it.

Sometimes professor-parents pride themselves on not letting their children do the things that "most" kids do or brag about providing their children with constant learning experiences that will make them smarter. Okay, I also admit that I like to expose my daughter to lots of cultural activities and travel. However, I'm happy to say that I don't pressure her to be a brainiac.

In the early 2000s, I remember some of my professor friends (okay, I was one of them) working very hard to avoid using a cell phone. We did not need to have cell phones because we didn't have them in the...

The Chronicle's Susannah Tully has brought my attention to a great article in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy by Scott Carrell and James West dealing with professorial approaches to teaching, student evaluations and student performance. It seems professors who do more than teach the basic bare-bones knowledge and are in some sense more rigorous tend to get poorer student evaluations (no surprise there). The less rigorous professors even get good performances out of their students in the courses taught but those students subsequently, in follow up courses, do poorer than the more rigorous professors who do more than teach to the standardized test. Sounds reasonable to me.

This got me thinking more about student evaluations and some other evidence. Specifically, I would note that student evaluations began to become popular during the 1960s and early 1970s as a common...