In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama took another step in his effort to rebrand community colleges. He sees the nation’s two-year colleges as playing a big role in preparing those who will work in emerging high-tech manufacturing industries. Putting worries about his job-creation strategy aside for a minute (I’ll believe [...]
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June 23rd, 2011 The idea that 4-year college degrees and liberal arts curricula waste students’ time and money, which I’ve lately been writing about in this blog, is definitely spreading among those who seem most easily to get media exposure. The recent words of Bill Gross, one of the country’s most revered bond investors, have been heard across [...] June 11th, 2011 “I want to have as few people touching our products as possible.” So spoke Dan Mishek, the managing director of an industrial plastic products manufacturer in Minnesota, quoted in Catherine Rampell’s NYTimes article yesterday, “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers.” Why would an employer want to keep people away from its products? Germphobia? Elitism? No, [...] May 17th, 2010 I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America. On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm [...] March 23rd, 2010 Today’s edition of NPR’s Radio Times spent an hour on proprietary colleges: the for-profit world of DeVry, ITT, the University of Phoenix, and other schools familiar to anyone who takes public transportation or watches local TV, where their ads offer training and quick advancement in nursing, computing, office management, and a host of technical occupations. It [...] January 18th, 2010 MIT has just issued a lengthy report on its hiring and promotion of underrepresented minority faculty, a document several years in the making. I will be writing more about this report in the next few days, trying to put it in historical perspective. MIT may be one-of-a-kind, sitting well above almost every other technical institution in the country, [...] December 16th, 2009 Coming Soon to a Community Bulletin Board Near You; with thanks to Darin Hayton. As Obama inches toward implementing his job creation schemes, we hear a lot about the jobs that will be created through federally supported “green” initiatives, including those in retro-fitting and weatherizing buildings. Folks who can afford it can already Google their [...] December 1st, 2009 The content of an article in today’s New York Times, In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap, by Michael Luo, will surprise no one who has thought about the role of race in American hiring; only a handful of the hundreds of comments posted online in response to the piece today fail to corroborate its [...] |
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