Category: Education

Thomas Frank writes: The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. He links to this Bloomberg piece from 2012 to support this claim. As expected, the Bloomberg piece… Continue reading College Prices Have Not Increased By 1200 Percent

At The Atlantic, Dana Goldstein interviewed Suzanne Mettler (of submerged state fame) on her new book about higher education. Here is one of the questions and its answer: You portray the four-year college degree as a transformative tool in battling inequality. What do you think of the counterargument that our national debate focuses too much… Continue reading How Higher Ed Contributes to Inequality?

Earlier, Sarah Kendzior claimed 76 percent of American faculty were adjuncts and that fact got parroted in a Jacobin article. It was not true and none of the underlying material linked by Kendzior ever said that. The actual figure was 41 percent. Kendzior has a more recent piece that features another statistic that is false… Continue reading Another false education statistic

The National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS) is out with fresh college cost data, which the College Board has neatly summarized. This data is released every four years and is the best source out there for really finding out what college costs actual students. In what follows, I detail the cost data from the 1999-2000 year… Continue reading College Cost Trends From 1999-2012

Miya Tokumitsu has a solid piece in Jacobin about the issues with the “Do What You Love” work advice. She makes a mistake at one point thought: The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which 76 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors — contract instructors who usually receive low… Continue reading False statistic: 76 percent of American faculty are adjuncts