Crossing the Finish Line, a new and impressive book by former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos, relied on two massive databases on the entering class of 1999–one on 96,000 first-time freshmen and 30,000 entering transfer students at 21 flagship universities and the other on 108,000 freshmen and [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Charles Murray'
Murray Vs. Murray
Earlier this month Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, gave this year’s Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of it reads like an Ayn Rand objectivist diatribe against socialist democratic states using”Europe” as the code word for all that is wrong with the world. Apparently that sort of thing is popular [...]
Charles Murray: Bachelor’s Degrees are Evil
Following up on his recent argument for education futility, Charles Murray has taken to the virtual pages of CATO Unbound to argue that, quote, “The BA degree is the work of the devil.” I disagree, and you can read why here, along with responses from Pedro Carneiro here and Bryan Caplan here. Further back-and-forth will [...]
Ugh
In a Reykjavik-level summit of “people who irritate me,” Deborah Solomon interviewed Charles Murray in the New York Times Magazine college issue over the weekend, producing this priceless exchange:
What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!
I’m sure you’re [...]
More on Murray
The piece I wrote yesterday about Charles Murray’s new book focused primarily on his higher education-related arguments that only 10 percent of people have an IQ high enough to obtain the college degrees that 35 percent of people actually do attain. I didn’t really have the space to tackle the first, K-12 half of the [...]
The Bell Curve Returns
With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted [...]
Cruel, But Not a Hoax
There’s a good higher education article in the The Atlantic this month titled “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower.” It’s written by an anonymous “Professor X,” an adjunct English instructor at both a small private college and a community college in the northeast. The gist is that many of his students are woefully unprepared [...]
Empowering Kids with Neuroscience
I wonder what Charles Murray has to say about this story on NPR about new research indicating that students’ beliefs about their intelligence can impact how they do in school. Students who believed their intelligence could grow got better grades than students who believed their intelligence was fixed.
An interesting part of the study design is [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.