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More medical and law schools have announced that they are leaving the U.S. News & World Report rankings of those institutions. The medical schools of Cornell University and the University of Chicago are the latest to join the movement. Harvard University kicked the movement this month, and it was quickly joined by the medical schools of Columbia and Stanford Universities and the University of Pennsylvania and the Icahn medical school of Mount Sinai. On Thursday, Francis Lee, interim dean of Weill Cornell Medicine announced that it would join. He said, "Critically, the rankings measure more about the students who enter the school than about the physicians who graduate, or about the actual substance and quality of the medical education we provide along the way. The volatility of the rankings, and the lack of transparency about the formulas and algorithms upon which they are based, also speak to the inadequacy of this annual survey." At the University of Chicago, t...

You’ve probably been reading about the looming demise of U.S. higher education. I don’t buy it. Yes, college and university enrollment has fallen, decreasing by almost 7.5 percent since 2019, before the pandemic began. Just six in 10 Americans say college is worth the time and money . And one-third of adult members of Generation Z say they tend not to trust higher education. And yet, this fall the University of Utah admitted a record class of first-year students for the third year in row. We’re on track to grow our student body from just under 35,000 to 40,000 over the next five years, and we have plans to build 5,000 additional student housing units in the same time frame, transforming what traditionally had been a commuter campus into a campus village. I have the benefit of leading a flagship research university in a growing Western state, with low unemployment , a booming economy , a young population and a persistently high birth rate . We’re still enrolling third-, f...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma What if we ranked universities not by inputs but by outputs? Not by admissions selectivity or even by their contribution to social mobility, but, rather, their impact on the growth of knowledge and technological and scientific advancement?  A recent piece in  Forbes  echoes an  argument that I made several months ago :  That the preeminence of many of the most highly regarded American universities is fading.   As the  Forbes  contributor, Matt Symonds, points out: Ivy League admissions may never have been more selective, but their place in the global rankings tells a very different story.  There is only one US Ivy in the Top 5 (Harvard) and only three others in the Top 10 (Columbia, Princeton, and Yale).  Brown, despite having this country’s oldest applied mathematics program and the Ivy League’s oldest engineering program, isn’t in the Top 30, and Dartmouth isn’t among the Top 50 US and Canad...

Blog:  Learning Innovation Professor Andrew Comrie reached out after reading my piece, How Do Academic Libraries Spend Their Money? In his book, Like Nobody's Business: An Insider's Guide to How US University Finances Really Work (Open Book Publishers, 2021), Andrew digs into academic library budgeting. I asked if Andrew would be willing to synthesize some of his findings in this space, and he graciously agreed. Q1:  Overall, how do academic libraries allocate their budgets? What are some of the trends related to academic library spending that a student of higher education should understand? Based on IPEDS data, university library budgets are apportioned quite consistently, with roughly 60 percent going to personnel and operations and the other approximately 40% going to acquiring resource materials. About three-quarters of the materials budget goes to ongoing subscriptions, the bulk of which are scholarly journals, while the other quarter is spent on one-time ...

Teachers went on strike for two days, starting Wednesday, at the University of California Lab School, which the Los Angeles Times described as "an elite pre-K-through-sixth-grade school nestled in a quiet corner of the UCLA campus," which "has offered a nurturing environment for students whose parents won a coveted spot for their child." The school is run by UCLA's School of Education and Information Studies. Students are selected for admission, and tuition is up to $25,000 with about a third of students on financial aid. The strike is over working conditions. “We have a leadership that does not seem to be concerned about the mission and vision of the school ... and very little understanding of the culture of the lab school, who we are and what we represent,” said Rebecca Heneise, a dual-language demonstration teacher at the lab school. The faculty are members of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, say that UCLA management has violate...

I bristle every time I see the word “Latinx.” The term has become ubiquitous, both in and out of academia: in social media, marketing materials, course titles, academic program names, job ads, etc. If we are serious about using language that promotes progressive reform, it is time to drop the term Latinx in favor of “Latine,” an ethnic identifier that fosters genuine inclusion. I did not always hate Latinx. I first saw the term following the 2016 Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, Fla. The word was an alternative to the gendered “Latino/a” and was intended to create more inclusive language. In the aftermath of that hideous shooting, the increased presence of “Latinx” in news stories, academic discourse and social media seemed a laudable act of solidarity. I know firsthand the influential power of language. The son of working-class Colombian immigrants, I grew up absorbing linguistic punches: poor Spic, coke dealer, f-ing immigrant . Words of discrimination, exclusion, ridicule....

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Is history a struggle between the forces of good and evil, pitting the children of light against the children of darkness, as the 3 rd  century Manicheans believed, or is the historical process more complex, convoluted, and circuitous, involving ambiguity, ambivalence, mixed motives, and irony, as Reinhold Niebuhr insisted 17 centuries later?   Two recent scholarly accounts, one by Jill Lepore on the January 6 Report, and the other a collection of essays on myths and legends that distort public understanding of US history, illustrate this interpretive divide in its starkest form.   The subtitle of Professor Lepore’s  New Yorker  essay, “ What the January 6th Report Is Missing ,” sums up her argument in 26 words:  “The investigative committee singles out Trump for his role in the Capitol attack. As prosecution, the report is thorough. But as historical explanation it’s a mess.” The report, she argues, “...