NOTE: The article referenced by this blog post, James Hatch's "My Semester with the Snowflakes," has been deleted from Medium, the platform where it originally appeared. It is now available on the author's personal website: https://www.spikesk9fund.org/blog/2020/10/31/my-semester-with-the-snowflakes/. The generational divide is real, captured in "ok, boomer" eyerolls, "Karen" memes, and complaints about those tech-obsessed, lazy millennials. …

Continue reading Back on campus: James Hatch on learning from (and with) today’s college students

We all know that the price tag for college puts a degree out of reach for many people, and for many others, the debt from student loans is very high. Lamar Alexander, US senator from Tennessee and former Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush, has a proposal for easing some of the …

Continue reading Easing the burden: Lamar Alexander on financing a college education

These days it seems that the STEM bandwagon is very full, and why wouldn’t it be, given how important STEM is for employment opportunities and technological advances? Still, there may be areas more important than STEM for the future health of the United States, and education writer Natalie Wexler discusses a few of them in …

Continue reading More than STEM: Natalie Wexler on forming “citizens of a democracy”

When you think about exports, the first things you probably think of are agricultural products such as corn and soybeans or manufactured items such as trucks or cigarettes. Did college degrees make your list? Not ours, either. Still, journalist Catherine Rampell, who covers public policy and political issues for the Washington Post, argues in this …

Continue reading Top export in trouble: Catherine Rampell on decline of international students in US schools

Smartphones get blamed for a lot of what may be wrong with social interactions these days, including a decline in “soft skills” that some say is the reason why young people are poorly prepared for the labor market. It’s refreshing to read someone who has other ideas about this lack of career readiness and ways …

Continue reading Not so soft a skill: Matt Reed on career navigation

Prestige universities across the globe share many of the features that account for their excellence—“celebrated faculty, groundbreaking research,” and comfortable, well-maintained facilities. There is a huge difference, however, in the source of funding for these institutions; those in the US are overwhelmingly private schools, while prestige universities in the rest of the world tend to …

Continue reading Who pays the bill: Alia Wong on prestige universities around the world

We want our doctors to be competent scientists, of course; our bodies are complicated instruments, and doctors need to learn a lot. Since medical training can’t cover everything, should it focus only on the hard sciences—the anatomy, the chemistry, the bioengineering? Dr. Angira Patel, professor of pediatrics and medical education in Chicago, argues that medical …

Continue reading The doctor’s empathy: Angira Patel on the humanities in medical training

March Madness draws a lot of attention to many colleges and universities that don’t usually get noticed, and the lack of recognition applies to much more than sports. In this March 2018 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, education professor Kevin R. McClure argues that public regional universities across the US should receive much …

Continue reading Ready for the ball: Kevin McClure on public regional universities