NAS Blog

According to this Bloomberg story, Americans of Asian ancestry are finding it harder than ever to get into top California universities because school administrators have decided to admit large numbers of foreign students who are Asian (especially Chinese).

This is very hard to square with the supposed need for more diversity (which is why “overrepresented” students of Korean, Japanese, Chinese or other Asian groups have evidently run into ceilings that keep them out, despite superb academic records), but easy to square with the desire on the part of officials to maximize revenues.

In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review Richard DeMillo’s book Abelard to Apple. In the last few years, there have been quite a few books written on the theme of impending, revolutionary change in higher education and I think DeMillo’s may be the most persuasive. It’s also very well written and chock-full of fascinating history and details. Highly recommended.

That is the question that Lenore Ealy addresses in today’s Pope Center Clarion Call. She looks quite a way back into the 20th century to see how the classical-liberal philanthropists of the post-war years went about trying to preserve the remnant of classical-liberal scholarship in an era when the great trend among intellectuals and society generally was toward statism. That was accomplished, but what is our best course now?

Anyone who is interested in higher-education philanthropy should also read the Pope Center’s recent paper “Games Universities Play” by Martin Morse Wooster

Duke University has recently received some large gifts, but in today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, alum Al Oettinger explains why he has stopped giving the school money.

A blogger whom I assume to be a University of Delaware grad writes here about the latest manifestations of the school’s diversity mania. It has recently established a new Center for the Study of Diversity (how much skepticism do you think there will be as to the benefits of it?) and that student course evaluations now include a question asking what lawyers would consider a leading question: were you prejudged by the professor based on your race, ethnicity or gender?

But here’s a very pointed one about the student debt bubble, with many sad college grads appealing to Barack to save them.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Notre Dame philosophy professor James Sterba gives his counter-arguments to the case I made against enshrining “socio-economic diversity” as another goal for elite colleges to attain through admissions preferences. We both participated in a forum back in September at Pomona College where that was the topic. I presented my case against that in a piece we published in October.  Professor Sterba responds and I respond to him.

I remain convinced that “affirmative action” — whether to achieve “better racial balance” or to get more students from poorer families into top schools, has minimal and mostly imaginary benefits that come at substantial cost.