By Steven Mintz. Small liberal arts colleges will be limited to a handful of highly endowed institutions.
It’s not just under-endowed, rural colleges with fewer than a thousand students that are in trouble. Many name-brand liberal arts colleges are also under stress. More...

By Steven Mintz. The Great Recession not only prompted enormous interest in new educational models – competency-based, stackable, earn-learn, among others – it coincided with a torrent of books on academic transformation. More...

By Steven Mintz. In the 1945 John Ford film, starring John Wayne and Donna Reed, the expendables were the Navy seamen who were left behind in the Philippines to allow Douglas MacArthur and other commanding officers to escape the impending Japanese invasion. More...

By Steven Mintz. A headline in a recent issue of the Boston Globe says it all: “Experimental colleges once were the future. Now, what is their future?”  One after another, the innovators of the 1960s and 1970s are biting the dust, fading, or transforming themselves into pale shadows of their original ambitions. It’s not just Hampshire College, but Franconia, Goddard, New College, and perhaps even Evergreen State College. More...

By Steven Mintz. Lurking behind many current debates about higher education lies a divide between those who seek to credential a growing number of young people and those more concerned about maintaining the integrity, quality, and rigor of a college education. More...

By Steven Mintz. Among the roles students commonly adopt are the compliant, the annoyingly argumentative, the habitual rebels, and the discouraged and fatalistic. Other student types include the careerist, the precocious intellectual, the procrastinator, the striver, and the disconnected. More...