By Kelly Field. Negotiators on a federal rule-making panel have agreed on a plan to expand and remake Pay as You Earn, the most generous of the student-loan income-based repayment plans.By Peter Schmidt. The University of Illinois violated principles of academic freedom in withdrawing a tenured faculty appointment to Steven G. Salaita over his harsh criticisms of Israel, the American Association of University Professors argues in a report released on Tuesday. More...By Loni M. Bordoloi and James J. Winebrake. "It’s required." Too many engineering undergraduates utter this simple phrase when asked why they are taking a particular liberal-arts course. The structured curricula that exist for most students in engineering fields create a checklist approach to liberal-arts courses that makes them seem, well, "required" — not relevant, salient, or connected to their professional aspirations. As a result, students struggle to see the value of the liberal arts, even though solving the complex problems of our time — eliminating hunger, preventing terrorism, minimizing our carbon footprint, to name a few — requires a multidisciplinary approach. More...By David Wescott. For a scholar ignored or condemned by almost everyone in his discipline, a career adjunct unable to secure job interviews much less a tenure-track position, Jonathan Gottschall is unusually prominent. More...By Clancy Martin. Few philosophical projects are more ambitious or daunting than writing a book about love. First of all, the literature on love is larger, I’d wager, than that on any other subject. There are classics like The Odyssey, The Symposium, the Kama Sutra, Pascal’s Discourse on Love, Kierkegaard’s "Diary of a Seducer," Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, not to mention Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust — and Woody Allen. See also the explosion of interest in the topic in contemporary American philosophy since the pioneering work of Irving Singer, Robert C. Solomon, Harry Frankfurt, and Martha Nussbaum, along with contemporary critical minds who have tackled the subject, like Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Adam Phillips, Simon May, and Laura Kipnis. I have only a small sampling of my favorite books on love at home, and they take up three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And that’s leaving out the neuroscientists. More...
By Jonathan Rothwell and Siddharth Kulkarni. The choice of college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality. This is especially true for colleges granting credentials of two years or less, which graduate two out of five postsecondary graduates. Moreover, popular rankings from U.S. News, Forbes, and Money focus only on a small fraction of four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that may contribute the most to student success.
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By Matthew M. Chingos. Student loans make billions of dollars for U.S. taxpayers, at least on paper. These profits attract frequent criticism from politicians, most recently in a letter to the Education Department by six U.S. senators led by Elizabeth Warren, who has previously called the profits “obscene” and “morally wrong.”. More...
By Rebecca Winthrop. When it comes to education the differences between the developed and developing worlds remain stark.
There has been a convergence in the number of pupils enrolling in primary school, with many more young children in developing countries now having access to school.
But when it comes to average levels of attainment—how much children have learned and how long they have spent in school—there remains a massive gap. More...
By . In mid-March, the United Kingdom launched five new social impact bonds (SIB), adding to the momentum that the field has witnessed in the last few years. As the number of SIBs around the world has grown to 43, they have become more diverse both in terms of countries and social issues targeted. In the most mature SIBs market, the U.K., impacts funds have even grown to cover multiple deals instead of just individual transactions. More...
By Maysa Jalbout. “The Arab world has made huge progress in giving children access to school,” says Maysa Jalbout, a nonresident fellow with the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Yet even so, she calls the 2.6 million Syrian children out of school in the region “perhaps the biggest education crisis globally.” In the podcast, Jalbout—former CEO of the Queen Rania Foundation and a global leader on education in international development—discusses the challenges and solutions to educating children in the Arab world, why quality and not just access matters, how the education crisis is a global security issue, and why 3 out of 4 Arab women remain out of the labor force in their countries. Much of the discussion is about Jalbout’s new report, “Reaching all Children with Education in Lebanon: Opportunities for Action.” More...
