Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Eric Best. Joel started thinking about writing about student loans more than 30 years ago, when he noticed that the national conversation about student loans had somehow shifted from depicting students as young people who deserved help to characterizing student borrowers as “deadbeats.”
Eric, who had taken a job dealing with corporate loans during the run-up to the Great Recession, noticed that student-loan policy started to mimic mortgage deregulation that had led to the housing bubble, in that Democrats wanted to give more people access to the American Dream via increased credit, while Republicans favored minimal government regulation. That combination resulted in vast debt growth with reduced individual-level oversight. More...

By Guest Writer. The following is by Jamie Miller, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University and a graduate of the University of Sydney.
It’s not news that higher education in the United States is in crisis. Student fees are out of control. Enrollment growth is slowing. Executive pay is skyrocketing. Faculty hiring and job security are plummeting. Nothing is working the way it is supposed to. Looking closely at the American system, the new government in Australia has decided on an overhaul of its own higher-education sector … by turning decisively towards the same marketization, competition, and “user pays” models it sees in the United States. More...

By James Turner. Listen to the dire talk around colleges and universities, read op-eds and magazines, and you might think the humanities were in greater danger than the earth’s climate. In fact, despite the overheated rhetoric, the humanities are not at death’s door. Contemporary pressures will more likely push them into a new shape, even ultimately a healthier one. That claim might seem bizarre. The proportion of college students majoring in the humanities has sunk to an all-time low. Students have turned their backs on art history and literature in favor of studies, like accounting and nursing, that lead directly to jobs. More...