Higher Education Quick Takes

The former department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was widely blamed for no-show classes and grade inflation that may have helped many athletes remain eligible was offered gifts like football tickets and scheduled classes for athletes' academic counselors, potentially undercutting claims by Chancellor Holden Thorp and an internal investigation's findings that the classes were not designed to benefit athletes. E-mails obtained by the Raleigh News & Observer show that Julius Nyang'oro, who retired under pressure in July, scheduled no-show classes at the behest of academic support staff, who steered athletes to those classes, the newspaper previously reported.

Thorp and other officials have maintained that the systemic scandal, which dates to 1997, was an academic and not athletic one because about half the students enrolled in the classes were non-athletes. Additionally, the National Collegiate Athletic Association declined to punish UNC for the scandal because there were no explicit NCAA rules violations; the "extra benefits" were not provided strictly on the basis of students' status as athletes.

The University of Washington -- following years of debate -- has decided to require all undergraduates to complete a course that touches on diversity in some form, The Seattle Times reported. Students could pick among hundreds of courses already offered that deal with a range of different types of diversity, including sexual orientation, disability, class, race, age, gender and religion.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is objecting to league-wide caps on the numbers of international students permitted to play on intercollegiate sports teams.

"The CCLA opposes unfair discrimination against non-citizens in all areas of law," Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel for the organization, said in a press release posted on the Canada News Wire website. "We are particularly concerned because later this week, the [Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association] will be considering a motion to extend this discriminatory measure and further limit the participation of international students in collegiate varsity sports.”

As the Windsor Star reported, there are currently caps on the numbers of international students on basketball, soccer and volleyball teams, and the athletic association is set to take up a measure that would expand those quotas to cover badminton, cross-country running, curling and golf at its conference this week. The caps are seen as inhibiting the recruitment of international students but Sandra Murray-MacDonell, the executive director of the athletic association, said they are necessary to ensure a fair playing field.

It has become trendy if not clichéd in recent years to declare that higher ed is the next "bubble" in the American economic system will pop. This view has been particularly dominant in business publications. Forbes has run columns about the coming higher ed bubble, or why a higher ed bubble should be coming, numerous times (see here and here and here and here and we could go on). Many of those articles predict that one or more "disruptions" in higher education (online learning for example) will be key to the higher ed bubble popping.

So we were surprised on Sunday to read in Forbes that the bubble might not be traditional higher ed. A column that starts off by bemoaning the high cost of elite private higher education ends up noting that students go to college (and parents pay for them to do so) for a lot of reasons other than just the learning in the classroom. Students get connections and they value "the experience," writes a staffer for the magazine. The piece may not please all professors and college administrators because it suggests that students want a fun experience, not just the personal educational experience. But based on this conclusion, the author writes: "There’s no college-education ‘bubble’ forming simply because teens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job. Online education only offers learning that the markets don’t desire, and because it does, its presumed merits are greatly oversold. There’s your 'bubble.' "

Could this be the start of the bursting of the higher-ed-bubble-story bubble?