Opinion

The National Bureau of Economic Research published the “College as Country Club” paper last week. It has gotten a lot of coverage already by IHE, the Chronicle of Higher Education, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, and Freakonomics.

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

Borrowing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm looking for help understanding this phenomenon as it pertains to higher ed.

Brett Foster is making lists of his goals, and thinking about what would be realistic.

Predictions of the collapse of higher education amid financial and technological tumult fail to account for our desire to be with, you know, actual people, writes Louis Betty.

This month, students in my January course have been reading about books and culture. This week, as we’re wrapping things up, they speculated about what the world of books might look like in ten years, and came up with some intriguing scenarios and proposals. As I left the building where the class meets I chatted with some humanities faculty and mentioned what we’d been talking about. They seemed at first apprehensive, then surprised and relieved that students predicted a future for books.

When academic Twitter starts sounding too much like academia.

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.