That is the “undercitation” of women and minority authors in philosophy. Thanks to a tipster who prefers to remain anonymous for this:

The SEP administrative staff has been following the discussion sparked
by Kieran Healy’s recent work regarding the undercitation of women
philosophers in articles published from 1993-2013 in four important
journals. …

We take this citation issue seriously and we are writing now to
encourage our authors, subject editors, and referees to help ensure
that SEP entries do not overlook the work of women or indeed of
members of underrepresented groups more generally.

So please keep this in mind as you write, revise, or referee an entry
for the SEP. And any time you notice a source missing from an SEP
entry (whether or not it is your own entry), you are welcome to write
to us.

Thank you for your attention to this matter and thank you for your
participation in the work of the SEP.

All the best,
Yours,
Ed and Uri
————————————————-
Edward N. Zalta Principal Editor
Uri Nodelman Senior Editor
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

John Rosenberg has an excellent piece on his Discriminations blog, catalyzed by a line from pollster Charlie Cook that much of the writing about “diversity” is based on sloppy thinking. Indeed so!

Sweden is regarded in this country as the crown jewel of Eurosocialism, having a high standard of living that coincides with statist egalitarianism. Many regard it as the model for the rest of the world. Since American liberals love the Swedish model and regard higher education as the key to economic development, surely higher education in Sweden must be outstanding to produce such prosperity? 

Or not. In this article on the Pope Center site, Anders Edwardsson, a Ph.D. candidate at Catholic University in D.C. and the possessor of an M.A. degree from the highly rated University of Uppsala, compares and contrasts the more “evolved” Swedish system of higher education with his experience in the U.S — and comes up with some unsettling observations about the path U.S higher education is taking.

Since 2008, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has published articles about lessons learned in college. The series, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now,” is written mostly by students, who offer advice based on their experiences. That advice has ranged from encouraging other students to speak up in class to how to choose a major to practical recommendations such as avoiding credit-card debt. The latest in the series is different, however. In “Transition and Tragedy,” Zachary Williams explains how he tried, without complete success, to cope with the sudden death of his mother during his freshman year.  

Cato’s Neal McCluskey has a very useful post here on the research that has been done on the relationship between government aid for students and the rising cost of going to college.

If the feds had a program to aid consumers of, oh, refrigerators, would anyone doubt that refrigerator makers would understand that such aid allowed them to raise prices? But higher ed is non-profit, so college leaders wouldn’t do such a thing.

“How about taking out a second mortgage or home equity loan so I can pay my student loan bills?” Mike Tremoglie writes about the pros and cons of doing that here.

If some people do so, it will help to keep the college bubble going a little longer, but it looks like a very bad idea.

One of the authors’ proposals in the new book by William Bennett and David Wilozel, Is College Worth It?, will send shivers up the spines of many second-tier and third-tier college officials. That will happen when they realize that, if the proposal were to be made the law of the land, the school would have some “skin in the game” with college loans, meaning that they would be responsible for “ten to twenty percent of loans originating so that students can attend there.”

That means that all the disengaged slacker students who these same officials are now encouraging to unwittingly bury themselves in debt with little hope of getting any reasonable return on their college investment would become, in part, the schools’ responsibilities. Shrinkage of departments that specialize in slacker students would be an inevitable result, as would the loss of many faculty and staff positions. George Leef reports on Bennett’s and Wilozel’s book in this week’s Clarion Call.

The renowned Thunderbird School of Global Management is selling its campus to for-profit college operator, Laureate Education Inc., in an attempt to stay afloat.

At one point in time, the MBA was considered a ticket to top investment banks or consulting firms, but a financial crisis and down economy hampered what was left of that reality.

I love my MBA students, but I question their timing for pursuing their degrees. Students with years of work experience have much to gain (from each other) when they are together in a classroom. But most MBA students I see have (maybe) two years of career experience; I can reach those students in my own way, but they are honestly better off career-wise at Hamburger University instead of a State U MBA program.

I’m not immune to this criticism; I sought my MBA two years after my undergraduate work. By the time I finished my degree, the inexperienced and overeducated Jason was told by employers that “if this was 1997, we could afford to hire you, but now we need people with experience.”

Caveat emptor.

Several Prager University videos touch upon political issues — this one does not. The latest course is useful for anyone who is (at least partly) human. Watch as Dr. Stephen Marmer of UCLA Medical School discusses the anatomy of offering forgiveness. 

Forgive me if I suggest that it’s worth sharing with others.

The higher-ed establishment recently published a splashy “statement” defending the use of racial preferences in deciding which students to admit. In today’s Pope Center piece, Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity scrutinizes it and finds that it’s full of erroneous notions and empty clichés. Colleges and universities may have an interest in assembling a diverse student body, he argues, but a student’s race has no logical bearing on whether he or she will do anything to add to the academic environment on campus. Just because a student is put into one of the “historically underrepresented” groups does not mean that he or she will enrich the school intellectually; conversely, students who don’t qualify for “underrepresented” status might do so — but they’re overlooked. 

Too bad that no one in the higher-ed establishment has the nerve to speak the truth and admit that the preferences regime is a costly game that allows the establishment to feel good about itself.

Inside Higher Ed reports that the White House is taking criticism for not appointing a permanent head of the Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Those institutions have lots of problems, but can’t they handle them on their own? Even if not, what good can the White House do? This looks like nothing but expensive grandstanding in a field where the executive branch has no constitutional authority.

Should school officials be limited to considering only teachers who have state licenses? Suppose that those officials (or some of them, at least) thought that individuals without such government approval would be better than individuals with them? Wouldn’t education improve if they could select the prospective teachers they believe best able to do a good job? A recent Pope Center piece by Jane Shaw and Zachary Williams explores that issue.

Specifically, legislation now in the North Carolina General Assembly would allow charter-school leaders to hire teachers who haven’t gone through the state-mandated course of training in an education school. No doubt the guild (i.e., the education schools) will fight against this. They don’t want competition and will proclaim their “expertise” in preparing teachers as the reason to maintain the status quo.

Based on Missouri data, the authors of this new NBER paper conclude that the gap in college-graduation rates is mostly explained by differences in student skills. Thus, the place to start in reducing the gap is the pre-college years.

On Minding the Campus, NAS president Peter Wood has an excellent essay about the Fisher decision and the way the higher-ed establishment is circling the wagons to defend its obsession with “diversity.” I recommend the essay, and for those with more time, I also recommend Peter’s book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what is happening to science in academia, but it seems to be losing its objectivity. Special interests, such as environmentalists (under the banner of sustainability), are pushing toward subjective decisions rather than the search for factual knowledge and understanding. John Droz Jr., a retired physicist in North Carolina, has made it his mission to collect examples and show, in formal presentations, the intellectual distortions he sees in academic science. “Droz’s presentation cites well-known example after example in which accepted standards of proof are cast aside to reach predetermined political ends,” writes Jay Schalin of the Pope Center.

Rather surprisingly, this Salon article does a pretty good job of debunking the idea that going to college ensures you an “earnings premium.” More surprisingly, the author turns thumbs down on the idea that the solution is for the kindly government just to forgive the debts of people who borrowed unwisely for college.

When sites like Salon can run articles attacking the leftist notion that the more people we put through college, the better off we’ll be, we’re near a breakthrough.

I’m impressed by what used to be known as Peace College. It was a small women’s college near downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Two years ago, the board of directors decided to change its name to William Peace University (after whom it had been named), welcomed men as undergraduates, and cut tuition. Now, it has announced plans to purchase a collection of warehouses across the street that has been developed into a retail center. The owner of the center had filed for bankruptcy.

Purchasing the property would allow the school to expand in the future; it already is using part of the site for a parking lot and tennis court. But buying the 92,000-square-foot property will require $20.75 million, or two-thirds of the school’s endowment.

My view is: Good for them.

In a sense, William Peace’s efforts are the result of desperation. Attendance had fallen below 800 when the board decided to change names and add men as undergraduates. Alumnae protested, but the board stuck to its guns. Enrollment is up and the board hopes to reach 1,000. (By the way, the campus is charming.)

As for decimating the endowment, I have two responses. First, I accept Vance Fried’s skeptical view of endowments. While a small one protects a school against calamity, large ones simply slow down the good that money can do. In “The Endowment Trap,” Fried wrote, “Unlike most human beings, who prefer consumption in the present rather than the future (a fact that creates the interest rate), the trustees view themselves as having a time preference of zero.” That is, they view spending in the present as no better than in the future. Most people think otherwise except when they happen to sit on a university board.

“They continue to build their endowments even though each dollar added to endowment represents a dollar that could have gone to providing an education to current students, researching today’s great problems, or to reducing tuition,” says Fried.

On the other hand, property is like an endowment, so maybe the Peace trustees are not really doing anything different — just taking a little more risk. Well, that’s unusual, too.

States are having trouble reforming their state universities, with turmoil in Texas and Virginia making news around the country. In North Carolina, we hope the reform process will be more peaceful and also more effective. We believe that the new University of North Carolina Board of Governors (which oversees 16 colleges) recognizes some of the problems and is willing to take action.

But what should it do? The Pope Center has developed a short list of specific steps. They start with hiring an executive director who would report to the board, so that board members can gather information independent of the administration. Our proposals are moderate and plausible (or at least I think so — we’ll see).

In today’s Freeman piece, SUNY-Purchase economics professor Sandy Ikeda takes a look at the connections between cheap credit for college and both the burgeoning cost of attending and the surfeit of graduates who are working in low-skill jobs.

Is freshman reading a fad that has seen its day?

Designed to bring college communities together and alert incoming students to what college is really like, “common reading” selections are often the subject of criticism and ridicule. The Pope Center’s Duke Cheston says they have been at various times “controversial, touchy-feely, and arguably too easy.” In any case, they seem to be losing steam.

Duke reports that colleges are beginning to reconsider their value, and four colleges in North Carolina have dropped the readings altogether. He also observes that more than half the remaining books can be found on Oprah’s Book Club list.