Salon.com > Higher education

SCOTUS could soon rule on affirmative action

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:49:00 +0000

The Supreme Court could issue a ruling on affirmative action as early as Monday, after having heard arguments on a challenge to the University of Texas at Austin's policy back in the fall of last year.

Reuters reports:

The case before the justices was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white suburban Houston student who asserted she was wrongly rejected by the University of Texas at Austin while minority students with similar grades and test scores were admitted.

The ruling is the only one the court has yet to issue following oral arguments in cases heard in October and November, the opening months of the court's annual term which lasts until the early summer. A decision might come as early as Monday, before the start of a two-week recess.

The Court could also decide to hold off on ruling, since it will be taking up another affirmative action case, this one brought by the state of Michigan challenging a lower court decision that a ban on the policy is unconstitutional.

As Bloomberg reported in March, when the Supreme Court elected to hear the Michigan case:

“Where Islam meets America”: The making of Zaytuna College

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:38:00 +0000

Light without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College

by Scott Korb

Beacon Press, 2013

What inspired you to write Light Without Fire?

In the wake of the Fort Hood mass shooting by Army Medical Corps officer Nadil Malik Hasan, Forbes published an essay under the headline “Going Muslim,” written by Tunku Varadarajan, who today often writes for The Daily Beast. At the time, Varadarajan was working at NYU, where I teach writing courses, often about religion. The coinage he explained this way:

“This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.”

Wall Street Journal gets a D in feminism

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:11:00 +0000

This just in from the Wall Street Journal: It's so cute when girls want to go college. Bonus: That's where the husbands are! The paper of record for rich white men has been taking an active interest in the matriculation habits of females of late, and the impression it would like you to have sure isn't one that suggests anything resembling academic ambition or intellectual qualification.

First, there was the head-scratchingly nonsensical, Liz Wurtzel-level self-indulgent tantrum that the paper ran over the weekend, by high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss. Weiss' qualifications for gaining the editorial real estate for an open letter "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" in the Journal? Being the "sassy" sister of former Wall Street Journal editorial features editor Bari Weiss, and having a conniption that she "failed to get into the colleges" of her dreams.

SCOTUS to review Michigan’s affirmative action ban

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:16:00 +0000

The Supreme Court will expand its review of affirmative action in higher education, announcing Monday that it will hear Michigan's challenge to a lower court decision that a ban on the policy is unconstitutional.

In November, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Proposal 2, a voter-approved ban on affirmative action policies in Michigan universities, ruling that it violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Proposal 2, which was passed in November 2006 by a margin of 58-42 percent, was pushed by Jennifer Gratz, who worked for the American Civil Rights Institute. Gratz won her own affirmative action case against the University of Michigan in 2003, in a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

“The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was backed by 58% of the Michigan electorate and simply states that public institutions cannot grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the will of the people last November," Gratz said in a statement on the Supreme Court's decision Monday. "The Court erred when it declared equality unconstitutional. We believe the US Supreme Court is poised to overturn the Sixth Circuit’s decision.”

College uses a visit from Westboro to fundraise for LGBTQ group

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:33:00 +0000

Vassar College, a small liberal arts school in New York's Hudson Valley, will be getting a visit from publicity-addicted hate group Westboro Baptist Church later this month.

In a statement on their website, Westboro warned "students, faculty, and alumni that the satanic policies of this nation, especially those of the colleges and universities, are causing God to pour His wrath out upon this nation. Doomed American academics fancy themselves to be smarter than God. They promote the fag agenda with all their might and mock the word of God and His messengers at every turn.”

Well, Vassar might not be smarter than God, but they're definitely smarter than Westboro. Here's how the college prepared for their visit from the hate group: By rallying the school's network of alums and other supporters to raise $100 to go towards an LGBTQ rights organization for every minute the group planned to protest.

And people say liberal arts degrees are useless!

The fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a national organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ young people, exceeded expectations, bringing in $41,529 as of this posting. (Keep an eye on the growing total here.)

Student loans: The next housing bubble

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

The American system of higher education is increasingly becoming a fiscal disaster for ever-larger numbers of students who move through it. That disaster is being caused by a combination of terrible incentives, institutional greed -- and the pervasive myth that more education is the cure for economic inequality.

The extent of this myth is highlighted by a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which indicates that nearly half of all employed college graduates have jobs that require less than a four-year college education. Despite such sobering statistics, the higher-education complex remains remarkably successful at ensuring that American taxpayers fund the acquisition of educational credentials that, in many cases, leave the people who obtain them worse off than they were before they enrolled.

Far from being “priceless,” as the promoters of ever-more spending on higher education would have Americans believe, both undergraduate and post-graduate education is turning out to be a catastrophic investment for many young and not-so-young adults.

Tuition calculators can put college within reach for many

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:02:00 +0000

A 2008 federal law requiring colleges to provide online net-price calculators has had limited success with families preparing to send their children to school. While they are intended to help parents get a clear picture of the real cost of college, these calculators often ask for a dizzying array of financial information unfamiliar to the people using them.

The results can be bewildering. That's why so few parents -- especially lower income families -- are using them.

As reported by the Times:

Just answering the most important basic question — how much a family earns — can be baffling. Some calculators want all wages included, others exclude money set aside for 401(k) or I.R.A. plans, and others ask for adjusted gross income...

Many colleges insist on a specific income figure, but some — mostly state colleges — ask for ranges, making the results less precise. For example, the University of Michigan’s calculator produces a net price range, which can be more than $10,000 wide.

When a calculator presents a financial aid figure, it can be labeled a grant, a gift or a scholarship, depending on the college. For low- or moderate-income students, some colleges specify that the aid includes government grants, while others do not, implying that all of the aid would come from the college. Some calculators also muddy the distinction between a grant, a loan the student must repay and money a student must earn at a work-study job.

Tax cuts steal from future

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

The central political problem of our time is finding some way to stop the present from stealing from the future. Whether the issue is global warming, cutting taxes or funding higher education, we apparently find it impossible to resist the temptation to spend today what our children will have to pay for (at much increased expense) in some conveniently distant tomorrow.

In each of these cases, we are passing on the costs of our behavior to future generations, in a way that is both economically inefficient and deeply unfair. For example, it would be much cheaper in the long run to take serious steps to cut back on carbon emissions now, but in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “we are all dead.”

So we continue to live ecologically destructive lives because most of the consequences of our irresponsible behavior will be visited on our descendants, who at present have little or no say in the matter.

Similarly, when we vote ourselves tax cuts today we are in effect voting for tax increases -- and/or spending cuts -- for our children. Combining tax cuts with increased spending is the social equivalent of running up a multi-trillion dollar credit card balance and then mailing the payment notices to the future.