HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Kamala Harris’ husband lands teaching gig at Georgetown University.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Marquette To Cut 225 Faculty And Staff As Part Of 25% Reduction In Academic Spending; $12 Million Budget Surplus To Be Used For Strategic Priorities.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Of Colorado Dean: ‘Never Waste A Good Pandemic’ — Replace 50 Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty With 25 Instructors Who Teach More And Earn Less. “To many, White’s proposal read as an attack on tenure, shared governance and the notion of higher education as a public good.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard dismisses Title IX complaint against prof who said trans student would have been murdered in China. But wait, there’s more:

More surprising is that Harvard University didn’t punish a professor for stating that truth, even when it riled up a student who ranks high on the subjective oppression scale – though it took a month to clear him.

The Ivy League school dismissed a Title IX complaint filed against Arthur Kleinman (above) by a transgender student who claimed the anthropology professor created a “hostile environment” by noting how Kai De Jesus would be treated in “rural China,” The Harvard Crimson reports.

Kleinman insisted he was trying to stop De Jesus, a man who identifies as a woman, from derailing the virtual class session on the tradeoffs in global public health by suggesting violence against whites was justified.

Another student in the class, Shah Faesal, agreed that the transgender student’s question, in retrospect, appeared to justify the “extermination of the white race to bring an end to the race problem.”

It’s nice to know that our allegedly top universities are incubating “final solution” talk.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why not ‘My Fuhrer’? Appeals court grills public college on forcing professor to call male student ‘miss.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF HATE EDITION: Texas A&M thanks account targeting, publishing information of conservative students.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Is This the End of College as We Know It?

Rachael Wittern earned straight As in high school, a partial scholarship to college and then a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She is now 33 years old, lives in Tampa, earns $94,000 a year as a psychologist and says her education wasn’t worth the cost. She carries $300,000 in student debt.

Dr. Wittern’s 37-year-old husband worked in a warehouse for several years before becoming an apprentice electrician. He expects to earn comparable money when he’s finished—minus the debt. When and if they have children, Dr. Wittern says her advice will be to follow her husband’s path and avoid a four-year degree. . . .

For more than a century, a four-year college degree was a blue-chip credential and a steppingstone to the American dream. For many millennials and now Gen Z, it has become an albatross around their necks.

Millennials are the most educated generation in the nation’s history, but they are broke compared with their predecessors. So why would they direct their children to take the same path?

“They probably won’t,” says John Thelin, a historian of higher education and professor at the University of Kentucky.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Applications Plummet For Next Year’s Freshman Class.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE – LEGAL EDITION UPDATE: “Following the [Obama-era] Gainful Employment regulations, Gillen divides law schools into three categories: pass (where the typical graduate’s debt payments are no higher than 8.6 percent of earnings), probation (between 8.6 percent and 12.8 percent) and fail (more than 12.8 percent of earnings)… 73 percent of the schools for which Gillen was able to get data (168 schools) fail.” Yeesh.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Too many prestigious graduate degrees and not enough jobs make for bad politics. My daughter has already noticed that the folks in her circle who are most into “activism” of various sorts are mostly the ones whose careers and lives seem to be going the worst.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: New Michigan State diversity director gets $315k salary, $700/month car allowance.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A sociology professor from George Mason University says student extracurricular activities serve “to perpetuate inequality” and benefit white males the most.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College undergrads: America is racist, looting ‘justified,’ reparations required.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Did You Know? The Ignorance of College Graduates.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Profs outraged over Trump being nice to female debate moderator Kristen Welker. Well, when you’ve lost the faculty of the University of Wisconsin (Platteville). . . .

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Freshman Enrollment Is Down 16% This Fall.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: CSUN professor runs ‘Boycott Israel Resource Page’ on university website. “The page calls Israel ‘The most racist state in the world’ accusing them of ‘Crimes against humanity” including “ethnic cleansing.'” Hatred and bigotry are at home in academia, for all the happy talk about diversity and anti-racism.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Boulder prof on Trump: ‘I just want him to die.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Update On Student Tuition Refund Lawsuits Following Colleges’ Shift To Online Classes During COVID-19.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Fall 2021 Law School Admissions Season Opens With A Bang: Applicants Are Up Over 35%, With Biggest Increases Among The Highest LSAT Bands.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U Colorado requires approval on statements addressing ‘sensitive’ topics, like First Amendment.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fall 2020 Undergraduate Enrollment Down 2.5%, Graduate Enrollment Up 3.9%.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE EDITION: SFSU Professor: “We Really Idolize Somebody like Leila Khaled..Somebody Who Actually Goes to a Plane and Hijacks It.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Frequent guest at leading universities says that ‘violence is the only way’ to support BLM. Student activity fees, laundered into speaking fees for lefty speakers, are an important part of the leftist ecosystem.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Faculty Struggle With Burnout During COVID-19.

I feel like faculty, overall, have had things a lot easier than say grocery workers or meatpackers, but we’re also a bunch of delicate complainers.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Duke prof’s new computer science course will focus on diversity.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Free Market Can Deliver Free College: Remember paying your broker $200 a trade? Higher education is at that stage today.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.

The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.

At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University—which offers an array of online classes—cut tuition by up to 25% for full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.

Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?

The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero. . . .

Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen — with a boost from the pandemic.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “ROBBING US OF OUR TUITION DOLLARS ONCE AGAIN.” Gettysburg College tells most of its students to go home. They don’t go quietly. “Previously, the college quarantined students for days, prohibiting them from leaving their rooms except to pick up meals and use the bathroom. . . . Tension on the campus was further escalated by the College’s lack of communication about whether tuition and fees paid would be reimbursed. Many students enrolled at Gettysburg paid prices they expected would cover a traditional educational experience, rather than a less resource-intensive model of remote delivery.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University suspended black student for a year because drunk white girl kissed him: lawsuit.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, DIVERSITY-PROBLEM EDITION: Professors Have Given Seven Times As Much To Biden Than To Trump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: House Of Cards: Can The American University Be Saved? “Across the country, universities are canceling classes and furloughing workers, leaving thousands stranded without income. Though some schools have lengthened the tenure timelines of assistant professors, the majority have refused to extend a similar courtesy to graduate students. Staff members and adjuncts have likewise been abandoned—forced to work fewer hours or unceremoniously let go. The situation is likely to get worse as students refuse to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to take subpar online courses while sitting in their living rooms. Without exaggeration, American higher education may be on the verge of a total breakdown.”

If only there had been some sort of warning.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION: Amidst 75% Enrollment Decline, Thomas Cooley Abandons Naming Rights To Minor League Baseball Stadium.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Columbia marching band, ‘founded on the basis of racism,’ votes to ‘dissolve’ itself. “The move comes after anonymous social media users made allegations of racism against unnamed band members.”

UPDATE: A reader whose daughter attends Columbia sends a warning that this may be a prank, and not a genuine story. Maybe so. Who can tell anymore!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The president of the University of North Texas tweeted that the college is “looking into” a conservative student group after a student tweeted that she feels “unsafe” by the group’s affiliation with UNT. Somebody needs to “look into” how UNT got such an awful president as Neal Smatresk.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Northwestern law faculty refuse to explain why they introduced themselves as racists. They’ve admitted it, and they won’t explain, so I guess we’ll have to fire them.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford offers sessions on ‘racial terror,’ claiming it’s ‘nearly impossible’ to think outside of White supremacy.

Cost of attending Stanford University: $71,857 per year.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ANTI-RACISM EDITION: Civil rights groups cheer Justice Department for finding Yale discriminates against Asians, whites.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College director: ‘Every white person in this country is racist.’ As taxpayers tire of supporting this kind of thing, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Legal Education Faces Its Waterloo As Wile E. Coyote.

Well, the good news is, even when he’s flattened by a steamroller, he just walks around like an accordion for a bit and then returns to normal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Berkeley ‘decolonization’ column argues in favor of ‘violent resistance.’ “‘There is no ‘civil’ way to resist ongoing occupation and war,’ writes paper’s decolonization columnist.”

Oh, you really don’t want Americans in general thinking that way.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus black privilege, explained: History prof spells out what it is, why it’s counterproductive.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Thanks to Coronavirus and Zoom, We’re Looking at the End Stages of College as a Commodity.

And now we get to the essentializing, because the pandemic has made something undeniable: To a large extent, students have become customers. And professors should acknowledge their own role in getting us to that point, because the commodification of higher education is a direct byproduct of the transformation of college into the entrance examination for America’s middle class, something the professoriate has cheered on.

Sure, students are buying a complex bundle that’s rarely described as a “product.” But if you doubt colleges are selling, you need look only at the glossy marketing campaigns. And if you think they’re mostly selling learning, consider this thought experiment from economist Bryan Caplan: If you had to choose, would you rather have four years of Princeton University classes but no diploma, or the diploma, but no classes?

Maybe you’d choose the classes; if so, you’re in the minority. Most students are primarily buying something else — a credential, a social network — not a “community of learning.” Which is not to say that this is what they should be buying, or that we should even think of it as a “purchase.”

Markets are terrific, and we need them, but we also need institutions that are buffered from them. When those buffers break down, as they have in America’s colleges, dysfunction ensues. University business-think has meant bureaucratic overgrowth and an obsession with useless “metrics” — assessing faculty using student evaluations rather than student learning, goosing “selectivity” by soliciting applications in order to reject them.

Professors rightly resist these developments. But what else could you expect once colleges became the gatekeeper to all the good jobs? Now most everyone needs to go, regardless of their interest in learning. And an essentially scholarly enterprise doesn’t serve most of those people well.

So instead, U.S. higher education bundled “teaching and research” with a bunch of other things — residential amenities, sports teams, networking opportunities, career coaching, dating service and so forth. Among other effects, all this initially created a booming demand for professors; their numbers quintupled from 1940 to 1970 and then almost doubled again by 1988. Without that shift, most of the professors complaining about the commercialization of education would have had to take jobs in actual businesses.

You don’t want that. I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results. Well, unless you’re a diversity officer or something.

Plus: “The bundle was still tightly woven enough, however, that we could tell ourselves the learning was still the heart of the package. Then covid-19 came, and suddenly, the lectures and the homework were the only part schools could still deliver. Yet somehow, few students seem reassured that they’re getting most of what they were paying tuition for. Deep down, even university presidents knew this would be the case, which is why so many spent the summer pretending they were going to find some way to reopen, in many cases announcing the truth only when the tuition checks were well in hand.”

Super-cynical, and entirely correct.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WATCH: Princeton prof compares Trump to ‘plantation owner.’

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS, HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE EDITION: University Of Georgia Says Students Should ‘Consider Wearing A Mask During Sex’: Report.

A friend on Facebook comments: “Millennials and Gen Z don’t even wrap it up for hook ups.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CORONAVIRUS EDITION: Princeton Scraps Plan to Return Undergraduates to Campus.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Tulane cancels event about book condemning white supremacy amid student backlash.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION EDITION: Republican lawmakers to universities: Show us your foreign funding.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In age of coronavirus, mother finds UNC-Chapel Hill didn’t even clean son’s dorm room.

While university administrators across North Carolina have spent weeks preparing to bring students back to their campuses amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, one mother says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill missed a basic step: cleaning the dormitories.

Amanda Edwards said that, when she walked into the Ram Village 5 building to help her son move in, the filth she saw was a complete disconnect with all of the talk during the pandemic of frequent cleaning and sanitizing surfaces to limit the spread of the virus.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ They did not clean anything, Edwards said. “You figure you’re going to have to do some cleaning because you want to do what’s right for your kid. But given the current times, I was, like, ‘Wait a minute.’ This is just inconsistent. This makes no sense.”

The filthy floor included a condom wrapper. The common area was even worse, she said.

UNC is a dump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Cancel culture’ crew nearly got me ‘expelled’ before I’d even started college.

For every public figure or pundit denouncing cancel culture — the wave of leftist coercion and censorship sweeping America’s institutions — there are many more who deny that such a thing even exists.

Before you believe the deniers, allow me to tell you what it’s like to find yourself in the jaws of this culture as a recent high-school graduate.

I wanted to attend Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., because I sought a faith-based education. The university touts itself as “Catholic and Jesuit,” but I knew that as a conservative and a supporter of President Trump, my views were likely to be controversial. But I never imagined that months before ever setting foot on campus, I’d be subject to ridicule, incendiary comments and even death threats.

I was about to be “canceled” before moving into my dorm.

Cost of attending Marquette University, $60,252.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Face Historic Summer Admissions Melt Of 25% Or More, With Higher Rates For Students Of Color.

The Dems hope that the coronavirus will cost Trump the presidency, but it’s leaving a swath of destruction through all their key institutions, from education (high and low) to Hollywood, to the woke sports leagues, to the bureaucracy, which nobody on the left or right trusts now. Another circling torpedo.

And if I were a freshman, I’d be strongly inclined to take a gap year. Between the virus and the campus madness, why go?