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At first glance, Fayetteville State University may seem like a run-of-the-mill institution. Out of the sixteen UNC system schools, FSU's enrollment ranks twelfth, and among the system's five historically black schools, it ranks third. The average SAT score for entering freshmen (844) is the...
Published: Tuesday, January 28th, 2014 @ 8:08 am
By: John William Pope Center
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The political left never rests in its drive to transform the U.S. into a more statist, more collective society. Its adherents are always scanning the status quo for openings and vulnerabilities to exploit, and they tirelessly produce a wide array of initiatives to advance their cause. It is hard...
Published: Saturday, January 25th, 2014 @ 10:21 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Bratwurst, Leica cameras, BMW automobiles, Beck's beer, and so on - great German imports to the U.S. Few people realize that our educational system was also imported from Germany. Unlike those fine products, however, the 19th century educational concepts we imported from Germany are not working...
Published: Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014 @ 4:51 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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For those happy few who may be unfamiliar with the term "smart classroom," it refers to an ordinary teaching-space fitted out with a desktop PC and monitor, a document camera, a multi-discriminating disc-player for CDs, DVDs and BluRay discs; a high-fidelity stereo speaker system, a digital projecto
Published: Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014 @ 5:14 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Before it became ensconced in academia, feminism had a point. By the 1960s, sex roles in the United States were changing; traditional roles had become outmoded and constricting. Laws, habits, and customs needed to be updated - and they were.
Published: Tuesday, January 21st, 2014 @ 8:01 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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"Universities for a very long time have been based on trust." So said the provost of the University of North Carolina, commenting on a report that a course taken mostly by intercollegiate athletes had never actually met. Dozens of other courses may have been similarly fraudulent, and a criminal...
Published: Sunday, January 19th, 2014 @ 9:46 am
By: John William Pope Center
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In 2009, the Pope Center produced a report on the UNC School of the Arts. The report's author, Max Borders, showed that on a per-student basis, UNCSA is North Carolina's most expensive publicly funded university. He concluded that, because of the expense and the school's uncertain economic...
Published: Wednesday, January 15th, 2014 @ 12:45 am
By: John William Pope Center
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When I saw my acceptance letter from UCLA in 2004, I was overjoyed to find out that I was one of the chosen to attend an elite university, currently ranked 23rd among national universities by U.S. News. My hard work and dedication toward creating the perfect college application during my four...
Published: Saturday, January 11th, 2014 @ 2:13 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Law school enrollment is declining at a marked rate. New American Bar Association figures show that last fall's first-year law student enrollment was 24 percent below the all-time high registered in 2010. There hasn't been a smaller entering class since 1975. Slowly but surely, it seems, Americans a
Published: Thursday, January 9th, 2014 @ 1:05 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Last August, the Obama administration floated the idea of a federal college rating system. The basic idea is to reward colleges that score well in the metrics of the system by allowing students who enroll in them to receive larger Pell grants. Conversely, colleges that scored poorly would only be...
Published: Monday, January 6th, 2014 @ 6:04 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Technological change has made online coursework very competitive with the traditional means of teaching. Will it lead to dramatic change in college, or have only a minor impact? Consider the analogy to music.
Published: Sunday, January 5th, 2014 @ 6:31 am
By: John William Pope Center
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The Pope Center celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2013. Our organization was initially part of the John Locke Foundation, but became independent in 2003. One of our activities is researching problems in higher education and issuing findings and recommendations in major reports...
Published: Friday, January 3rd, 2014 @ 12:19 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Until about five years ago, few people said much about America's federal student loan system. There was no talk of a "crisis," and discussions about change were pretty much limited to tinkering around the edges.
Published: Tuesday, December 31st, 2013 @ 1:48 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Perhaps the most glaring weakness among American college students is their writing. Many enter college lacking the ability to put together even a single good paragraph - and graduate without much improvement. It has been that way for a long time.
Published: Monday, December 30th, 2013 @ 6:33 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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What high school curriculum best prepares a student for college? Which majors yield the highest-paying jobs? Does being held back in kindergarten ultimately help or hurt lifelong educational performance? A new data collection program may provide the necessary long-term information to...
Published: Sunday, December 29th, 2013 @ 11:37 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Big things were anticipated for higher education reform in 2013 - but the sizzle turned to fizzle in many cases. Landmark court decisions got pushed off for another year, bubbles didn't quite burst, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) did not take over vast swaths of the higher education...
Published: Saturday, December 28th, 2013 @ 1:24 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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There has been tremendous buzz about online higher education in recent years, both from insiders and reformers. Much of it is deserved - obviously, there's a lot of new technology out there with great potential for teaching and learning. But there is also a lot of confusion.
Published: Tuesday, December 24th, 2013 @ 1:19 am
By: John William Pope Center
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On an ordinary Monday morning in a graduate industrial engineering class at North Carolina State University, one would expect to hear talk about statistical analysis, linear programming, or maybe the outcome of the previous weekend's football game. In reality, it is nearly impossible to discern...
Published: Sunday, December 22nd, 2013 @ 2:54 am
By: John William Pope Center
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About 65 million years ago, the huge dinosaurs went extinct, but small, quick mammals that could adapt to the new environment thrived. And about 25 years ago, mammoth steel mills gave way to more efficient mini-mills.
Published: Friday, December 20th, 2013 @ 3:24 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Every few years, The College Board releases a report entitled Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society. It had not done so since 2010, until the latest version. These reports have a perfectly consistent message, namely that college education is all good. It...
Published: Tuesday, December 17th, 2013 @ 1:48 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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As a finance and economics professor, I often encounter students with scarce financial knowledge. While students finish high school well-versed in topics such as dangerous drugs and sex, often they know little about basic financial concepts such as compounding interest or the mechanics of the...
Published: Tuesday, December 17th, 2013 @ 7:16 am
By: John William Pope Center
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"Today an employer at a minimum wants [graduates with] job-related skills or training, plus critical thinking and communication abilities," wrote Champion Mitchell, a member of the University of North Carolina system's Board of Governors, in a recent Pope Center featured. Mitchell, a former...
Published: Monday, December 16th, 2013 @ 3:59 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Suppose you sent your daughter to a music camp - an expensive camp lasting months. She had said that she wanted to learn the violin, so you bought a nice one and sent her off to camp. Upon her return, you ask how the camp was and she replies, "Great! We studied lots of stuff about music and the...
Published: Thursday, December 12th, 2013 @ 4:41 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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College degrees are not created equal. Would you buy your child just any old degree? A folk art and artisanry degree? A dance degree? A psychology degree?
Published: Tuesday, December 10th, 2013 @ 6:47 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Madam Chair, Ranking Member Hinojosa, and Distinguished Members of this committee, thank you for this opportunity. The Pell grant program faces two serious problems today: its increasing cost to the taxpayer, and its failure to serve students well. The program is too expensive and too few...
Published: Friday, December 6th, 2013 @ 8:10 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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The Pope Center recently published a report on UNC-Chapel Hill's general education program - the "core curriculum" of non-major requirements that all students must complete in order to graduate. In our report, we analyzed the current system and then presented two alternative programs for general...
Published: Wednesday, December 4th, 2013 @ 9:29 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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A recent New York Times piece caught my eye, as it hit upon a topic - alas! - so close to my heart. I'm talking about the enormous glut of people who have earned their PhDs. but cannot find secure, decent-paying academic work.
Published: Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013 @ 12:43 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Although some young Americans graduate from high school with superb academic skills, a great many leave high school with pathetic abilities in crucial areas: reading, writing, basic math, and reasoning. One of the key reasons why that's so is that many of their teachers are not very good themselves.
Published: Saturday, November 30th, 2013 @ 1:04 am
By: John William Pope Center
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At Modesto Junior College on September 17, 2013, an ordinary thing happened on what, by all accounts, is an ordinary college campus. A student, Robert Van Tuinen, was told to stop handing out literature on campus in violation of campus rules.
Published: Thursday, November 28th, 2013 @ 12:21 am
By: John William Pope Center
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A battle over the North Carolina State Endowment Fund's right to sell its 123-square mile forest to an Illinois-based agribusiness firm appears to have ended. On Friday, a Wake County Superior Court judge ruled that the sale could proceed without an environmental impact statement, which a group...
Published: Tuesday, November 26th, 2013 @ 10:22 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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It often appears as if the country’s six regional accrediting agencies are the federal overseers of all things higher education. It’s time to put an end to their expansive role; doing so would very likely set off a great chain of positive reform. This is especially important now, as Congress is...
Published: Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 @ 2:11 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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You can reform particular organizations - a university or a department - but you cannot reform education as a whole. Why? Because education is a spontaneous order.
Published: Thursday, November 21st, 2013 @ 3:01 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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The term "spontaneous order" was coined by the economist F.A. Hayek to describe the market economy. He meant that no one designed the world of market exchange; it developed spontaneously as people sought to achieve their goals by coordinating with others in ways that they discovered over time.
Published: Wednesday, November 20th, 2013 @ 8:30 am
By: John William Pope Center
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A large percentage of those Americans also know that government policy had something to do with that bubble, although you do encounter some who insist that it was entirely due to capitalistic greed. (Similarly, there used to be people who insisted that the poor harvests in the Soviet Union were...
Published: Monday, November 18th, 2013 @ 8:21 am
By: John William Pope Center
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