The Pope Center publishes this paper as part of our continuing effort to spur transparency in higher education. North Carolina citizens need to know if the UNC system is fulfilling its mission of discovering, creating, transmitting, and applying knowledge. The new edition of...
Published: Friday, January 8th, 2016 @ 10:57 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Higher education has already become an important issue in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary race. It should receive considerable attention in the first primary date, scheduled for October 13 on CNN.
Published: Thursday, October 8th, 2015 @ 9:47 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Measuring the performance of colleges - and holding them accountable for their performance - is an unsolved problem. A new "earnings gains" measure of community colleges in North Carolina aims to solve it.
Published: Tuesday, September 29th, 2015 @ 11:53 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Paying for college is not like paying for other goods and services. The eventual customers, college students, may not always feel the impact of rising college costs. Instead, parents and taxpayers often subsidize much of students' tuition.
Published: Monday, September 28th, 2015 @ 4:24 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Measuring the performance of colleges-and holding them accountable for their performances-is an unsolved problem
Published: Friday, September 4th, 2015 @ 12:43 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Listen to mainstream education advocates, and you'll come away thinking that not enough people are going to college. But if you listen to higher education reformers, particularly political conservatives, you'll hear that too many are going to college.
Published: Wednesday, August 26th, 2015 @ 9:05 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Higher education is often an ignored issue in presidential campaigns. The 2016 campaign, however, may be different.
Published: Tuesday, August 11th, 2015 @ 12:52 am
By: John William Pope Center
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If one is looking for clues regarding what universities think a college education should be about, one obvious place to look is their freshman summer reading programs
Published: Thursday, July 23rd, 2015 @ 4:35 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Tomorrow is the day we celebrate our nation's founding-and the first time that a nation was deliberately founded on reason and the rule of law instead of on accidents of history. The central question of this article is "how are the founding and related topics treated in today's academia?" It is a...
Published: Sunday, July 12th, 2015 @ 11:57 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Cracks are appearing in the longstanding school tradition of breaking for the summer; not everyone prefers the traditional schedule. In some circles, a year-round schedule is gaining in popularity. For example, in Wake County, more than a third of elementary schools have year-round schedules.
Published: Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 @ 5:10 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Listen to members of the education establishment, and you will hear that not enough people are going to college. Listen to higher education reformers, particularly political conservatives, and you will hear that too many are going to college
Published: Monday, July 6th, 2015 @ 7:06 am
By: John William Pope Center
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It often seems as though the central mission of higher education today is promoting diversity. Diversity - which usually means racial, religious, and sexual diversity - is commonly accepted by most administrators as crucial to the success of the 21st-century university. More and more...
Published: Tuesday, June 9th, 2015 @ 1:21 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Commencement season often is a controversial time. Last year was conspicuous for its wave of politically motivated disinvitations, with students trying, sometimes with success, to get their universities to rescind invitations to commencement speakers such as anti-Islamist writer and activist Ayaan H
Published: Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015 @ 2:17 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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In the United States, tradition dictates that we have summers off from school.
Published: Sunday, May 31st, 2015 @ 2:24 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Commencement season is an often-controversial time. Last year was conspicuous for its wave of politically motivated disinvitations, with students trying, sometimes with success, to get their universities to rescind invitations to commencement speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Condoleezza Rice.
Published: Monday, May 11th, 2015 @ 6:34 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Richard Cornuelle, the Indianapolis libertarian activist who started United Student Aid Funds (USAF), had a fight on his hands. His organization, whose downfall led ultimately to the creation of today's college-access giant known as the Lumina Foundation, was created with the goal of competing...
Published: Thursday, April 16th, 2015 @ 7:22 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Major donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation dominate higher education philanthropy today. Most are aware of the Gates Foundation's roots in Bill's vast wealth, but the story of how Lumina came to be is more complicated.
Published: Wednesday, April 8th, 2015 @ 3:36 am
By: John William Pope Center
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UNC-Chapel Hill has launched Carolina Conversations, an initiative designed to provide forums for students to discuss sensitive topics. UNC-CH will do this in three ways: sponsor regular large-scale town-hall-style forums called My Carolina Voice, smaller gatherings called Carolina Pulse, and...
Published: Wednesday, April 1st, 2015 @ 10:44 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Attend a North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges meeting and you are likely to fall asleep as board members and community college system office staffers take turns dispassionately checking off the month's agenda items to unanimous approval.
Published: Monday, February 2nd, 2015 @ 10:43 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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The federal proposal that the president is calling "America's College Promise" has inspired fanfare and controversy that go beyond President Obama's decision earlier this week not to interfere with so-called 529 savings plans.
Published: Saturday, January 31st, 2015 @ 10:57 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The new federal proposal that the president is calling "America's College Promise" is short on details but has inspired much commentary.
Published: Tuesday, January 20th, 2015 @ 9:35 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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As 2015 approaches, we offer our hopes for higher education reform. Some changes will require action by university stakeholders, and others will require a "hands off" approach. Here's hoping that the new year brings improvement upon the status quo.
Published: Thursday, January 1st, 2015 @ 10:31 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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This year has been an eventful one for higher education in general and for North Carolina specifically. As Santa checks his list, the Pope Center has a few suggestions as to who's been naughty and nice this year.
Published: Saturday, December 27th, 2014 @ 6:14 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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What are the limits of the partnerships that a public institution of higher education may form? A growing number of critics, including university officials and faculty, argue that accepting funding and academic influence from the communist Chinese government crosses a line.
Published: Friday, December 26th, 2014 @ 11:41 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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What are the limits of the partnerships that a public institution of higher education may form? A growing number of critics, including university officials and faculty, argue that accepting funding and academic influence from the communist Chinese government crosses a line.
Published: Tuesday, December 16th, 2014 @ 8:00 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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In most states, community colleges offer only associate degrees in nursing, which require two to three years of education.
Published: Saturday, December 13th, 2014 @ 11:18 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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In 2012, a UNC-Chapel Hill freshman with a blood level of alcohol nearly three times the legal limit was found dead. Winston Crisp, vice chancellor for student affairs, saw this as indicative of a nationwide problem-one he has been working to address since then.
Published: Monday, December 1st, 2014 @ 9:15 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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In most states, community colleges offer only associate degrees in nursing, which require two to three years of education. But in five states Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington they offer a four-year nursing bachelor's degree.
Published: Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014 @ 4:49 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Should public universities be allowed to derecognize a Christian student group because it requires members to be Christian? Astoundingly, the courts say yes. Ever since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the courts have allowed universities this power.
Published: Sunday, October 12th, 2014 @ 12:58 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Not all students can obtain federal loans for college because some community colleges do not participate in the federal lending program.
Published: Tuesday, September 16th, 2014 @ 6:01 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Are college students more likely to listen to a lecture about education policy if an adult film actress is behind the podium? They certainly filled the room for Belle Knox, whose real name is Miriam Weeks, a 19-year-old Duke student. She came to UNC-Chapel Hill on Tuesday to talk about the high cost
Published: Saturday, September 13th, 2014 @ 7:58 am
By: John William Pope Center
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Left-liberals may dominate universities in the United States, but another kind of liberal—the classical liberal—is finding its way into the fray.
Published: Monday, August 25th, 2014 @ 6:53 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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Ever since 2006, when Margaret Spellings, then the U.S. secretary of education, issued a report stressing the need for higher graduation rates at colleges and universities, there has been pressure on universities to award more diplomas.
Published: Tuesday, August 19th, 2014 @ 2:36 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Social media is ubiquitous in the lives of the millennial generation, and its use is still evolving.
Published: Monday, August 18th, 2014 @ 10:46 pm
By: John William Pope Center
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