As you embark on four years of college, think of the food offered in the cafeteria as a metaphor for your studies. You pay a flat rate -- meal ticket, tuition -- for both, then you can consume whatever you have room for.
This week, millions of young people head to college and universities, aiming for a four-year liberal arts degree. They assume that degree is the only gateway to the American middle class. It shouldn't be.
What we once took for granted in higher education has been turned on its head. The scrutiny of the liberal arts comes at a time when the economic performance of the United States has been languishing for more than six years.
Many today are calling for us to create a much more vocational style of teaching. They claim that in today's economy we should track students earlier into specific fields for which they seem to have aptitude. This is exactly the opposite of the American tradition of liberal education.
Professor David Lummus's "Italy: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," a new "Gateways to the World" course aimed at students interested in studying abroad in Italy.
It takes a novelist to remind us of something that is difficult for us to see from our perspective at the center of our own experience, namely, that our lives follow the curve of a narrative.
Every year business-oriented publications like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Kiplinger's rate college majors. What are the best and worst cours...
These are the students of today and tomorrow, whom we want and need to attract to higher education. It is these individuals who will help us to become, once again, the most educated nation in the world.
If you think this has no earthly use, ask Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Bezos insists that his senior executives write memos -- often as long as six printed pages -- and begins senior management meetings with a period of quiet time -- sometimes as long as 30 minutes -- while everyone reads the memos and makes notes on them. Whatever you will do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly and -- I would add -- quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill. And it is, in many ways, the central teaching of a liberal education.
Encouraging more STEM training, as called for by President Obama, is a worthy goal. But graduates should also build a capacity for problem solving and critical thinking by way of a broad-based, liberal arts curriculum.
The answer, I believe, is rooted in a particular history and vision of what post-secondary public education in a healthy democracy ought to look like.
Confession: I am a millennial and I do not have all the answers, would never argue that I do, and as I always say, our work is never done. However, we...
Let's stop talking about the death or decline of the arts and humanities. Let's explicitly engage with its rebirth.
A hundred years ago, there was also speculation that the liberal arts would go the way of the horse and carriage. Then as now, some believed that higher education should emphasize the technical rather than the humanistic, production over contemplation, and job training in lieu of life training.
Once, when I told a guy on a plane that I taught philosophy at a community college, he responded, “So you teach Plato to plumbers?” Yes, indeed. B...
The process of managing uncertainty starts by spending time thinking about the future. That may sound a bit facile, and probably doesn't seem like an academic pursuit on its face. But planning is a discipline
Over several decades, computers have replaced workers who perform routine tasks, notably in the manufacturing sector. This trend is expected to continue and to increasingly impact occupations where workers perform non-routine tasks.
I can't claim any credit for his final decision to attend a small liberal arts college, but I thought other parents who are facing a similar situation might like to see a shortened version of the letter I sent to my son more than twenty years ago.
Research released by edX and other massive online providers has reoriented our sense of the disrupted topography of higher education -- and where online education fits within it.
As a long-serving college president, I am often asked for advice on how to make a choice among colleges. Answers to the following five questions will, more often than not, result in a good decision.
According to the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, upon graduating from college with a degree in English, there are only several career options tha...
Every few years or decades, some new idea threatens to revolutionize higher education and right now that is the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) just about the hottest idea around.
A society built on the rapid pace of today's technological achievements cries out for a leadership and workforce educated broadly.
Last week, President Obama apologized for his flippant remark about the value of an art history degree, but he was hardly the first person to question...
Note that Martin Luther King Jr. declared 'I have a dream,' neither 'I have a plan' nor 'I have a strategy.' By articulating a shared dream -- not a plan, not a strategy -- he empowered his fellow Americans to participate in a national dialogue as to how to achieve that vision.
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