This post is a fascinating essay by Yasheng Huang about the Chinese examination system, which was recently published in Aeon. Here's a link to the original. It draws on his new book, which I highly recommend: The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exam, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They … Continue reading Yasheng Huang — The Exam that Broke Society
This post is an essay by Rachel Shin about the hypercompetition among students at elite universities, which appeared several weeks ago in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. She reports that Yale undergraduates have ramped up student stress by turning the application process for admission to what are supposed to be benign extracurricular activities … Continue reading Rachel Shin on Hypercompetition at Elite Universities
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It's a brief essay about what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This post is a reflection on the social advantage that comes from attending an extremely exclusive private college. Typically this means one of the Ivy-Plus schools -- namely members of the Ivy League plus a few others such as Stanford and Chicago. Upper-middle class families are famously obsessed with getting their children into one of … Continue reading You Don’t Need the Ivies to Be Successful
This post is an opinion essay that appeared in a recent Newsweek. Here's a link to the original. And here's a link and another and yet another for somewhat different spins on the subject. In the belief system of the American meritocracy, pursuing higher levels of formal education is the route to upward mobility and … Continue reading Diplomas May Be Killing the American Dream
This post is a lovely essay about that central academic institution, the endowed chair. It's written by a professor who wants one. Every professor does. Not because it brings money and power but because it offers the key form of academic compensation -- a little bit of fame. It picks up on a theme I've … Continue reading Buy Me a Chair
This post is a recent essay by David Brooks about how the Trumpers have a point. A key part of what they're objecting to is people like us, the residents of the highly credentialed American meritocracy who lord it over the unwashed who didn't go to Princeton or didn't go to college at all. As … Continue reading David Brooks: What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?
This post is a piece from the The Economist about the cost of attending American universities. It pushes back against the conventional wisdom about the excessive cost burden that these institutions impose on students. The spin is one I like, which is that universities have an incentive to appear more expensive than they really are. … Continue reading Sticker Shocker: US Universities Aren’t as Expensive as They Look
This is a piece I published in Aeon in October, 2017. It provides an overview of my book that came out that year, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. It’s a highly improbable rags-to-riches story, in which the US system of higher education went from pitiful in the 19th century to powerful in the … Continue reading Rags to Riches: How US Higher Ed Went from Pitiful to Powerful
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's book, Escape from Rome. It's a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the world … Continue reading How the Fall of the Roman Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about Rise of US Higher Ed
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 