Bloomberg has a long article about the rip-off of online for-profit colleges directed at the military and our tax dollars. Makes for very sad reading.
Bloomberg has a long article about the rip-off of online for-profit colleges directed at the military and our tax dollars. Makes for very sad reading.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
December 15th, 2009 at 9:47AM
[…] Story via Margaret Soltan. […]
December 15th, 2009 at 10:49AM
Part of the problem here is organizations that idiotically require a *degree* in order to get hired, promoted, or paid more, without any concern as to what getting the degree actually involves, or whether it is really relevant to the job and seriously differentiates from candidates who don’t have the degree. K-12 education is the biggest offender here, with automatic pay increases often coming with an advanced degree (even one in squisy-soft "education") despite any evidence that such degrees are really of any value…but business, and apparently also the military, are by no means totally innocent.
Haven’t seen many stories about people getting fake degrees or oversimplified on-line degrees in genuinely high-content subjects like "theromodynamics of steam turbines" or even "German poets of the late Middle Ages"…it generally seems to be some degree whose purpose for existing is that piece of paper itself.
December 15th, 2009 at 12:10PM
Assholes ripping off the government and the soldier: a dishonorable tradition since 1776.
December 15th, 2009 at 2:00PM
> Part of the problem here is organizations that idiotically require a *degree* in order to get hired, promoted, or paid more…
Don’t forget law enforcement as one of the principal sectors involved in this kind of enterprise. There’s many a fourth-tier college staying afloat by offering criminal justice degrees that are required for promotion in various police departments.
>… or oversimplified on-line degrees in genuinely high-content subjects… "German poets of the late Middle Ages"
Ironically, and partly to be contrarian, I think a serious Great Books degree program is the sort of thing that might be successful online. It would be text-heavy, with lots of reading and writing, and online discussion. To be good it would have to have the same kind of student-faculty ratio you’d find in an on-campus program, so it couldn’t be a cheap thing, nor a mass market thing. If David wants to put up the money I’ll develop it. 😉
December 15th, 2009 at 2:21PM
David is perfectly right about credentialism — and there are two side effects that are damaging to higher education. One is the devaluation of liberal arts degrees, because a "relevant" schlock degree can often win out. The other, clearer problem is that institutions that specialize in credentials intended to bring automatic promotion are not subject to appropriate market discipline. The main reason schools of education are so bad is that nobody much cares about the quality of their highest degrees (MEd, EdD degrees for administrators).
December 15th, 2009 at 2:45PM
RJO…I think an online Great Books program could work well if done properly..however, I wonder if there would actually be a significant market for it. I’m guessing most of the people interested in that kind of reading these days are self-confident & quirky enough to want to choose their own reading materials, whereas in the original GB days, people were looking for someone to to tell them what was culturally acceptable.
In his memoirs, Tom Watson Jr of IBM tells an interesting story about his friend Al Williams, who rose from a very rough background to become President of IBM. Williams explained that his self-improvement program had consisted of three elements: (1)buy clothes at Brooks Brothers, (2)read the classics, (3)listen to classical music every evening. (This was in the 1930s & 1940s, IIRC)
It’s interesting & probably depressing to speculate about what a parallel self-improvement program would look like today…
December 15th, 2009 at 4:45PM
David, I don’t know exactly what it would look like, but it would probably involve reading People magazine and watching reality television…
February 8th, 2010 at 4:39PM
Although two degrees have the same level of study and examined at the same level employers and a lot of university admission services distinguished between study methods. Learning through interaction could be more beneficial and this is especially perceived by employers. I have experience if this from as a lecturer and at management level in commercial industry.