RealClearEducation Articles
College Rankings Are Flawed—but City Journal’s New Alternative System Only Compounds the Problems
City Journal has unveiled a new college ranking system, presenting it as a corrective to the perceived failures of existing rankings. The need for a better ranking system is real. Traditional rankings often rely on blunt prestige metrics, reputational surveys, and financial inputs that track institutional status more faithfully than educational substance. But the weaknesses of existing rankings do not make every critique credible, nor every alternative rigorous. The relevant question is whether the methodology of the alternative meets the standards of academic seriousness it implicitly claims...
Florida Shows How to Push Back Against Campus Speech Radicalism
Campus free expression is in crisis. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings found that student acceptance of disruptive protest tactics has reached record highs. More students than ever believe it is acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to campus events, or use violence to silence speech. For the first time, a majority of students oppose allowing any of the six controversial speakers - three liberal, three conservative - that FIRE asked about. The average school earned an F for its speech...
The National Movement to Trim Higher Ed Bloat
Americans don't agree on much these days, but we all seem to agree that higher education in our country is broken. The good news is that we may now see the beginning of a nationwide movement to make higher education a better investment for students and help prepare them for life after school.
Since the 1990s, we have seen an explosion in the cost of college driven by a growth in administrators and virtually endless government-backed debt. Continued increases in enrollments allowed even state schools to create classes and even entire majors for which there was absolutely no...
With Washington Stepping Back, States Must Step Up
Nearly a year into his presidency, the Trump administration continues to dramatically reshape the federal role in education and workforce policy—dismantling regulations, slashing budgets, and rethinking the purpose of agencies like the Department of Education. While much remains uncertain even now, one thing is becoming clear: states cannot rely on Washington to lead the way. In fact, shifting power to the states is part of the plan.
But with that power comes responsibility. From governors’ offices to state and county workforce agencies, state leaders will need to...
How Can We Get More High-Achieving Poor Kids into College?
In theory, opening doors for high-achieving, low-income students – or, as we call them, “HALO” kids – should be a national obsession. Yet in practice, such students’ academic potential often goes unfulfilled.
For years, nationally representative data have suggested that, compared to their similarly high-achieving but wealthier peers, HALO students are more likely to lose ground during their K-12 careers and far less likely to go to college.
This is partly about structural challenges in our K-12 system, such as funding constraints and the number of low-achieving...
Rebuild the College-to-Work Pipeline, Connect the Systems That Already Exist
The labor market’s long unbroken streak of resilience is running out. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, total employment growth slowed last month, with private-sector hiring essentially flat. Meanwhile, early-career workers are feeling the strain: the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders ages 20 to 24 now stands at roughly 9 percent—about double the national average.
It’s the latest indication that a college degree, once the surest ticket to economic stability, no longer guarantees a clear path to employment—a...
Short-Term Workforce Pell, Long-Term Stakes
The federal Pell Grant program is the cornerstone of college aid for low-income undergraduates, providing roughly $39 billion in fiscal year 2025 to help students pay for college. Those dollars go almost exclusively to semester-long academic programs leading to college degrees.
President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act added a new twist to the Pell program. It created Workforce Pell, a bipartisan policy change that makes students in short-term, job-focused training programs eligible for Pell Grants. This sounds like a modest tweak to the nation’s main college-aid program. But it...
David McCullough and the Study of History
One of the greatest weeks of my life was the week David McCullough came to teach a one-credit course at Hillsdale College in 2006. McCullough, the great writer and teacher of history, held forth on the craft of writing, led us in a discussion of a primary source reading from the pen of John Adams, and held office hours with the largest gathering of students I ever saw in the faculty office building. I realized then that some people make more of a difference in a week’s time in the lives of people around them than many others make over the course of years. David McCullough made a...
Honor Charlie Kirk, Pass a Free Speech Bill
After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, flags flew at half-mast, Kirk received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom---and everyone moved on.
I was reminded of this by a surreal juxtaposition of events. Once, shortly after listening to a prominent progressive professor call cancel culture a reactionary myth, I attended a meeting of a nonprofit. Board members lamented that in the moral panic after a cop murdered George Floyd, activists forced our umbrella association to fire its executive director for a tweet arguing against demonizing all cops. One...
A Bipartisan Step Toward Smarter College Accountability
Rarely do Washington policymakers find common ground on higher-education reform. Conservatives often call for discipline in how taxpayer dollars are spent. Progressives typically focus on protecting students from predatory institutions and crushing debt. Yet in the recent reconciliation legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, both sides can find something to like. Its new accountability standards, connecting financial aid to the earnings outcomes of college majors, mark a major step forward for students and taxpayers alike.
To be sure, education is its own reward, and ideally, the system...
UC San Fran Champions Dangerous Anti-Palestinian Racism Study
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has threatened its institutional credibility by backing a dangerous study on anti-Palestinian racism that seems to flout the most basic tenets of academic research. This comes as the university is still under a hiring freeze as a result of federal and state budget cuts.
The study, "Systemic Anti-Palestinian Racism Against US Healthcare Providers”, released earlier this year by the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR), has been shared heavily among activists and media.
However, upon closer examination, the...
How Federal Red Tape Is Driving Up College Costs
Government involvement in American higher education has been an abject and costly failure. Out-of-control taxpayer-funded subsidies have resulted in higher—not lower—tuition bills for students and their families. In addition to throwing money at the problem, bureaucrats are foolishly trying to regulate their way to a more effective and efficient higher education system. The federal government is once again trying to pick winners and losers among education programs it deems worthy, even though Congress has already come up with a more even-handed approach to measure college...
How Religious Schools Strengthen Our Republic
The narrowing of intellectual life on campus is no passing trend; it has become a defining feature of American higher education. Viewpoint diversity among professors and students alike is growing scarce, leaving prevailing ideas uncontested and unrefined. Yet religious colleges and universities offer an unlikely model for renewal. Though rooted in faith traditions, they often preserve the very conditions for open, rigorous inquiry that many secular institutions now struggle to sustain. That the most intellectually diverse campuses may be those grounded in a single faith seems...
The Last Seminar
I teach my students to read Plato while their parents calculate the ROI on a philosophy degree. Seventeen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college have shown me both the beauty and limits of the old model. The liberal arts promise to cultivate wisdom, but wisdom alone no longer pays the rent.
Last year, a mother asked whether her daughter's thesis on rhetoric in ancient Athens had prepared her for anything "real." Her daughter later texted me that she'd been hired by a crisis communications firm specifically because she could explain why standard PR responses deepen public mistrust rather...
A.I. is a Copernican Revolution in Education
What happens when an unstoppable force slams into an immovable object?
Higher education is, if nothing else, an incredibly conservative and stable institution; in fact, no institution (except for the Catholic Church) has been around longer. The problem is that artificial intelligence is changing anything and everything in its path.
So who’s going to come out of this collision alive? Dear reader, before you decide, let me provide a metaphor.
AI is not like one of those highway road rollers, slowly paving over everything in its path. That’s what organizational theorists call...
A Small Act of Thievery in Vermont
Higher education provides more stories that deserve public attention than Aesop had fables. But like Aesop’s accounts of loquacious animals, the incidents on campus often have a pungent moral.
I have written from time to time about a small act of thievery at a rural college in Vermont. The college is Middlebury, and the peculiar theft was the name of a building.
In recent years, colleges and universities around the country have been busy renaming buildings, scholarships, and sometimes whole schools that had been burdened with references to individuals the...
Congress Must Protect the Core Identity of College Sports
Last year’s Paris Summer Olympics put a spotlight on the impact of college sports in America. Current and former NCAA athletes earned over 300 medals, and about a third came from our Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools. But the most notable fact? The vast majority of these competitors played sports that don’t generate revenue for their schools. Their success underscores college athletics’ unique model, which allows athletes to excel in their sport, develop important life skills, compete at the highest levels, and earn a degree – in short, to prepare them to be...
Standing Up for Parental Rights Has Never Been More Urgent
I was an educator for more than 25 years, most recently as a special education and English teacher at Harrisonburg City Public Schools in Virginia. During that time, I saw how keeping parents involved and informed through honesty and transparency could transform tough situations. That principle became more relevant than ever to me in 2021, when a new district policy went into effect that required concealing things from parents about their children.I believe that God created the family and charged parents with the primary responsibility of caring for their children. As a teacher, part of my...
The Ideological Erosion of College Readiness
A stunning new report from the University of California, San Diego documents what many educators have feared: incoming college students are less prepared than ever. This “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of incoming college students isn’t limited to advanced subjects; it’s hitting the bedrock of learning: literacy and numeracy. These are the skills upon which all higher-order thinking depends.
The report points to pandemic disruptions, the removal of standardized tests like the SAT, and grade inflation masking academic weakness. But these are symptoms,...
Our Wishlist for Higher Ed Reform
Now that Congress has resolved the government shutdown, attention is turning to what comes next. For Republicans, that likely means early planning for a second round of reconciliation—call it Reconciliation 2.0.We should first acknowledge how much lawmakers accomplished in the first reconciliation effort. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduced long-overdue accountability in higher education, finally tying colleges’ access to federal student aid to whether their graduates achieve reasonable financial outcomes. The bill also set reasonable limits on student loans,...
