I have been arguing for some time now that there’s a fundamental and essential missing step in our educational debates, which is trying to better understand how dependent individual student outcomes in performance metrics are on teacher inputs. It’s an immensely important question. For all of the effort school reformers have invested in treating education […]

I wrote a piece a little while ago about some analytical and rhetorical failures that are common to critics of the political economy of the American university, and this Rebecca Schuman post is a pretty perfect example of what I’m talking about. I agree with some of the specific proposals she’s discussing; it would indeed […]

I have written a (futile, naturally) please to my university to get out of the football business. Check it out.

As I’ve written many times, the plight of the adjunct in American colleges and universities is a true nightmare, and a profound stain on the character of those colleges and universities. You could read all about it in more detail and at greater length than I can present here, so it’s enough to say that […]

Just to offer a brief followup to my recent piece on the myth of a STEM shortage, I want to focus a bit more on the uncontroversial value of being a star. I think that maybe the essential point is the one my engineer friend was making: companies may be hungry for STEM workers, but […]

I wrote a post over at Medium aggregating the evidence that there’s no STEM shortage. Happy Thanksgiving.

In his Life is Hell comic, Matt Groening once did a series on education where he went through the various stages. He titled the comic about grad school “Grad School: Some People Never Learn,” which I always thought was funny. Self-mockery aside, it’s interesting to think about how long I’ve been a student, and how much of being […]

I wrote a piece for Medium on our educational debates and their importance for maintaining our national myth. Check it out.

Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic asks why people are in humanities graduate programs in spite of very bad job numbers. First, I suppose I should say that my program is in a small subfield within the larger world of English, which has much better numbers generally than English writ large, and that my particular program has effectively […]