And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

The front lawn of the Nunnery:


Two articles in the New York Times recently looked at the relationship between academia (my vocation/charity of choice) and the real world. The current economic situation is wreaking havoc on the college admissions process. Some quotes:

It's like the dot-com bubble burst for higher ed ... We've been in this growth mode for a period of time. Now there's a real leveling going on.

It's a consumer confidence issue ... families are feeling like they can't afford it even if they're in the same financial position they were three months ago.

And job prospects, even for those with higher or terminal degrees, are scarce:

... the system producing graduate students [is] increasingly out of sync with the system hiring them.

[Applicants with] Ph.D.s are stacked up ... like planes hovering over La Guardia.

Another article this week, also in the Times, focuses on the plight of the large public research university, citing Arizona State University as a reference point. For some reason Michael Crow, the university's president, made it his goal to expand ASU to 100,000 students by 2020. Are there really people to whom this sounds like a good idea?

Cui bono when a student attends a dinosaur of an institution? Education of value is a priori an individual experience. And large institutions have difficulty adapting to the shifting needs of the moment, not to mention the lapses in judgment which can arise while trying to negotiate conflicts of interest among a significant number of stakeholders. Plus, google news keeps telling me that transparency has a hard time thriving in large, complex organizations, much to the detriment of you and me.