Monday, August 31, 2026
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills [ WSJ ]
The flava:
When he was the director of international student services at Syracuse University, Juan Tavares received a regular Saturday email from the dean of admissions reporting the tally of student applications, acceptances and enrollment deposits.
“The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as like an Ivy, but it’s not,” Tavares said.
Tavares, who no longer works at the school, said his recommendations went nowhere.
In 2025, the weaknesses he had pointed out collided with President Trump’s high profile crackdown on student visas. Syracuse’s international enrollment numbers declined by half for undergraduate and graduate students.
Syracuse also failed to draw enough students overall—prompting it to offer emergency financial-aid packages to lure freshmen.
This school year, which began Aug. 24, enrollment fell short, sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.
Syracuse also added nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms, which brought on a bond market reprimand. And it recently cut programs it said weren’t popular.
A national brand-name institution with a $2.5 billion endowment and a storied 150-year tradition is suddenly beginning to flail.
The problems that have long buffeted the nation’s smaller schools are now spreading to the nation’s bigger, richer universities—with midsize private schools such as Syracuse especially feeling the pinch. . . .
The article:
Friday, August 28, 2026
A West Point for Space? Trump Calls for New Academy to Train Space Personnel [ WSJ ]
The U.S. will develop an academy to train personnel for government space jobs, along the lines of long-established institutions that do the same for the Air Force and Coast Guard.
President Trump signed an executive order Friday to establish the U.S. Space Academy, during an event at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The new institution will aim to prepare people to take on a range of positions at NASA, in military space agencies and the private sector, according to the White House.
“It’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled servicemembers and engineers and civil operators and everything else,” Trump said of the space academy, comparing it to West Point, the military educational institution in New York. He didn’t say where the institution would be located.
The academy will be led by NASA and offer both technical education and leadership training. Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, will serve as chairman of a presidential commission set up to advise the president on creating the institution. . . .
The article:
Thursday, August 27, 2026
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating [ Adam Grant ]
When the 95 students logged in for the exam, however, they got a surprise. I’d ditched the multiple-choice and short-answer questions I usually include. Instead I asked the students to write an essay, using the principles of organizational psychology they’d been studying, on how to motivate students to stop cheating.
Their responses shocked me. Hardly any students saw cheating as a violation of integrity. A majority made excuses: We’re under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. We have no choice. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. ChatGPT was their performance-enhancing drug.
--Adam Grant in the New York Times
Friday, August 21, 2026
Ex-NSA Director: The Unfiltered Truth About Steve Jobs, AI & The Next Tech Collapse [ Naomi Kent ]
Seldom have I editorialized here, but I quite enjoyed this interview with Bobby Ray Inman. For years, I used to run into him as we both exercised at Gregory Gym at the University of Texas. I haven't seen him in a while, but at 95 years old he is still a force.
Naomi Kent's YouTube channel had only 139 subscribers this morning. With content like this, no doubt the number will grow.
--Zooze the Horse
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Once globally preeminent, U.S. universities are sliding into decline [ The Hechinger Report ]
The nation was distracted by other things when a quiet warning sounded: Support was diminishing for American academic research that had led to breakthroughs and innovation.
That familiar-sounding worry came not this year, but near the end of World War II, in a pivotal government study by the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.
The response then: infusions of government cash that would propel the U.S. higher education system into international preeminence over the subsequent decades.
American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world. They attracted top scholars who won a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. They helped drive the innovation economy. As trade deficits beset other industries, education became the sixth-largest U.S. services export. At their peak enrollment, international students brought in more than $40 billion a year.
Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings and independent experts.
The slide has been accelerated by a year and a half of funding cuts, restrictions on international students and curbs on what can be said or taught. But it began before those political challenges, with enrollment declines, lackluster returns on ever-rising prices and public mistrust. . . .
The article:
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’ [ WSJ ]
The flava:
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared. . . .
The article:
Monday, August 10, 2026
Friday, August 7, 2026
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Should you use AI for a task? Here’s a simple way to decide [ Bruce Schneier ]
"I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?
The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.
The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work – if the task has to be done and no one cares how – then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.
This, of course, assumes that the AI is actually up for the task and that it’s trustworthy: that it can do the job well, that its mistakes are minimal and correctable, that it’s been secured from cyber-attacks that would influence its results. Those are all important, and shouldn’t be minimized. There’s no point giving an AI something that it can’t do reliably. But once you’re confident that the AI can perform the task, the work v gym distinction helps you decide if it should.
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing. . . ."
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
The ‘Fraud Squad’ at Caltech Will Catch You if You Lie on Your Application [ WSJ ]
The flava:
At California Institute of Technology, a little-known band of admissions officials is scrutinizing the fonts on science-fair certificates, checking addresses on high-school transcripts and analyzing signatures on awards.
Known as the “fraud squad,” these investigators are in charge of vetting applications to the highly selective STEM-focused school, which admitted less than 4% of its 11,400 applicants for the incoming class. Caltech created the team two years ago partly in response to a rising number of anonymous accusations of dishonest submissions.
The four-person team inspects every admitted student’s application, taking nothing for granted. They scour the internet to confirm obscurities, contact competition officials and high-school counselors and use a video-interview program to suss out students’ research claims.
At elite colleges such as Caltech, admissions have become more competitive and applications are increasingly complex. Some request long lists of accolades—research, competitions, awards and independent projects—that colleges can find harder to verify than grades and test scores.
At the same time, technology like artificial intelligence makes it easier to falsify submissions. And for young people, the stakes often feel higher than ever. . . .
The article:
Monty Roberts, Horse Trainer Who Preached Kindness, Dies at 91 [ NYTimes ]
The flava:
. . . His father, a horse trainer, was a proponent of conventional horse-breaking techniques that employed fear and punishment to bring a young mustang into submission.
Early in his life, Mr. Roberts recounted in his 1996 autobiography, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” he recoiled at those methods. When he was just 7, he showed his father how effective it was to treat a young stallion with kindness to instill trust.
His father, he said, flew into a rage and beat him so severely with a chain that he had to be hospitalized. He vowed never to share his unconventional ideas with his father again. But he remained convinced that there was a better way to work with horses.
When he was 13, he went out to the high desert in northern Nevada alone and spent days observing herds of wild horses. He watched as the dominant mare used body language and visual cues to control young stallions. This nonverbal communication astounded him.
“In time, I would grasp just how exact a language it was,” he wrote. “There were precise messages, whole phrases and sentences that always meant the same thing, always had the same effect.”
He realized, he added, that “if I understood how to do it, I could effectively cross over the boundary between human (the ultimate fight animal) and horse (the flight animal).”
The article:
Sunday, August 2, 2026
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