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:
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