notes on a coming project

I'm working on a series of posts dedicated specifically to the Atlantic's reportage and commentary on American higher education. This will involve critiquing various writers from across their website. (Preview: in total, the work I'm considering represents a frankly extraordinary record of dishonesty, inaccuracy, and bias.) I'm interested in doing this in large part because I've come to think that there are some obvious ways that blogging  can evolve for the better, and this series will reflect, I hope, those changes I'd like to see. But the kind of media analysis I want to do takes time, discretion, and real research, precisely the resources that the Atlantic seems unwilling to invest in their discussion of the university, so it will be awhile in coming.

However, I do just want to highlight this passage from Tyler Cowen's new minibook, The Great Stagnation, which I am making my way through now and which I will have a lot to say about later:

In contrast to earlier in the twentieth century, who today is the marginal student thrown into the college environment? It is someone who cannot write a clear English sentence, perhaps cannot read well, and cannot perform all the functions of basic arithmetic. About one third of the college students today will drop out, a marked rise since the 1960s, when the figure was only one in five. At the two hundred schools with the worst graduation rates, only 26 percent of the students will finish. The typical individual in these schools-- much less the marginal individual-- is someone who struggled in high school and never was properly prepared. It also may be the student who, whatever his or her underlying talent level may be, comes from a broken and possibly tragic home environment and simply is not ready to take advantage of college.

Educating many of these students is possible, it is desirable, and we should do more of it, but it is not like grabbing low-hanging fruit. It's a long, tough slog with difficult obstacles along the way and highly uncertain returns.

These are the conditions under which the modern university operates: it is tasked with educating a class of student that it was never traditionally intended to teach, and then relentlessly criticized for not educating them perfectly, cheaply, and quickly. This is a conversation that must be had with great care, and I intend to undertake it thoughtfully and slowly, but it is hard to be patient when confronted with a publication that constantly criticizes with nothing resembling a dedication to fairness or accuracy. To read a given publication engage in reckless criticism day in and day out is annoying; to see such things come from a publication with such a long history, distinguished pedigree, and considerable collection of resources is scandalous. I think an accounting is in order, and I intend to pursue one.