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The lists of “top colleges” have varied little in many years. They always include the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. But that could change. Colleges of all types can differentiate themselves on the core values of free speech and academic freedom, and those that do will increasingly attract more and better students, faculty, and employment opportunities for their graduates.
However, most of these “prestige” schools have low ratings in the annual survey of students on free speech issues conducted by the Foundation for Rights and Expression (FIRE). Many have had recent embarrassments that rightfully tarnished their image on free speech. And many have atmospheres that smack of indoctrination and huge bureaucracies to enforce those atmospheres.
Sitting in my office, I began searching for some cause for hope, some reason to believe that higher ed could stanch the damage for the next generation of students. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing less despair from colleagues at certain smaller schools that offer undergraduate study in the “liberal-arts tradition,” a broad and flexible approach to education that values developing the person over professional training. I wondered if these schools—especially the wealthy ones that cluster near the top of national rankings—might enjoy some natural insulation from the fires raging through the nation’s research universities.
Current and former heads of both research universities and liberal-arts colleges confirmed my intuition: Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.
A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.
The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO. “Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.”
The recent news about plummeting math preparation among University of California, San Diego, students was startling: Over five years, the number of incoming students deemed to need remedial math courses before taking calculus had risen from 32 in 2020 to more than 900 last fall.
Math achievement declines across the country are real, but data from a single campus is not representative, even if it makes national news. In fact, UCSD offers a poor reference point for policy discussions in California and most other states, given how unique its approach to math proficiency has been.
