Today, college students are saddled with more student loan debt than ever before in American history. The average student loan debt for 2017 graduates was over $39,000, which is a six percent uptick from 2016. Students owe nearly $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. According to the website, StudentLoanHero.com, student loan debt now runs $620 billion higher than...
If some public universities have lost sight of the fact that freedom of speech is essential to both education and American democracy, the American people are fortunate that a growing number of state legislatures have not. Several weeks ago, Louisiana Governor John Edwards signed SB 364, a bill crafted to restore students’ free speech at the...
Just how bad is the state of free speech and debate on America’s campuses? In March 2018, Gallup/Knight looked to answer this question through conducting a survey of more than 3,000 college students. The results are frightening: The survey reveals that 61 percent of American college students find that their school prevents some students and faculty from...
Last year, in these pages, I reported that, on January 13, 2017 (just one week before the Obama administration exited DC), the Obama Department of Education released a memorandum confessing that it had “overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools.” The “updated numbers” provided by the Department were analyzed by the Wall Street...
Most college graduates above the age of 55 remember that their best teachers refused to allow themselves to be pigeonholed as mere hawkers of one political agenda over another. They refused to do this not because they were politically indifferent, but because they knew that their job was to teach, not indoctrinate. And they knew...
If students continue to be deprived of the growth opportunities provided by encountering and debating ideas with which they disagree, they will come to lack the qualities essential to informed, effective citizenship. Key Points: There has recently been a plethora of news accounts exposing serious restrictions on free speech and debate on our country's campuses. ...
I write this report more in sorrow than anger, for I never thought I’d see the day when a law school dean would damn the First Amendment. This is the point we’ve come to on too many campuses today: Our academics teach suicide for the American experiment in democratic freedom. On March 29, South Texas College...
The Gallup-Knight Foundation recently completed its latest survey of college students nationwide. The results are less than encouraging. On the one hand, the majority of students surveyed continue to believe that protecting free speech rights (56 percent) is extremely important, while 52 percent answer that promoting a diverse and inclusive society is also extremely important to...
College students and their parents find it increasingly difficult to cope with tuition hyperinflation and historically high student-loan debt. Over the last 30 years, the average tuition for a U.S. bachelor’s degree at a traditional four-year college increased more than 15 times faster than the average household income in the United States. Students who borrow...
Over the past few years, a glut of news accounts has exposed serious restrictions on free speech and debate on American campuses. University speech codes, restrictive “free-speech zones,” commencement speaker “dis-invitations,” and campus shout-downs of invited speakers (the unconstitutional “heckler’s veto”) threaten to undermine our schools’ defining mission: the free, nonpartisan quest for truth. There...
In the face of rising intolerance on our campuses, there is confusion in some quarters regarding not only how, but whether state lawmakers should act to protect the right to free speech at our public institutions of higher learning. Here in Texas, as one newspaper account recently stated it, “After months of media conflagration, hand-wringing and attempts to...
A wave of support for legislative efforts to restore free speech and debate on campus appears to be taking shape in a number of states across the country. As reported on the website of the Goldwater Institute, Nebraska recently became the latest state to consider “legislation to restore free speech on college campuses” when Nebraska State...