Displaying posts published in

June 2015

The Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Bite By Andrea Fuller and Douglas Belkin

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive

Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

Those problems are blamed by critics for deepening the student-debt crisis as college costs soared during the past decade. Last year alone, the U.S. government sent $16 billion in aid to students at four-year colleges that graduated less than one-third of their students within six years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of the latest available federal data.

Nearly 350 out of more than 1,500 four-year colleges now accredited by one of six regional commissions have a lower graduation rate or higher student-loan default rate than the average among the colleges that were banished by the same accreditors since 2000, the Journal’s analysis shows.

Europe’s Intolerable “Tolerance” by Samuel Westrop

For Tony Blair and European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), “tolerance” seems not to be freedom of expression, but an Orwellian standard of behavior to be rigidly enforced and regulated by government, in which group rights trump individual rights.

Under government-enforced “tolerance,” extremists would flourish, honest critics would be silenced, freedom of expression would be criminalized, and, in deference to “groups,” the individual would lose his right to be an individual.

In a recent case before London’s High Court, a judge ruled that an illegal immigrant who beat his own son should be forgiven because of the “cultural context.” In other words, the law should protect only white children; the ruling implicitly condones the beating of minority children — all in the name of diversity and tolerance.