So then, it's a new academic program straight outta Duke University: "Write(H)ers," which will, according to the Duke Chronicle, "create a community of feminist-oriented writers," by, you know, teaching women how to blog. Specifically—direct quote—"The 23 members of the program will participate in personal blogging." This new program is officially sponsored by the Women's Center at Duke University, a school with a tuition of $43,623 per year.

There is no (definitive) manual on How to Teach Quantum Physics, obviously, but one imagines that if such a manual existed it would likely recommend against opening your first lecture half-naked, curled into a fetal position while footage of Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and 9/11 play on the projector. And yet! Columbia professor Emlyn Hughes opened his Frontiers of Science—one of the Ivy League university's core classes—with just such a show. Here's how Columbia gossip blog Bwog describes it:

The cold hard truth is that kids who major in business are generally considered to be kind of dumb. Not by us, mind you, but by, you know, people in the world of business. "A business major is a big fucking waste of time," is the consensus opinion of those people that business majors will soon be asking for jobs. Now, the penchant for "telling it like it is" when it comes to majoring in business has come to an unlikely place: business school.

Mistakes. We all make them, it's understandable, forgivable, a part of human nature even. But when there's a particular irony to said mistake, it makes it nearly impossible not to mock that mistake, and there's nothing more ironic than an institution of higher learning misspelling its own damn name.

Three years after receiving and unsuccessfully challenging a C+ in a course critical to her master's degree, Megan Thode did the reasonable thing and sued Lehigh University, her alma mater — which she attended for free, because her father works there — for $1.3 million, the amount she claims the poor grade will cost her career earnings. Apparently, the C+, which, let's be real, isn't so terrible, forced her to switch to a career in human development instead of professional counseling.

Imagine: a New York Times without articles about retirement or a Health section, no Gail Collins, and Paul Krugman wearing a bandana and a cool pair of shades. Endless trend pieces about the death of chivalry and instead of a Metro section, just something called BKLN. The Style section grows three times as large, and covers the same young literary darlings multiple times per edition ("They're young, Ivy-bred, have read Baudrillard, and love cigarettes. Totally boss.")

To highlight labor inequities, adjunct professors ask students not to call them "Professor." Okay, Not Real Professor.

Colleges sue poor students for defaulted loans so they can loan that money to new poor students. Perhaps a new system?

To the litany of disastrous news about our nation's huge student debt burden, we can add this: more and more of that debt is being held by the borrowers least able to pay it back.

Raising the percentage of Americans who have college degrees is a major component of the Obama administration's education goals. It's a policy that can swing many billions of dollars towards the higher education industry—an industry that is growing every more conscious of the fact that its financial foundation is not solid. "Promoting higher education" sounds like a good cause, in the abstract. But it may be a huge waste of money.

New research indicates that paying a lot of money for college is bullshit.

Get a load of this one, the big joke of the day: students entering our nation's four-year colleges actually expect to graduate, from those colleges, in four years. I know. What?? Somebody give these kids some education!

Cedarville University is a Baptist college in Ohio with 3,000 students. The campus is currently engulfed in a minor uproar over the way it's enforcing its ideological beliefs. Let's take this opportunity to gape and marvel at what some people who run educational institutions actually believe to be true.

To hear Manti Te'o tell it, he's a victim of one of the greatest web hoaxes in the internet's relatively short lifespan. Te'o, the Notre Dame football star presently embroiled in a fake-dead-girlfriend scandal thanks to Deadspin, says that he was deceived for years by internet pranksters who led him to believe he was dating a woman named Lennay Kekua—a woman who, it turns out, never even existed. Te'o says those same pranksters eventually convinced him Kekua was in a serious car accident and then stricken with leukemia, only to die from leukemia in September of last year on the same day his grandmother died. In a word, it's fantastical. So fantastical, in fact, that a lot of people are having a hard time believing Te'o himself wasn't in on the scam at least partially. Though a lot of questions remain, one thing that's certain is that if Te'o is lying, he will have violated at least some of the regulations in Notre Dame's famously sacrosanct "du Lac" student code of conduct, which is when things get even more complicated.

In case any unimportant "regular" college students were operating under the delusion that your university's boilerplate about how "Academics Come First" was actually a meaningful statement of values, it is now possible to quantify financially just how much more important athletes are than you, the unathletic plebeian.

David Brooks, author, essayist, columnist for The New York Times, guy who has thoughts, is teaching a class at Yale this semester. Here is the syllabus; authors listed include Edmund Burke, Reinhold Niehbuhr, Isaiah Berlin, and David Brooks. "We will ask," Brooks writes, "whether it is proper to put a Yale window sticker on the back of your car."

In what will surely go down as one of the most profoundly satisfying academic studies of the year, sociology professor Laura Hamilton has found that the more money parents pay for their kids' college educations, the worse their kids' grades are. Naturally.

A new Pew report out today confirms that, yes, having a college degree does have some benefit: young people with college degrees did much better during the recent recession than their peers without college degrees. (One would hope!) Expect your local college to immediately begin leafletting the town with this report, as a marketing effort.

A new study of racial segregation in American colleges (covering only black and white students) shows that progress has been made in the past 40 years (one should hope so), but also that higher learning is far from integrated. Is that a problem? Depends on your perspective.

Will 2013 be the year when the student debt bubble pops, raining havoc down upon us all in the form of economic destruction? Eh, who knows. What we do know is that college prices, which have been shooting skyward for many years as institutions reaped every last dollar they could from the public's hope and ignorance, are now slowly—ever so slowly—calming down.