higher-learning
What Should Colleges Invest In?
Hamilton Nolan · 05/17/13 11:58AMThe precocious and progressive young students of Swarthmore College are currently urging their school to completely rid itself of any investments in fossil fuels. The school pointed out that this move could potentially raise each student's tuition costs by $13,000 per year. Is there any way to make divestment work?
Hamilton Nolan · 05/13/13 03:02PM
Universities Exist Primarily to Enrich Football Coaches
Hamilton Nolan · 05/08/13 08:04AMHamilton Nolan · 03/29/13 11:43AM
Epicenter of Evil (Harvard University) in Quiz Team Cheating Scandal
Hamilton Nolan · 03/22/13 09:05AMLast night, the Harvard University men's basketball team—considered scrappy underdogs in this, but no other, field—upset New Mexico in the NCAA tournament, to the exclusive delight of Harvard alumni. Yet today, in a bit of reassuring proof of the existence of karmic justice, comes news of a Harvard cheating scandal. HIDE YOUR SHAME, HARVARD DEVIANTS: your quiz bowl team was dirty.
Going to College Reduces Your Chances of Being a Drunk
Hamilton Nolan · 03/19/13 11:24AMPeople who are uneducated boors generally assume that college is little more than a four year-long fraternity party during which the main activity is drinking vast quantities of intoxicating liquor. That's not true at all; it takes many frat boys six years to finish college. Haha, but seriously folks, I'm not very drunk at all right now—thanks to college.
Oregon Law Professor Educates Students by Shoving Them, Stealing Their Phone
Hamilton Nolan · 03/18/13 08:27AMCollege is not some soft fantasyland where professors gently stroke students' egos with uncontroversial lessons. College is a place where students come to have their opinions challenged, preferably by a law professor who shoves them and steals their cellphones.
Hamilton Nolan · 03/13/13 09:18AM
Hamilton Nolan · 03/11/13 12:41PM
Hamilton Nolan · 03/06/13 02:00PM
Student Debt Is Perfectly Following the Financial Meltdown Script
Hamilton Nolan · 03/04/13 09:56AMJust when the stock market recovers and public optimism returns and you start to lose faith in the power of American capitalism to constantly repeat its past mistakes in the form of foreseeable boom-and-bust cycles that always end in massive losses, the system steps up to reinforce your belief in humanity's fundamental unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, ever. Hello, looming student loan meltdown!
Student Debt Is a Runaway Train to Hell, as Always
Hamilton Nolan · 03/01/13 02:48PMYour grandparents, enterprising and hardscrabble dirt farmers that they were, could probably work their way through college with nothing more than a job as a soda jerk at the Moderne Tyme Coca-Cola Soda and Sweetes Fountainne and Heroin Dispensary. Now, though, you would have to actually be a heroin trafficker in order to pay your own way through college. The latest figures on the humongous US student debt load are out. They are not improving.
Hamilton Nolan · 02/27/13 09:05AM
If You Go to Vet School, You Will Be Broke
Hamilton Nolan · 02/25/13 09:40AMEver since you were a little kid, you loved animals. Cats, dogs, other animals: you just loved them. Petted them and everything, real nice. You always dreamed, since you were a little kid, of growing up and working with animals every single day. You love the pretty animals, and you want to help them. Even when you were five years old, you knew that one day, you would grow up and become a veterinarian.
Economic Analysis Unfortunately Confirms Stereotypes About Art School
Hamilton Nolan · 02/19/13 09:58AMMaking fun of going to art school as a futile and self-indulgent formula for regret is like... even more cliched than making fun of law school. Unfortunately, the latest economic data confirms that everyone must continue with this trite (and, frankly, unfunny) form of mockery until the situation on the ground changes.
If You Go to College to Learn to Blog You Are a God Damn Sucker
Hamilton Nolan · 02/18/13 05:50PMSo 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.
Business Professor: Don't Major in Business
Hamilton Nolan · 02/14/13 02:47PMThe 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.
Publisher Sues College Librarian for Saying Publisher Sucks
Hamilton Nolan · 02/08/13 11:15AMA well-known principle of academic debate is, "If someone challenges your intellectual credentials, the best way to prove them wrong is to try to sue them into oblivion." So it goes for the poor college librarian who's being sued for millions of dollars over a blog post disparaging an academic publisher. (Ironically, no college librarian's blog post disparaging an academic publisher has ever been read by a human being.)