Can closer cooperation with employers help higher ed out of its crisis? One potentially useful strategy is wedding various industries to academia and producing graduates with the specific credentials those industries desire. Inside Higher Ed outlines one such endeavor in manufacturing management (h/t Glenn Reynolds): For example, Harper College, a community college in Illinois, last […]

Americans sometimes wonder whether all that foreign aid does any good. Laurie Garrett, an old WRM friend and colleague who does a lot of work on global health issues recently had one of those odd experiences that Americans meeting with foreigners sometimes have: somebody thanked her. A few years ago at a medical conference in […]

The recent slowdown in India’s economy has everybody from stock investors to grand strategists and foreign policy poohbahs concerned. In a Project Syndicate piece we found while scanning Lebanon’s English language newspaper The Daily Star, Indian parliamentarian and intellectual Shashi Tharoor showcases reasons for optimism about India’s future.India, Tharoor tells us, thrives on “frugal innovation,” […]

Russia has long struggled with Islamic (and other) terrorists in the Caucasus. President Vladimir Putin promised to eradicate terror networks and separatists movements as he rose to power in 1999 and 2000, and ever since then he’s been ruthless in targeting enemies of the state. The days of hostage crises and apartment block bombings are gone, […]

“Organized labor is in free fall,” writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times. He’s right. As Porter puts it, The number of workers who belong to a union has plummeted about 20 percent over the last decade. Only 8 percent of all workers are unionized. And leading labor activists are wringing their hands over […]

The Great Recession has done something that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago: it has dented America’s faith in the returns on higher education. Over the past four years, the number of adults who see college as a “good investment” dropped by a quarter. The Huffington Post reports: In 2008, 81 percent of adults […]

We already knew that the Iranian leadership hates the Talmud, denies the Holocaust, funds genocidal terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, murders Israelis and Jews abroad, and generally seems ill-disposed to the very existence of the State of Israel. Now a Reuters exclusive report based on hitherto unseen documents brings the whole picture into focus: […]

At a time when the country is obsessed with the idea that all comity is lost and bipartisanship is dead, education writer Ben Joravsky makes a point that we’ve tried to get at on this blog: there are some important domestic issues where the parties have much in common.Joravsky doesn’t like the bipartisan education consensus, […]

Is Kim Jong Un the next Den Xiaoping? An unnamed source informs Reuters that the young Supreme Leader of North Korea has carried out a purge against army officers loyal to his father’s economic planning, exclusively controlled by the military. Now Kim the younger has set up a new independent political bureau to take over: […]

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok highlights a fascinating exchange between super-VC Peter Thiel (AI interview here) and Google’s Eric Schmidt on the future of technology. Do read Tabarrok’s excerpts, and don’t neglect to read the whole thing over at CNN. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say here that I sit on the […]