Universities, and their several simultaneous crises.
10 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings
Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose & Ban Cheah · 2011
Tracks lifetime earnings by credential level and finds a large, persistent wage premium for degree holders, though with enough overlap between levels…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure
American Association of University Professors · 1940
Sets out the argument, still cited in nearly every US tenure dispute, that a professor's freedom to teach and publish without institutional reprisal…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Idea of a University
John Henry Newman · 1852
Argues a university's proper end is the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake, and that useful knowledge is a by-product of liberal education…
+3 more at this level
9 works
Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose & Ban Cheah
Tracks lifetime earnings by credential level and finds a large, persistent wage premium for degree holders, though with enough overlap between levels that the credential itself is an imperfect proxy for what an employer actually needs.
link checked 17 Sept 2026American Association of University Professors
Sets out the argument, still cited in nearly every US tenure dispute, that a professor's freedom to teach and publish without institutional reprisal is a condition of the university serving the common good, not a personal privilege.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Smith
A former BMJ editor argues from the evidence on peer review that it is slow, biased, poor at detecting fraud and barely better than chance at catching errors, yet science has few workable alternatives.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul E. Smaldino & Richard McElreath
Models academic incentives as an evolutionary process and shows that rewarding publication volume over rigour will select for sloppier methods across a research community even if no individual researcher behaves badly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Argues doctoral training has not kept pace with the careers most STEM PhD holders actually enter, and recommends restructuring programmes around the outcomes students actually have.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Henry Newman
Argues a university's proper end is the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake, and that useful knowledge is a by-product of liberal education rather than its purpose.
about 11 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026David H. Autor
Argues the rising college wage premium, not gains at the very top, explains most of the growth in US earnings inequality since 1980, making the value of a degree an inequality story as much as an individual one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adam Looney & Constantine Yannelis
Traces rising student-loan defaults not to traditional four-year college borrowers but to the expansion of borrowing among students at for-profit and open-enrolment institutions with weak labour-market outcomes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler & Tyler Ransom
Using admissions data disclosed in litigation, finds that most white admits who benefit from legacy, athlete, dean's-interest or faculty-child preference would not have been admitted without them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026