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researchers in various fields of study have also voiced their concerns about the quality of Kuznetsov’s research

the questions concerning Kuznetsov’s work, researchers who have published in one of the journals he edits, the British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research, report having no abnormal interactions with the editors during the review process. “I found my experience with that journal to be no different than with any other,”

Swanson said he has no way to judge the validity of the accusations against Kuznetsov, and that it would be unfair to jump to conclusions. If the allegations are true, however, “it certainly hurts the reputation of their journal, and I suspect they would rectify that problem (again, if there is truth here) fairly quickly. Most reputable researchers would not want to submit to such a journal.”

A purposeless, purely physical universe, in which human life is accidental and human consciousness is what you call “a neuronal illusion,” is a bleak vision, isn’t it?

Mothers are desperate to have their children vaccinated; patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes struggle to get medicine; and there is “huge anxiety in the population,”

On Aug. 21, the group got word from some of its “silent partner” hospitals of a flood of patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” — roughly 3,600 in a period of three hours, including 355 who died.

The debate over whether doctors should expose human rights abuses has long been “one of these inside baseball arguments within the humanitarian community,” said Len Rubenstein, an expert on human rights and medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University. While Doctors Without Borders has a culture of “bearing witness,” he said, not all humanitarian organizations do.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, adheres to a strict code of political neutrality;

“These are very difficult tradeoffs that our society has to make,” said Dr. Woodcock. “The reason we approve these drugs is for people in pain. But we can’t ignore the epidemic on the other side.”

In 2011, about 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone-containing medications were written for some 47 million patients, according to government estimates. That volume of prescriptions amounts to about five billion pills.

Schedule II drugs are those drugs with the highest potential for abuse that can be legally prescribed.

Along with changing how doctors prescribe these drugs, the classification change will also impose added storage and recordkeeping requirements on druggists. In some states, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals who can currently prescribe hydrocodone-containing drugs may no longer be able to do so.

potential for creating children from multiple parents is not limited to the halting of the passage of mitochondrial disorders.

these genetic engineering procedures raise both legal and ethical concerns. Legal issues include: Who are the legal parents of a child generated from genetic material obtained from multiple donors? Would such a child have the right to know the identity of all his gene donors? In an article to be published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (in press), we propose a legal solution to address some of these issues

many ethical concerns raised by such technologies is whether these advances in reproductive medicine could lead to the creation of “designer babies,” in which parents select the genetic composition of their children for enhancement or for health reasons. The fear in creating designer babies is that it may herald a new era of “consumer eugenics” with potentially unknown consequences for humankind.

I fled my passion, literature, for a practical and rational-minded career in medicine.

More important, studying the humanities helps us make sense of our lives and our world, whether the times are good or bad.

But the humanities are not on life support. They are alive and well, and remain vitally important in preparing graduates to lead meaningful, considered lives, to flourish in multiple careers and to be informed, engaged citizens of our democracy and our rapidly evolving world

While the professors justifiably cite inadequate funding and marketplace demand for scientists and engineers as causes of the marginalization of the humanities, they also ought to look inward at their profession’s rejection of the rational ideals that make the educated world go round.

The narrow focus on STEM education can produce a well-trained work force. What the country and the world need are well-educated citizens.

The statin trials, which involved tens of thousands of people, found no more muscle aches, the most common complaint, in patients who took statins than in those who took placebos.

The widely held belief that statins affect memory also has not been borne out in clinical trials, said Dr. Jane Armitage of the University of Oxford. She and her colleagues studied memory problems in 20,000 patients randomly assigned to take a statin or a placebo. “There was absolutely no difference,” she said.

In a separate study, they looked at mood and sleep patterns and again found statins had no effect. Another study, in Scotland, detailed cognitive testing of older people taking statins or a placebo, and also found no effect.

In the nations that lead the international rankings — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Canada — teachers are drawn from the top third of college graduates, rather than the bottom 60 percent as is the case in the United States. Training in these countries is more rigorous, more tied to classroom practice and more often financed by the government than in America. There are also many fewer teacher-training institutions, with much higher standards.

By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. It is not surprising, then, that researchers find wide variation in teaching skills across classrooms; in the absence of a system devoted to developing consistent expertise, we have teachers essentially winging it as they go along, with predictably uneven results.

Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.

Teachers in leading nations’ schools also teach much less than ours do. High school teachers provide 1,080 hours per year of instruction in America, compared with fewer than 600 in South Korea and Japan, where the balance of teachers’ time is spent collaboratively on developing and refining lesson plans

These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs.

hese elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.

In America, both major teachers’ unions and the organization representing state education officials have, in the past year, called for raising the bar for entering teachers; one of the unions, the American Federation of Teachers, advocates a “bar exam.”

Ideally the exam should not be a one-time paper-and-pencil test, like legal bar exams, but a phased set of milestones to be attained over the first few years of teaching. Akin to medical boards, they would require prospective teachers to demonstrate subject and pedagogical knowledge — as well as actual teaching skill.

We let doctors operate, pilots fly, and engineers build because their fields have developed effective ways of certifying that they can do these things. Teaching, on the whole, lacks this specialized knowledge base; teachers teach based mostly on what they have picked up from experience and from their colleagues.

other fields spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their budgets on research and development, while in education, it is around 0.25 percent

Education-school researchers publish for fellow academics; teachers develop practical knowledge but do not evaluate or share it; commercial curriculum designers make what districts and states will buy, with little regard for quality.

Early- to mid-career teachers need time to collaborate and explore new directions — having mastered the basics, this is the stage when they can refine their skills. The system should reward master teachers with salaries commensurate with leading professionals in other fields.

research suggests that the labels don’t matter — there are good and bad programs of all types, including university-based ones. The best programs draw people who majored as undergraduates in the subjects they wanted to teach; focus on extensive clinical practice rather than on classroom theory; are selective in choosing their applicants rather than treating students as a revenue stream; and use data about how their students fare as teachers to assess and revise their practice.

It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.

There is evidence that vaccinations have become more of a political issue in recent years. Pew Research Center polls show that in 2009, 71 percent of both Republicans and Democrats favored requiring the vaccination of children. Five years later, Democratic support had grown to 76 percent, but Republican support had fallen to 65 percent.

The debate does not break entirely along right-left lines. The movement to forgo vaccinations has been popular in more liberal and affluent communities where some parents are worried that vaccines cause autism or other disorders among children.

Howard Dean, a presidential candidate in 2004 and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said there are three groups of people who object to required vaccines: “One is people who are very much scared about their kids getting autism, which is an idea that has been completely discredited. Two, is entitled people who don’t want to put any poison in their kids and view this as poison, which is ignorance more than anything else. And three, people who are antigovernment in any way.”

The issue has more political potency among conservative voters who are highly skeptical of anything required by the government.

for Republicans like Mr. Paul who appeal to the kind of libertarian conservatives who are influential in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold the first two contests in the battle for the nomination, there is an appeal in framing the issue as one of individual liberty.Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”

It’s a consistent phenomenon, but medicine has never really dealt with it — Ted Kaptchuk, Harvard Medical School

In trials for Parkinson’s disease, as many as 65% report adverse events as a result of their placebo. “And around one out of 10 treated will drop out of a trial because of nocebo, which is pretty high,” he says.

“Building a more complex cortex likely involves several things: making more cells, modifying the functions of cortical areas, and changing the connections neurons make with each other

Scientists have become adept at comparing the genomes of different species to identify the DNA sequence changes that underlie those differences. But many human genes are very similar to those of other primates, which suggests that changes in the way genes are regulated — in addition to changes in the genes themselves — is what sets human biology apart.

First, Noonan and his colleagues mapped active regulatory elements in the human genome during the first 12 weeks of cortical development by searching for specific biochemical, or “epigenetic” modifications

same in the developing brains of rhesus monkeys and mice, then compared the three maps to identify those elements that showed greater activity in the developing human brain.

wanted to know the biological impact of those regulatory changes.

They used those data to identify groups of genes that showed coordinated expression in the cerebral cortex.

“While we often think of the human brain as a highly innovative structure, it’s been surprising that so many of these regulatory elements seem to play a role in ancient processes important for building the cortex in all mammals, said first author Steven Reilly

Page predicted a “time of abundance,” when human needs could be more easily met and people would “have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests.”

Of course, when we get more free time, we’ll simply spend it staring at our iPads

“In a way, it’s not being honest,” he said. “We’re still pretending that we’re inventing a brain when all we’ve come up with is a giant mash-up of real brains. We don’t yet understand how brains work, so we can’t build one.”

“People are unwittingly feeding information into the Cloud for automated services, which they’re not being paid for,” Lanier said. “I don’t like pretending that humans are becoming buggy whips. You have this fantasy that it’s machines doing it without people helping.

Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion.

the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students.

John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president.

GWU is, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit organization. Best example: study abroad. Their top program, a partnering with Sciences Po, costs each student (30 of them, on a program with 'prestige' status?) a full semester's tuition. It costs GW, according to Sciences Po website, €1000. A neat $20,000 profit per student (who is in digging her/himself deeper and deeper in debt.) Moreover, the school takes a $500 admin fee for the study abroad application! With no guarantee that all credits transfer. Students often lose a partial semester, GW profits again. Nor does GW offer help with an antiquated, one-shot/no transfers, tricky registration process. It's tough luck in gay Paris.Just one of many examples. Dorms with extreme mold, off-campus housing impossible for freshmen and sophomores. Required meal plan: Chick-o-Filet etc. Classes with over 300 students (required).This is not Harvard, but costs same.Emotional problems? Counselors too few. Suicides continue and are not appropriately addressed. Caring environment? Extension so and so, please hold.It's an impressive campus, I'm an alum. If you apply, make sure the DC experience is worth the price: good are internships, a few colleges like Elliot School, post-grad.GWU uses undergrad $$ directly for building projects, like the medical center to which students have NO access. (Student health facility is underfunded, outsourced.)Outstanding professors still make a difference. But is that enough?

Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don’t buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer’s standpoint, isn’t just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It’s that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying.

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain.

The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from $200 million to almost $1 billion.

The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn’t quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the “first tier.”

The watch and vodka analogies are correct. Personally, I used car analogies when discussing college choices with my kids. We were in the fortunate position of being able to comfortably send our kids to any college in the country and have them leave debt free. Notwithstanding, I told them that they would be going to a state school unless they were able to get into one of about 40 schools that I felt, in whatever arbitrary manner I decided, that was worth the extra cost. They both ended up going to state schools.College is by and large a commodity and you get out of it what you put into it. Both of my kids worked hard in college and were involved in school life. They both left the schools better people and the schools better schools for them being there. They are both now successful adults.I believe too many people look for the prestige of a named school and that is not what college should be primarily about.

In 2013, only 14 percent of the university’s 10,000 undergraduates received a grant — a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about $30,800 in debt.

When I talk to the best high school students in my state I always stress the benefits of the honors college experience at an affordable public university. For students who won't qualify for a public honors college. the regular pubic university experience is far preferable to the huge debt of places like GW.

Carey would do well to look beyond high ticket private universities (which after all are still private enterprises) and what he describes as the Olympian heights of higher education (which for some reason seems also to embitter him) and look at the system overall . The withdrawal of public support was never a policy choice; it was a political choice, "packaged and branded" as some tax cutting palaver all wrapped up in the argument that a free-market should decide how much college should cost and how many seats we need. In such an environment, trustees at private universities are no more solely responsible for turning their degrees into commodities than the administrations of state universities are for raising the number of out-of-state students in order to offset the loss of support from their legislatures. No doubt, we will hear more about market based solutions and technology from Mr. Carey

I went to GW back in the 60s. It was affordable and it got me away from home in New York. While I was there, Newsweek famously published a article about the DC Universities - GW, Georgetown, American and Catholic - dubbing them the Pony league, the schools for the children of wealthy middle class New Yorkers who couldn't get into the Ivy League. Nobody really complained. But that wasn't me. I went because I wanted to be where the action was in the 60s, and as we used to say - "GW was literally a stone's throw from the White House. And we could prove it." Back then, the two biggest alumni names were Jackie Kennedy, who's taken some classes there, and J. Edgar Hoover. Now, according to the glossy magazine they send me each month, it's the actress Kerry Washington. There's some sort of progress there, but I'm a GW alum and not properly trained to understand it.

This explains a lot of the modern, emerging mentality. It encompasses the culture of enforced grade inflation, cheating and anti-intellectualism in much of higher education. It is consistent with our culture of misleading statistics and information, cronyism and fake quality, the "best and the brightest" being only schemers and glad handers. The wisdom and creativity engendered by an honest, rigorous academic education are replaced by the disingenuous quick fix, the winner-take-all mentality that neglects the common good.

I attended nearby Georgetown University and graduated in 1985. Relative to state schools and elite schools, it was expensive then. I took out loans. I had Pell grants. I had work-study and GSL. I paid my debt of $15,000 off in ten years. Would I have done it differently? Yes: I would have continued on to graduate school and not worried about paying off those big loans right after college. My career work out and I am grateful for the education I received and paid for. But I would not recommend to my nieces and nephews debts north of $100,000 for a BA in liberal arts. Go community. Then go state. Then punch your ticket to Harvard, Yale or Stanford — if you are good enough.

American universities appear to have more and more drifted away from educating individuals and citizens to becoming high priced trade schools and purveyors of occupational licenses. Lost in the process is the concept of expanding a student's ability to appreciate broadly and deeply, as well as the belief that a republican democracy needs an educated citizenry, not a trained citizenry, to function well.Both the Heisman Trophy winner and the producer of a successful tech I.P.O. likely have much in common, a college education whose rewards are limited to the financial. I don't know if I find this more sad on the individual level or more worrisome for the future of America.

This is now a consumer world for everything, including institutions once thought to float above the Shakespearean briars of the work-a-day world such as higher education, law and medicine. Students get this. Parents get this. Everything is negotiable: financial aid, a spot in the nicest dorm, tix to the big game. But through all this, there are faculty - lots of 'em - who work away from the fluff to link the ambitions of the students with the reality and rigor of the 21st century. The job of the student is to get beyond the visible hype of the surroundings and find those faculty members. They will make sure your investment is worth it

My experience in managing or working with GW alumni in their 20's or 30's has not been good. Virtually all have been mentally lazy and/or had a stunning sense of entitlement. Basically they've been all talk and no results. That's been quite a contrast to the graduates from VA/MD state universities.

More and more, I notice what my debt-financed contributions to the revenue streams of my vendors earn them, not me. My banks earned enough to pay ridiculous bonuses to employees for reckless risk-taking. My satellite tv operator earned enough to overpay ESPN for sports programming that I never watch--and that, in turn, overpays these idiotic pro athletes and college sports administrators. My health insurer earned enough to defeat one-payor insurance; to enable the opaque, inefficient billing practices of hospitals and other providers; and to feed the behemoth pharmaceutical industry. My church earned enough to buy the silence of sex abuse victims and oppose progressive political candidates. And my govt earned enough to continue ag subsidies, inefficient defense spending, and obsolete transportation and energy policies.

as the parent of GWU freshman I am grateful for every opportunity afforded her. She has a generous merit scholarship, is in the honors program with some small classes, and has access to internships that can be done while at school. GWU also gave her AP credits to advance her to sophomore status. Had she attended the state flagship school (where she was accepted into that exclusive honors program) she would have a great education but little else. It's not possible to do foreign affairs related internship far from D.C. or Manhattan. She went to a very competitive high school where for the one or two ivy league schools in which she was interested, she didn't have the same level of connections or wealth as many of her peers. Whether because of the Common Application or other factors, getting into a good school with financial help is difficult for a middle class student like my daughter who had a 4.0 GPA and 2300 on the SAT. She also worked after school.The bottom line - GWU offered more money than perceived "higher tier" universities, and brought tuition to almost that of our state school system. And by the way, I think she is also getting a very good education.

This article reinforces something I have learned during my daughter's college application process. Most students choose a school based on emotion (reputation) and not value. This luxury good analogy holds up.

The entire education problem can be solved by MOOCs lots and lots of them plus a few closely monitored tests and personal interviews with people. Of course many many people make MONEY off of our entirely inefficient way of "educating" -- are we even really doing that -- getting a degree does NOT mean one is actually educated

As a first-generation college graduate I entered GW ambitious but left saddled with debt, and crestfallen at the hard-hitting realization that my four undergraduate years were an aberration from what life is actually like post-college: not as simple as getting an [unpaid] internship with a fancy titled institution, as most Colonials do. I knew how to get in to college, but what do you do after the recess of life ends?I learned more about networking, resume plumping (designated responses to constituents...errr....replied to emails), and elevator pitches than actual theory, economic principles, strong writing skills, critical thinking, analysis, and philosophy. While relatively easy to get a job after graduating (for many with a GW degree this is sadly not the case) sustaining one and excelling in it is much harder. It's never enough just to be able to open a new door, you also need to be prepared to navigate your way through that next opportunity.

this is a very telling article. Aimless and directionless high school graduates are matched only by aimless and directionless institutes of higher learning. Each child and each parent should start with a goal - before handing over their hard earned tuition dollars, and/or leaving a trail of broken debt in the aftermath of a substandard, unfocused education.

it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th.Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on “Sex and the City.” Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top-25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same.

I currently attend GW, and I have to say, this article completely misrepresents the situation. I have yet to meet a single person who is paying the full $60k tuition - I myself am paying $30k, because the school gave me $30k in grants. As for the quality of education, Foreign Policy rated GW the #8 best school in the world for undergraduate education in international affairs, Princeton Review ranks it as one of the best schools for political science, and U.S. News ranks the law school #20. The author also ignores the role that an expanding research profile plays in growing a university's prestige and educational power.

And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, “That could be me.” Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit “better” students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction — up! — and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be.

this is the same playbook used by hospitals the past 30 years or so. It is how Hackensack Hospital became Hackensack Medical Center and McComb Hospital became Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. No wonder the results have been the same in healthcare and higher education; both have priced themselves out of reach for average Americans.

a world where a college is rated not by the quality of its output, but instaed, by the quality of its inputs. A world where there is practically no work to be done by the administration because the college's reputation is made before the first class even begins! This is isanity! But this is the swill that the mammoth college marketing departments nationwide have shoved down America's throat. Colleges are ranked not by the quality of their graduates, but rather, by the test scores of their incoming students!

The Pew Foundation has been doing surveys on what students learn, how much homework they do, how much time they spend with professors etc. All good stuff to know before a student chooses a school. It is called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE - called Nessy). It turns out that the higher ranked schools do NOT allow their information to be released to the public. It is SECRET.Why do you think that is?

The article blames "the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way." This is the view of someone who has never taught at a university, nor thought much about how education there actually happens. Once undergraduates get beyond the general requirements, their educations _have_ to depend on "autonomous departments" because it's only those departments know what the requirements for given degree can be, and can grant the necessary accreditation of a given student. The idea that some administrator could know what's necessary for degrees in everything from engineering to fiction writing is nonsense, except that's what the people who only know the theory of education (but not its practice) actually seem to think. In the classroom itself, you have tremendously talented people, who nevertheless have their own particular strengths and approaches. Don't you think it's a good idea to let them do what they do best rather than trying to make everyone teach the same way? Don't you think supervision of young teachers by older colleagues, who actually know their field and its pedagogy, rather than some administrator, who knows nothing of the subject, is a good idea?

it makes me very sad to see how expensive some public schools have become. Used to be you could work your way through a public school without loans, but not any more. Like you, I had the advantage of a largely-scholarship paid undergraduate education at a top private college. However, I was also offered a virtually free spot in my state university's (then new) honors college

My daughter attended a good community college for a couple of classes during her senior year of high school and I could immediately see how such places are laboratories for failure. They seem like high schools in atmosphere and appearance. Students rush in by car and rush out again when the class is over.The four year residency college creates a completely different feel. On arrival, you get the sense that you are engaging in something important, something apart and one that will require your full attention. I don't say this is for everyone or that the model is not flawed in some ways (students actually only spend 2 1/2 yrs. on campus to get the four yr. degree). College is supposed to be a 60 hour per week job. Anything less than that and the student is seeking himself or herself

This. Is. STUNNING. I have always wondered, especially as my kids have approached college age, why American colleges have felt justified in raising tuition at a rate that has well exceeded inflation, year after year after year. (Nobody needs a dorm with luxury suites and a lazy river pool at college!) And as it turns out, they did it to become luxury brands. Just that simple. Incredible.I don't even blame this guy at GWU for doing what he did. He wasn't made responsible for all of American higher ed. But I do think we all need to realize what happened, and why. This is front page stuff.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, given the choice between low tuition, primitive dorms, and no athletic center VS expensive & luxurious, the customers (and their parents) are choosing the latter. As long as this is the case, there is little incentive to provide bare-bones and cheap education.

Wesleyan University in CT is one school that is moving down the rankings. Syracuse University is another. Reed College is a third. Why? Because these schools try hard to stay out of the marketing game. (With its new president, Syracuse has jumped back into the game.) Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia hasn't fared well over the past few decades in the rankings, which is true of practically every women's college. Wellesley is by far the highest ranked women's college, but even there the acceptance rate is significantly higher than one finds at comparable coed liberal arts colleges like Amherst & Williams. University of Chicago is another fascinating case for Mr. Carey to study (I'm sure he does in his forthcoming book, which I look forward to reading). Although it has always enjoyed an illustrious academic reputation, until recently Chicago's undergraduate reputation paled in comparison to peer institutions on the two coasts. A few years ago, Chicago changed its game plan to more closely resemble Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate amenities, and lo and behold, its rankings shot up. It was a very cynical move on the president's part to reassemble the football team, but it was a shrewd move because athletics draw more money than academics ever can (except at engineering schools like Cal Tech & MIT), and more money draws richer students from fancier secondary schools with higher test scores, which lead to higher rankings - and the beat goes on.

College INDUSTRY is out of control. Sorry, NYU, GW, BU are not worth the price. Are state schools any better? We have the University of Michigan, which is really not a state school, but a university that gives a discount to people who live in Michigan. Why? When you have an undergraduate body 40+% out-of-state that pays tuition of over $50K/year, you tell me?Perhaps the solution is two years of community college followed by two at places like U of M or Michigan State - get the same diploma at the end for much less and beat the system.

In one recent yr., the majority of undergrad professors at Harvard, according to Boston.com, where adjuncts. That means low pay, no benefits, no office, temp workers. Harvard.Easily available student loans fueled this arms race of amenities and frills that in which colleges now engage. They moved the cost of education onto the backs of people, kids, who don't understand what they are doing.Students in colleges these days are customers and the customers must be able to get through. If it requires dumbing things down, so be it. On top of tuition, G.W. U. is known by its students as the land of added fees on top of added fees. The joke around campus was that they would soon be installing pay toilets in the student union. No one was laughing.

You could written the same story about my alma mater, American University. The place reeked of ambition and upward mobility decades ago and still does. Whoever's running it now must look at its measly half-billion-dollar endowment and compare it to GWU's $1.5 billion and seethe with envy, while GWU's president sets his sights on an Ivy League-size endowment. And both get back to their real jobs: 24/7 fundraising,Which is what university presidents are all about these days. Money - including million-dollar salaries for themselves (GWU's president made more than Harvard's in 2011) - pride, cachet, power, a mansion, first-class all the way. They should just be honest about it and change their university's motto to Ostende mihi pecuniam! (please excuse my questionable Latin)Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess - if they do, it's thanks to the professors, adjuncts and the administrative staff, who do the actual work of educating and keep the school running.

When I was in HS (70s), many of my richer friends went to GW and I was then of the impression that GW was a 'good' school. As I age, I have come to realize that this place is just another façade to the emptiness that has become America. All too often are we faced with a dilemma: damned if we do, damned if we don't. Yep, 'education' has become a trap for all too many of our citizen.

I transferred to GWU from a state school. I am forever grateful that I did. I wanted to get a good rigorous education and go to one of the best International Affairs schools in the world. Even though the state school I went to was dirt-cheap, the education and the faculty was awful. I transferred to GW and was amazed at the professors at that university. An ambassador or a prominent IA scholar taught every class. GW is an expensive school, but that is the free market. If you want a good education you need to be willing to pay for it or join the military. I did the latter and my school was completely free with no debt and I received an amazing education. If young people aren't willing to make some sort of sacrifice to get ahead or just expect everything to be given to then our country is in a sad state.We need to stop blaming universities like GWU that strive to attract better students, better professors, and better infrastructure. They are doing what is expected in America, to better oneself.

"Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess." How could it possibly be otherwise??? I am glad that you are willing to give credit to teachers and administrators, but it is not they who "do the actual work of educating." From this fallacy comes its corollary, that we should blame teachers first for "under-performing schools". This long-running show of scapegoating may suit the wallets and vanity of American parents, but it is utterly senseless. When, if ever, American culture stops reeking of arrogance, greed and anti-intellectualism, things may improve, and we may resume the habit of bothering to learn. Until then, nothing doing.

Universities sell knowledge and grade students on how much they have learned. Fundamentally, there is conflict of interest in thsi setup. Moreover, students who are poorly educated, even if they know this, will not criticize their school, because doing so would make it harder for them to have a career. As such, many problems with higher education remain unexposed to the public.

I've lectured and taught in at least five different countries in three continents and the shortest perusal of what goes on abroad would totally undermine most of these speculations. For one thing American universities are unique in their dedication to a broad based liberal arts type education. In France, Italy or Germany, for example, you select a major like mathematics or physics and then in your four years you will not take even one course in another subject. The amount of work that you do that is critically evaluated by an instructor is a tiny fraction of what is done in an American University. While half educated critics based on profoundly incomplete research write criticism like this Universities in Germany Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan as well as France have appointed committees and made studies to explain why the American system of higher education so drastically outperforms their own system. Elsewhere students do get a rather nice dose of general education but it ends in secondary school and it has the narrowness and formulaic quality that we would just normally associate with that. The character who wrote this article probably never set foot on a "campus" of the University of Paris or Rome

The university is part of a complex economic system and it is responding to the demands of that system. For example, students and parents choose universities that have beautiful campuses and buildings. So universities build beautiful campuses. State support of universities has greatly declined, and this decline in funding is the greatest cause of increased tuition. Therefore universities must compete for dollars and must build to attract students and parents. Also, universities are not ranked based on how they educate students -- that's difficult to measure so it is not measured. Instead universities are ranked on research publications. So while universities certainly put much effort into teaching, research has to have a priority in order for the university to survive. Also universities do not force students and parents to attend high price institutions. Reasonably priced state institutions and community colleges are available to every student. Community colleges have an advantage because they are funded by property taxes. Finally learning requires good teaching, but it also requires students that come to the university funded, prepared, and engaged. This often does not happen. Conclusion- universities have to participate in profile raising actions in order to survive. The day that funding is provided for college, ranking is based on education, and students choose campuses with simple buildings, then things will change at the university.

This is the inevitable result of privatizing higher education. In the not-so-distant past, we paid for great state universities through our taxes, not tuition. Then, the states shifted funding to prisons and the Federal government radically cut research support and the GI bill. Instead, today we expect universities to support themselves through tuition, and to the extent that we offered students support, it is through non-dischargeable loans. To make matters worse, the interest rates on those loans are far above the government's cost of funds -- so in effect the loans are an excise tax on education (most of which is used to support a handful of for-profit institutions that account for the most student defaults). This "consumer sovereignty" privatized model of funding education works no better than privatizing California's electrical system did in the era of Enron, or our privatized funding of medical service, or our increasingly privatized prison system: it drives up costs at the same time that it replace quality with marketing.

There are data in some instances on student learning, but the deeper problem, as I suspect the author already knows, is that there is nothing like a consensus on how to measure that learning, or even on when is the proper end point to emphasize (a lot of what I teach -- I know this from what students have told me -- tends to come into sharp focus years after graduation).

Michael (Baltimore) has hit the nail on the head. Universities are increasingly corporatized institutions in the credentialing business. Knowledge, for those few who care about it (often not those paying for the credentials) is available freely because there's no profit in it. Like many corporate entities, it is increasingly run by increasingly highly paid administrators, not faculty.

GWU has not defined itself in any unique way, it has merely embraced the bland, but very expensive, accoutrements of American private education: luxury dorms, food courts, spa-like gyms, endless extracurricular activities, etc. But the real culprit for this bloat that students have to bear financially is the college ranking system by US News, Princeton Review, etc. An ultimately meaningless exercise in competition that has nevertheless pushed colleges and universities to be more like one another. A sad state of affairs, and an extremely expensive one for students

It is long past time to realize the failure of the Reagonomics-neoliberal private profits over public good program. In education, we need to return to public institutions publicly funded. Just as we need to recognize that Medicare, Social Security, the post office, public utilities, fire departments, interstate highway system, Veterans Administration hospitals and the GI bill are models to be improved and expanded, not destroyed.

George Washington is actually not a Rolex watch, it is a counterfeit Rolex. The real Rolexes of higher education -- places like Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, the Ivies etc. -- have real endowments and real financial aid. No middle class kid is required to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from those schools, because they offer generous need-based financial aid in the form of grants, not loans. The tuition at the real Rolexes is really a sticker price that only the wealthy pay -- everybody else on a sliding scale. For middle class kids who are fortunate enough to get in, Penn actually ends up costing considerably less than a state university.The fake Rolexes -- BU, NYU, Drexel in Philadelphia -- don't have the sliding scale. They bury middle class students in debt.And really, though it is foolish to borrow $100,000 or $120,000 for an undergraduate degree, I don't find the transaction morally wrong. What is morally wrong is our federal government making that loan non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many if these kids will be having their wages garnished for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.There is a very simple solution to this, by the way. Cap the amount of non-dischargeable student loan debt at, say, $50,000

The slant of this article is critical of the growth of research universities. Couldn't disagree more. Modern research universities create are incredibly engines of economic opportunity not only for the students (who pay the bills) but also for the community via the creation of blue and white collar jobs. Large research university employ tens of thousands of locals from custodial and food service workers right up to high level administrators and specialist in finance, computer services, buildings and facilities management, etc. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system employ more people than any other industry in Maryland -- including the government. Research universities typically have hospitals providing cutting-edge medical care to the community. Local business (from cafes to property rental companies) benefit from a built-in, long-term client base as well as an educated workforce. And of course they are the foundry of new knowledge which is critical for the future growth of our country.Check out the work of famed economist Dr. Julia Lane on modeling the economic value of the research university. In a nutshell, there are few better investments America can make in herself than research universities. We are the envy of the world in that regard -- and with good reason. How many *industries* (let alone jobs) have Stanford University alone catalyzed?

What universities have the monopoly on is the credential. Anyone can learn, from books, from free lectures on the internet, from this newspaper, etc. But only universities can endow you with the cherished degree. For some reason, people are will to pay more for one of these pieces of paper with a certain name on it -- Ivy League, Stanford, even GW -- than another -- Generic State U -- though there is no evidence one is actually worth more in the marketplace of reality than the other. But, by the laws of economics, these places are actually underpriced: after all, something like 20 times more people are trying to buy a Harvard education than are allowed to purchase one. Usually that means you raise your price.

Overalll a good article, except for - "This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s “Academically Adrift,” a study that found “limited or no learning” among many college students." The measure of learning you report was a general thinking skills exam. That's not a good measure of college gains. Most psychologists and cognitive scientists worth their salt would tell you that improvement in critical thinking skills is going to be limited to specific areas. In other words, learning critical thinking skills in math will make little change in critical thinking about political science or biology. Thus we should not expect huge improvements in general critical thinking skills, but rather improvements in a student's major and other areas of focus, such as a minor. Although who has time for a minor when it is universally acknowledged that the purpose of a university is to please and profit an employer or, if one is lucky, an investor. Finally, improved critical thinking skills are not the end all and be all of a college education even given this profit centered perspective. Learning and mastering the cumulative knowledge of past generations is arguably the most important thing to be gained, and most universities still tend to excel at that even with the increasing mandate to run education like a business and cultivate and cull the college "consumer".

As for community colleges, there was an article in the Times several years ago that said it much better than I could have said it myself: community colleges are places where dreams are put on hold. Without making the full commitment to study, without leaving the home environment, many, if not most, community college students are caught betwixt and between, trying to balance work responsibilities, caring for a young child or baby and attending classes. For males, the classic "end of the road" in community college is to get a car, a job and a girlfriend, one who is not in college, and that is the end of the dream. Some can make it, but most cannot.

as a scientist I disagree with the claim that undergrad tuition subsidizes basic research. Nearly all lab equipment and research personnel (grad students, technicians, anyone with the title "research scientist" or similar) on campus is paid for through federal grants. Professors often spend all their time outside teaching and administration writing grant proposals, as the limited federal grant funds mean ~%85 of proposals must be rejected. What is more, out of each successful grant the university levies a "tax", called "overhead", of 30-40%, nominally to pay for basic operations (utilities, office space, administrators). So in fact one might say research helps fund the university rather than the other way around. Flag

It's certainly overrated as a research and graduate level university. Whether it is good for getting an undergraduate education is unclear, but a big part of the appeal is getting to live in D.C..while attending college instead of living in some small college town in the corn fields.

Much of the epidemiological data underpinning the government’s dietary advice comes from studies run by Harvard’s school of public health. In 2011, directors of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences analyzed many of Harvard’s most important findings and found that they could not be reproduced in clinical trials.

In 2013, government advice to reduce salt intake (which remains in the current report) was contradicted by an authoritative Institute of Medicine study. And several recent meta-analyses have cast serious doubt on whether saturated fats are linked to heart disease, as the dietary guidelines continue to assert.

In clearing our plates of meat, eggs and cheese (fat and protein), we ate more grains, pasta and starchy vegetables (carbohydrates). Over the past 50 years, we cut fat intake by 25 percent and increased carbohydrates by more than 30 percent, according to a new analysis of government data. Yet recent science has increasingly shown that a high-carb diet rich in sugar and refined grains increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — much more so than a diet high in fat and cholesterol.

Today, we are poised to make the same mistakes. The committee’s new report also advised eliminating “lean meat” from the list of recommended healthy foods, as well as cutting back on red and processed meats. Fewer protein choices will likely encourage Americans to eat even more carbs. It will also have policy implications: Meat could be limited in school lunches and other federal food programs.

It’s possible that a mostly meatless diet could be healthy for all Americans — but then again, it might not be. We simply do not know. There are no rigorous clinical trials on such a diet, and although epidemiological data exists for adult vegetarians, there is none for children.

We have to start looking more skeptically at epidemiological studies and rethinking nutrition policy from the ground up.

Until then, we would be wise to return to what worked better for previous generations: a diet that included fewer grains, less sugar and more animal foods like meat, full-fat dairy and eggs

Various companies are now trying to emulate Uber’s business model in other fields, from daily chores like grocery shopping and laundry to more upmarket products like legal services and even medicine.

Proponents of on-demand work point out that many of the tech giants that sprang up over the last decade minted billions in profits without hiring very many people; Facebook, for instance, serves more than a billion users, but employs only a few thousand highly skilled workers, most of them in California.

But the rise of such work could also make your income less predictable and your long-term employment less secure. And it may relegate the idea of establishing a lifelong career to a distant memory.

“This on-demand economy means a work life that is unpredictable, doesn’t pay very well and is terribly insecure.” After interviewing many workers in the on-demand world, Dr. Reich said he has concluded that “most would much rather have good, well-paying, regular jobs.”

“We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,”

at the end of 2014, Uber had 160,000 drivers regularly working for it in the United States. About 40,000 new drivers signed up in December alone, and the number of sign-ups was doubling every six months.

The report found that on average, Uber’s drivers worked fewer hours and earned more per hour than traditional taxi drivers, even when you account for their expenses. That conclusion, though, has raised fierce debate among economists, because it’s not clear how much Uber drivers really are paying in expenses. Drivers on the service use their own cars and pay for their gas; taxi drivers generally do not.

A survey of Uber drivers contained in the report found that most were already employed full or part time when they found Uber, and that earning an additional income on the side was a primary benefit of driving for Uber.

The larger worry about on-demand jobs is not about benefits, but about a lack of agency — a future in which computers, rather than humans, determine what you do, when and for how much. The rise of Uber-like jobs is the logical culmination of an economic and tech system that holds efficiency as its paramount virtue.

“These services are successful because they are tapping into people’s available time more efficiently,” Dr. Sundararajan said. “You could say that people are monetizing their own downtime.”Think about that for a second; isn’t “monetizing downtime” a hellish vision of the future of work?

“I’m glad if people like working for Uber, but those subjective feelings have got to be understood in the context of there being very few alternatives,” Dr. Reich said. “Can you imagine if this turns into a Mechanical Turk economy, where everyone is doing piecework at all odd hours, and no one knows when the next job will come, and how much it will pay? What kind of private lives can we possibly have, what kind of relationships, what kind of families?”

Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch.

opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000 years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our “civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.

our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh

The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones.

certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or come into contact with another human being — to get what we want.

We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations. Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”