I just saw the movie The Mist (actually, one of those really good B horror movies that hasn’t gotten enough notice) so maybe that metaphor is just on my mind. But that’s the metaphor that popped into my head when I read about the new regulations for the for-profit education sector (where I teach). I am mostly talking about the ‘truth in advertising’ requirements that would force schools to put all sorts of information in a prominent place on their websites (“Splitting the Difference on Gainful Employment“).

It’s a good idea but I wonder too if it’s naive, in the short run. After all, despite the nearly half-century of dire warnings (more dire than debt) on cigarettes,…

The entire modern history of higher education in the U.S. is littered with various people– inevitably but not always crediting themselves with liberal intentions– wringing their hands over the difficulties of class mobility. No matter the context, the basic idea is always the same: not everyone wants to go to college, so why should we make them? It’s an appeal to our sacred values of individuality. We are all unique, we should all be the masters of our own destiny.

Chris Meyer’s recent piece in Education Week (The Inadvertent Bigotry of Inappropriate Expectations) has all of the right elements: the liberal credentialing (“As someone who founded and ran a college-prep enrichment program for at-risk secondary school students…”) and the…