Links for 9/23/10

Seth Roberts

we can ask if colleges exist: 1. To teach the students. 2. To employ the teachers. 3. To help businesses who will eventually employ the students (the signalling function of college)…

Dan Ariely

We ordered a typical college term paper from four different essay mills, and as the topic of the paper we chose… (surprise!) Cheating…

The essay mills charged us in advance between $150 to $216 per paper.

Two weeks later, what we got would best be described as gibberish…

At this point we were rather relieved, figuring that the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them…

two of the papers were 35-39% copied from existing works… contacted the essay mills requesting our money back. Despite the solid proof that we provided, the companies insisted that they did not plagiarize. One company even tried to threaten us by saying that they will get in touch with the dean at Duke to alert them to the fact that we submitted work that is not ours…

Kevin Carey

States technically control access to the higher education market by building public colleges and universities and chartering private non-profit institutions, but that hardly ever happens anymore… In practice, state higher education regulatory bodies spend a lot of time approving and disapproving individual programs at existing public institutions…

The result is that state higher education regulatory agencies end up creating elaborate procedures for program approval, institutions that enjoy the fruits of regulatory restriction expend lots of resources protecting their turf, and meanwhile whole realms of higher education policy–like whether the programs in question are any good–remain essentially unexamined.

Scott Jaschik

What if the alumni preferences are significant? What if significant numbers of these alumni children wouldn’t have gotten in anyway? And what if -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- alumni preferences have no impact on alumni giving? Those what-ifs are all true, according to a book being published and released today by the Century Foundation (and distributed by the Brookings Institution Press). The book is a collection of research articles by scholars, journalists and lawyers arguing that much of what colleges have said over the years about alumni admissions preferences isn’t true -- and that they amount to the book’s title: Affirmative Action for the Rich…