PLANK NOVEMBER 15, 2012
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Editor’s Note: We’ll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy!
Could online education be the death knell for the university?
The Guardian | 15 min (3,700 words)
In Mexico, drug lords warn journalists they plan to attack with a cautionary phone call. Why do reporters ignore it?
NYRB | 16 min (3,893 words)
Why did Orhan Pamuk make a museum? He is obessed with objects.
Telegraph | 6 min (1,480 words)
The Western boogeyman: What scares one of China's most powerful generals.
Foreign Policy | 8 min (1,989 words)
3 comments
"Grist has been looking at the funding model of British universities, and sees trouble ahead. The massive rise in fees this year is just the start of it. "We've set off down this road now, and if you create competition and a market for universities, I think you're going to have to go further." He foresees the best universities becoming vastly more expensive, and the cheaper, more vocational ones "holding up". "It's the middle-tier, 1960s campus ones that I think are going to struggle." Goodbye, Columbus!
- rayward
November 15, 2012 at 4:24pm
The middle tier universities depend on the bottom tier students, and the bottom tier students won't pay the cost for so little return. That's what's facing the middling universities. Either shrink on your own terms or disappear from market forces. There is at least one benefit from the coming revolution: no more big time college football! And, if the stars are aligned, no more ESPN!
- rayward
November 15, 2012 at 4:35pm
Of course, the middle tier universities go to great lengths to hide the bottom tier students, through grade inflation, banning the bell curve, you name it, but the bottom tier, they may not be top tier, but they know who they are; so no matter how hard the middle tier universities try to hide the bottom tier students from themselves, they know, and they won't take it much longer.
- rayward
November 15, 2012 at 4:56pm