The hottest Higher Ed Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Education Topics

What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever

Freddie deBoer • 8261 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The idea that schools used to universally prepare everyone for the same academic track or that education can by itself erase class and racial gaps is a modern invention and has never been achieved anywhere.
  2. Bringing more people into formal schooling naturally lowers average test scores and completion rates because many newly included students are less prepared, so declining metrics often reflect wider access, not a sudden failure of schools.
  3. Economic changes like globalization, automation, and the decline of unionized middle-skill jobs removed pathways to good work for non-degree holders, and policymakers then pressured schools to fix that problem by pushing everyone toward college—something schools alone cannot realistically do.

Columbia Grad Students Get a Reality Check

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 626 implied HN points • 15 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The UAW warned Columbia's graduate student union to drop radical or political demands, saying those demands would keep the national union from supporting a strike.
  2. Although student workers authorized a strike, the UAW controls whether it can happen and has said it won't fund or green-light a walkout until the students keep negotiating with the university.
  3. The situation shows a clash between the local union's political priorities and the national union's pragmatic strike strategy, and without compromise the students may not get the backing they need.

The Scholar vs. the Professional

In My Tribe • 759 implied HN points • 27 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. There is a real tension between the leisurely, curiosity-driven scholar and the busy, goal-oriented professional, and universities are being pulled to serve both roles.
  2. The rise of the "professional scholar" — who chases grants, publications, and metrics — can distort true scholarship and weaken ties to the world outside academia.
  3. Trying to make students both scholars and builders at the same time risks short-changing each and causing burnout; sequencing dedicated periods for study and for professional immersion may work better.

Why I Let Anti-Israel Protesters Interrupt My Talk

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 4164 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. A lecture focused on Jewish history highlighted how displacement and mass death shaped Israeli identity and politics.
  2. Masked, keffiyeh-wearing anti-Israel protesters interrupted the event, a form of disruption that has become routine on many U.S. campuses.
  3. Rather than shut them down, the lecturer let the interruption happen and turned it into a teaching moment, keeping most of the protesters until the end.

Bad education is a terrible way to fight inequality

Noahpinion • 23353 implied HN points • 26 Nov 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Basic math and reading skills have fallen sharply across the US, with many college entrants unable to do middle-school math or meet basic writing standards, forcing universities to place large numbers in remedial classes.
  2. The decline comes from multiple sources: pandemic learning loss, grade inflation and lowered K–12 standards, elimination of standardized tests, policies like “no zeros,” high absenteeism, and distractions such as phones, making grades a poor signal of real skills.
  3. Relaxing standards in the name of equity — effectively giving students a pass instead of educating them well — is a misguided approach that harms learners and is a counterproductive way to try to reduce inequality.
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Examination Systems

David Friedman’s Substack • 350 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Imperial China chose most officials through brutally competitive exams that tested knowledge of Confucian texts, poetic forms, and essay styles rather than practical administrative skills.
  2. Those exams probably served as a form of indoctrination, instilling Confucian duties and loyalty in elites and spreading those beliefs widely since many people studied even if few passed.
  3. Modern college degrees work similarly by requiring years of study in subjects often unrelated to specific jobs, so degrees can function as signals or ways of inculcating habits and values rather than just teaching directly useful skills.

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Holocaust 2.0’ Threat Sent to Stanford Chabad House.

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 723 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
📰 News Higher Ed
  1. A threatening email with the subject "The coming Holocaust 2.0?" was sent to the Stanford Chabad House just hours before Purim.
  2. Several hateful messages came from the same email address and were directed at Jewish students on campus.
  3. The messages warned Jews not to gather and implied they were being targeted, which alarmed the community and leadership.

Why Hazing Makes Better Men

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 1010 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Higher Ed
  1. A police body-camera video showed dozens of shirtless, blindfolded underclassmen standing silently in a fraternity basement, covered in food substances during an initiation ritual.
  2. The university investigated and determined the event violated hazing policies, suspending the fraternity until at least 2029.
  3. The footage went viral and drew widespread online condemnation as grooming that normalizes exploitation and silence, though some contend the public misinterpreted the scene.

AI and Academia

In My Tribe • 364 implied HN points • 24 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. New AI tools that can write, run, and manage code let individual researchers build scrapers, dashboards, and analysis pipelines far faster than before, creating a big gap between code-savvy users and ordinary users.
  2. Replacing junior researchers or coding projects with AI may be efficient for supervisors but it also destroys the hands-on training that turns students into skilled practitioners, so educators must find new ways to teach those capabilities.
  3. AI will make it much easier to churn out low-value papers, so the academic reward system needs redesigning to stop incentivizing quantity over meaningful research.

Pending Change in Higher Ed

In My Tribe • 470 implied HN points • 21 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Parents are moving away from public K–12 toward private schools and homeschooling, which expands the pool of families willing to try alternative higher-education models like UATX.
  2. UATX expects a fast surge in enrollment that could quickly change campus culture and shows how new providers can exploit demographic and recruitment problems facing legacy universities.
  3. Colleges now face a governance choice about how much to embrace AI; going all in will reshape hiring, curriculum, and budgets but risks alienating faculty, while hesitating risks becoming irrelevant.

The Hinternet Foundation

Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet • 933 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. A new nonprofit has been launched to protect and promote humanistic creativity in an AI-driven world, acting as a sober, programmatic counterpart to a more playful publication.
  2. In 2026 the group will run small, selective programs — an online summer school, paid fall courses, and a Paris summit — with limited spots, application deadlines, and modest fees.
  3. The initiative responds to a perceived failure of universities by building para-academic communities, adapting technology rather than rejecting it, and using boutique publishing and courses to sustain humanistic inquiry.

Average is Over with AI

In My Tribe • 759 implied HN points • 01 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The economy increasingly rewards people who can work well with AI, so those who complement machines will thrive while others doing automatable tasks lose opportunities.
  2. The Alpha model pairs AI-driven one-on-one learning in the morning with student-chosen project work in the afternoon, and it naturally selects for learners who can learn from AI and who push themselves to excel.
  3. Colleges and other institutions should move from lecturing and grading toward guiding and coaching, because conscientiousness and ambition plus the ability to use AI will determine who succeeds and will widen social and geographic divides.

Further Progress on AI Teaching Assistant

In My Tribe • 288 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The AI tutor tracks your skills and uses adaptive spaced repetition, showing items less often when you get them right and more often when you get them wrong, but it currently won't recognize you if you switch browsers.
  2. Building the tutor was fast with Claude, however the tool runs intensively so continuing development will require upgrading to a more expensive subscription.
  3. Universities suffer from too much professor autonomy and weak centralized leadership, which makes it hard to identify or reward instructors who teach AI-relevant skills and to reorganize the institution for the AI era.

Toward a New College Culture

In My Tribe • 501 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Students should adopt an achievement mindset and put in real effort to gain skills instead of expecting high status with minimal work.
  2. Faculty roles should shift from distant authority figures to hands-on mentors or guides who understand individual students and help motivate their growth.
  3. AI can serve as personal tutors for subject knowledge, so colleges should reorganize around AI-powered learning and bring in coaches or practitioners to help students apply skills.

Columbia’s Modern Arab Studies Chair Contenders Have One Thing in Common: Hating Israel

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 343 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Columbia is overhauling its Middle Eastern studies programs and replacing the Modern Arab Studies chair after losing federal funding and reaching a settlement.
  2. Several top candidates and committee members have publicly taken strongly critical positions toward Israel, including framing violent events as responses to Israeli policies, which raises concerns about ideological bias.
  3. Despite university promises to ensure "balanced" curricula, the candidates' views suggest the program may stay politically slanted, fueling accusations and institutional consequences.

Boys can read

Of Boys and Men • 167 implied HN points • 28 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Boys lag behind girls in reading from early grades through high school, finishing roughly a year behind on average.
  2. Boys do a bit better in math, but that advantage is much smaller; math scores don’t explain college enrollment gaps the way GPA, course-taking, and college expectations do, which helps account for lower college enrollment among boys.
  3. Some tutoring and instructionally aligned programs show promise for closing the reading gap and may help boys more, but the evidence is limited and researchers should always report gender-disaggregated results so effective policies can be scaled.

Actually-existing UATX

In My Tribe • 744 implied HN points • 08 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Students are earnest, hardworking, and take initiative. Many land internships as freshmen, so the school suits motivated, practical learners.
  2. The school still struggles with poor coordination and frequent changes of plan that create avoidable snafus. It needs better formal communication and modest structure without turning into rigid bureaucracy.
  3. Teachers should give clearer road maps but are experimenting with AI tools like “vibe-coding,” “vibe-reading,” and “vibe-tutoring” to improve learning and writing. The plan is to have AI show suggested edits while leaving rewrites to the students so they learn.

Education Links, 1/30/2026

In My Tribe • 334 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Colleges should promise students real career experience, teach adaptable technical skills, and build the uniquely human strengths that machines can’t replicate before graduation.
  2. Research shows learning is faster when students study worked examples, explore open-ended problems, learn in spaced chunks with breaks, and automate basic skills so working memory can focus on higher‑order thinking.
  3. Large outside funding and DEI operations can influence campus culture and how discrimination complaints are handled, so universities need stronger transparency, oversight, and accountability.

What Happened to Columbia’s Antisemitism Monitor?

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 482 implied HN points • 27 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Columbia agreed to a $221 million settlement with the federal government and was required to create a monitorship to address allegations of antisemitism.
  2. Bart M. Schwartz, a veteran compliance consultant from Guidepost Solutions, was appointed to oversee the university’s compliance with the agreement.
  3. Insiders report the university failed to fully cooperate with the watchdog, undermining the monitorship’s effectiveness and fueling campus controversy, including protests over suspensions of SJP and JVP.

Maybe a project?

In My Tribe • 151 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. An AI teaching assistant could make freshman econ students fluent by using spaced repetition and testing them in new situations.
  2. A prototype demo for production possibility frontier exercises exists online, but it currently checks answers against hard-coded solutions rather than giving live AI corrections.
  3. The plan is to add real AI-driven feedback and a wider variety of examples so students get adaptive practice and become truly fluent.

Education Links, 1/25/2026

In My Tribe • 273 implied HN points • 25 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Top universities get far more of their revenue from endowments and research grants than from tuition, so students are a smaller part of the financial model.
  2. Many young people are skipping both factory jobs and high-end tech roles, creating a talent pipeline gap that schools could address by improving math prep, offering job shadowing, and creating tech pathways that don't require top-level math skills.
  3. Long-term success depends less on raw intelligence and more on character: initiative, self-control, good relationships, and doing real, meaningful projects help teenagers become thriving adults.

Human Nature, Nick Fuentes, Education Exchange

Rob Henderson's Newsletter • 984 implied HN points • 11 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Humans are relatively monogamous compared with chimpanzees and gorillas, with an estimated monogamy rating around two-thirds.
  2. Mainstream media show ideological blindspots, so tools that compare coverage and highlight underreported stories can help readers spot bias and find missing reporting.
  3. Recent studies link social exposure, personality, and political beliefs: wealthy people’s local exposure to poor neighbors can reduce their support for redistribution, personality traits predict everyday behaviors, and sizable minorities in parts of the Republican coalition hold distorted views of the Holocaust.

University Civics Centers: what is the point?

In My Tribe • 258 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. State-funded civics centers are being created to teach citizenship and foundational texts, but their purpose is unclear: are they meant to reform universities or to educate citizens for self-government?
  2. Nonviolent, disciplined protest and reliance on courts are presented as more effective and constructive ways to protect rights and persuade the public, while violent direct action risks turning movements into public-order problems.
  3. Many civics centers are bureaucratic and face trade-offs with other priorities; focused events like teach-ins could be valuable, but students are overextended and institutions need to consolidate and prioritize initiatives.

Truth, Trust, and the Case for Viewpoint Diversity

Unsafe Science • 106 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Viewpoint diversity is essential for getting closer to the truth in unsettled or politicized areas because it encourages competing hypotheses, adversarial collaboration, and stronger tests of ideas.
  2. Framing calls for intellectual pluralism as merely a conservative or authoritarian plot is misleading; the case for viewpoint diversity predates modern politics and its advocates are not uniformly partisan.
  3. Many academic fields are heavily left-leaning, which fosters self-censorship and biased scholarship, so increasing ideological diversity would improve research, teaching, and public trust.

The Speaker The University Didn’t Want Me to Invite

Juan David’s Newsletter • 6 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Campus bureaucracy can create slow, intimidating, and unnecessary barriers that make it hard for students to organize simple events.
  2. Persistence, creative problem-solving, and leaning on friends or technical know-how can overcome institutional roadblocks and get things done.
  3. Bringing challenging ideas to campus matters for intellectual growth and personal confidence, and successfully hosting them shows what student initiative can achieve.

When to Graduate from College?

In My Tribe • 303 implied HN points • 28 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. AI may reduce the market value of formal credentials and shift hiring toward demonstrable skills, so the traditional diploma and a May graduation feel less climactic.
  2. Graduation should be flexible and based on readiness to work rather than a fixed number of credits; students might graduate when they start a job, join government, or launch a business.
  3. Colleges need to connect students with employers and adapt courses from day one, using a network-based model that emphasizes practical skills and connections over credentials.

Two Months into an MBA

From the Desk • 27 implied HN points • 28 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Returning to school as an adult can feel out of place at first, but it often brings renewed focus, confidence, and enjoyment in the classroom.
  2. Early classes in accounting and finance are practical and sometimes frustrating—accounting feels more exacting, while finance ties to broader concepts. AI can be a powerful study aid to clarify ideas quickly, but it mustn't replace your own thinking.
  3. Strong family and partner support, including financial sacrifice, makes part-time MBA study possible, and the program helps achieve concrete goals like credentials, practical business skills, a local professional network, and better chances for management or teaching.

We Must be Doing Something Right

Unsafe Science • 119 implied HN points • 29 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. AI can be used to spot propaganda disguised as academic scholarship, doing in minutes what can take humans days and making large-scale checks possible.
  2. Some academic work is ideologically driven and can selectively cite or spin evidence, so claims (like widespread hiring bias) sometimes don’t match the actual data.
  3. Exposing propaganda often triggers hostile reactions from its defenders, which can signal the exposure is hitting a nerve, and automating the work with AI would make such critique faster and broader.

Picturing my students

In My Tribe • 243 implied HN points • 26 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The instructor has 34 students across three sections and used student photos plus an AI-built flash-card app to try to learn names, though the images had to be extracted manually first.
  2. AI coding tools are shifting from expecting professional toolchain knowledge to enabling "vibe-coding," letting amateurs create usable software without downloading or configuring complex developer environments.
  3. Students should learn vibe-coding, document their process with AI tools, and keep up with rapid AI coding progress so they aren’t handicapped entering organizations today.

Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & 'AI'"?

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 146 implied HN points • 16 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The liberal arts originally meant practical skills that let people without land or inherited power navigate and survive in a complex, literate society.
  2. Those arts form a modern curriculum for people whose main asset is their mind, preparing them to use knowledge as their primary form of capital.
  3. With AI becoming part of our shared intelligence, education should teach students to use AI to deepen their connection to humanity’s knowledge instead of letting it quietly hollow out human judgment and autonomy.

Savage's 'Lost Generation', or: Thoughts on the DEI scam and what happened after 2015

eugyppius: a plague chronicle • 283 implied HN points • 23 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Higher Ed
  1. Starting around 2014–2015, aggressive DEI hiring in journalism, academia, and entertainment prioritized racial and gender targets over merit, and many white male millennials say they were shut out of the careers they trained for.
  2. Senior administrators protected themselves by enforcing these policies, which often led to hires chosen for demographic reasons rather than qualifications and made institutions more female‑skewed, worse to work in, and more politically radicalized.
  3. Those antiracist measures frequently backfired by amplifying racial optics and grievances, generating hypocrisy among progressives, and appearing likely to persist because meritocracy is weak and demographic preferences can be self‑perpetuating.

Is This STEM?

Life Since the Baby Boom • 1383 implied HN points • 04 Aug 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. The definition of STEM seems to be shifting, and some jobs that don't require advanced math or science are being labeled as STEM. This might make it easier for people to claim they're part of this field.
  2. Women are increasingly represented in STEM degrees and the tech industry, but many roles in healthcare are being counted as STEM without needing crucial skills like calculus or organic chemistry.
  3. It's important to ensure that a clear understanding of what constitutes a STEM job exists. Not all technical jobs necessarily fit this definition, and redefining it could impact workforce training and economic competitiveness.

From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist Trumpist Turn to “Discourse Safety Initiatives”

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 169 implied HN points • 30 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Universities should stick to their core job: protect academic freedom and judge scholarship by merit, while fostering communities where people can speak, listen, think, learn, and support one another.
  2. New waves of weaponized cancel culture and ‘discourse safety’ initiatives risk repurposing campus rules to stifle inquiry, so institutions must resist transactional compacts that trade academic integrity for political favor.
  3. The practical response is to recommit to institutional neutrality: protect nonviolent, non-disruptive protest, prevent violence and major disruptions, avoid policing off-campus political speech, and use clear norms and measured enforcement to preserve open debate and scholarship.

Matt Yglesias Has a Pretty Good Piece on Larry Summers

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 307 implied HN points • 25 Nov 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher Ed
  1. On many policy fights he was more right than wrong, offering sound economic reasoning on trade, drug pricing, pollution, university reform, and stimulus policy even when those positions provoked controversy.
  2. The claim that men simply show greater variability is unsettled; observed sex differences look more complex and likely reflect a mix of biological, behavioral, and social factors rather than a single bell-curve explanation.
  3. Personal misconduct—romantic entanglement and scheming with someone tied to sex crimes—is indefensible and badly damaged his reputation, and even correct reforms can fail if pursued clumsily or provocatively.

Is Internal Reform of Academia Possible?

Unsafe Science • 183 implied HN points • 14 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Academia is seriously skewed by left-wing ideological capture that affects theory, methods, hiring, teaching, funding, and publishing. That bias leads to censorship, politicized journals, and distorted scholarship.
  2. Many insiders block reform through denial, deflection, and a ‘now is not the time’ or ‘can’t do’ mentality, and some reformers weaken efforts by worrying about optics or jargon instead of acting. Common excuses include claiming reform is a right-wing plot, minimizing the problem, or endlessly debating terms.
  3. Internal reform is possible but difficult and requires sustained, practical action like working groups, viewpoint-diversity initiatives, and firm pushback against obstructionary rhetoric. Progress will be slow and needs a mix of patient inside efforts, outside pressure, and educating skeptics with evidence.

Transparency Crisis: A Black Box of Overhead Spending & Academia’s Mission Creep from Rigorous Science

OpenTheBooks Substack • 121 implied HN points • 22 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Universities get growing federal research dollars plus large overhead payments that have fueled administrative bloat and pulled resources away from core scientific work.
  2. Science faces reproducibility problems and many recent graduates lack the practical job skills employers want, revealing a gap between academic priorities and workforce needs.
  3. Grant rules requiring “broader impacts” and targeted outreach (including DEI goals) shift money and faculty time toward programs and administration instead of direct research.

Hillsdale and the N=1 Problem

Aaron Renn • 746 implied HN points • 07 Feb 24
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Hillsdale College's unique success story is hard to replicate by other colleges.
  2. Some successful models, like Hillsdale, are challenging to copy due to unique leadership and historical factors.
  3. Creating models like Hillsdale or other successful entities requires singular leaders and specific conditions that are not easily reproduced elsewhere.

Education Links, 11/21/2025

In My Tribe • 167 implied HN points • 21 Nov 25
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. A lot of teachers believe it's important to show students that America is a good country. Most teachers don't have extreme views and the idea that they're anti-American isn't true.
  2. Students should learn practical skills for the job market, especially in tech, rather than just theory. AI might change how software engineering is done, with most code being generated by machines in the future.
  3. High schoolers are increasingly taking college courses, showing families want a blended education. This shift suggests we need to create a more flexible learning path for students.

Part 2, Breaking the bureaucratic mold of instruction

Unsafe Science • 42 implied HN points • 24 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher Ed
  1. Universities often proclaim values like critical thinking and open debate, but growing surveillance and tight classroom controls can quietly undermine those ideals.
  2. Students and institutional pressures push education toward measurable outcomes, detailed rubrics, and atomized syllabi, turning learning into scorekeeping instead of exploration.
  3. Instructors can push back by leaving room in the syllabus, encouraging student initiative and struggle, and treating knowledge as testable hypotheses rather than demanding one cookbook solution.