The hottest Higher education Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Education Topics

The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do

Experimental History • 59806 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
🔬 Science Higher education
  1. For-profit scientific publishers extract large sums from publicly funded research by paywalling papers and charging institutions and authors to publish or read work the public already paid for.
  2. Many ‘open access’ rules let publishers just shift costs onto authors through huge article-processing fees, so the profit-skimming continues unless for-profit publishers are cut out entirely.
  3. This is a collective-action problem that only governments and big funders can solve; banning for-profit journals from handling grant-funded work would save money and create room for nonprofit, more honest publishing models.

Whither the Humanities?

Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet • 483 implied HN points • 15 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. A free, online Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summer School will run on Fridays and Saturdays in August 2026 and is limited to 15 participants.
  2. The program centers on the question "What Makes Us Human?" and will offer sustained reflection on the current state and future of humanistic inquiry, with each year taking a different approach.
  3. Thanks to a generous donation the course is offered at no cost, but applicants must apply by June 1; the program is run by a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

'Woke' might not be the enemy, but it still deserves critique

Odds and Ends of History • 1608 implied HN points • 26 Mar 26
🎭️ Culture Higher education
  1. Focusing on "woke" controversies often distracted people from the much bigger danger of rising right-wing authoritarianism and authoritarian politicians.
  2. Criticism of "woke" ideas from within the left isn’t inherently misguided; internal critique can help the left stay effective, accountable, and appealing.
  3. People on the centre-left should reprioritize to confront authoritarian threats while still debating cultural issues so those debates strengthen rather than weaken progressive politics.

A Third Way for the Humanities

Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet • 8156 implied HN points • 08 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Universities have hollowed out traditional humanities: economic pressures, corporate influence, and technologies like AI have pushed departments toward market‑driven, business‑school models that prevent professors from teaching deep humanistic formation.
  2. The main intellectual responses—shrill “myth‑busting” critique and crude nationalist “myth‑making”—both miss the point and produce narrow, self‑defeating approaches that break the humanities’ broad, comparative, and democratic purpose.
  3. The real remedy is to build parallel, independent initiatives and community institutions that treat the humanities as a practice of self‑cultivation and collective study of cultural traditions, not merely as credentialing or corporate training.

Crumbling DIEvory Towers

Postcards From Barsoom • 6999 implied HN points • 25 Oct 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Many colleges, like Whittier College, are struggling with issues like low enrollment and poor management. This is leading to unhappy students and worried alumni.
  2. At some prestigious universities, standards are declining because of changes to grading and admission policies. More focus is being put on participation and homework rather than exams.
  3. The increasing role of administrators in universities is changing the focus of education. Important academic traditions are being lost as the emphasis shifts toward managing feelings rather than fostering intellectual growth.
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The New Normal

russ880 • 1016 implied HN points • 30 Oct 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Many students in Israel are missing school due to military service obligations, especially during times of conflict. This makes starting the academic year very challenging.
  2. Despite the ongoing war and personal losses, students still find value in their education. They appreciate having a safe place to learn and grow during difficult times.
  3. Life in Israel during wartime is a mix of joy and sorrow. People celebrate moments like weddings while also mourning losses, showing resilience amid challenges.

Academia is Women’s Work

Postcards From Barsoom • 15604 implied HN points • 16 Oct 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. More women are enrolling in college than men, and this trend is changing how we view various professions. When too many women join a field, men tend to leave, as they see it as less competitive and valuable.
  2. Academia is becoming feminized, which could lead to a decline in its status and quality. As more women join, some believe that the competitive drive that often leads to higher performance in academia may be fading.
  3. Lower male participation in colleges can hurt the university's reputation and funding. If schools are seen as feminine spaces, they might struggle to attract male students and the resources that come with them.

Friday brief: Course cuts considered by under pressure university

NN Journal • 139 implied HN points • 01 Nov 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. The University of Northampton is considering cutting some courses due to financial issues. This may include merging or dropping certain subjects to stabilize their finances.
  2. Students are worried about how these changes might impact their education and the quality of teaching. Some are actively petitioning to save specific courses that they feel are being undervalued.
  3. Local MPs are concerned about the university's financial stability and have called for better funding for higher education. They emphasize that the university is important for the local economy and workforce.

Paying College Athletes Has Created a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do.

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 537 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26
🎾 Sports Higher education
  1. Allowing athletes to earn from their name, image, and likeness fixed a long-standing unfairness where schools and others profited while the players did not.
  2. The change has created a messy new landscape — big pay deals for some players, rising costs for programs, and worries about competitive balance and college priorities.
  3. Despite the chaos and political outcry, reversing the change would be the wrong move because the worst predictions haven’t come true and compensating athletes was the right thing to do.

Education Links, 3/9/2026

In My Tribe • 273 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Sustained success comes from focused fascination rather than vague "follow your passion" advice — true curiosity is what you can stick with longer than your competitors without burning out.
  2. Graduate students who identify as more "woke" report much higher interest in politics and engage in political discussion with peers far more often than less "woke" students.
  3. The academic publishing system is rent-seeking because taxpayers fund research but then pay to access it; putting papers in the public domain and making peer review transparent would eliminate that double payment.

America's Future Leaders Are Learning To Become Grifters

Rob Henderson's Newsletter • 5814 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Claims of disability are much higher at elite colleges, with many students using diagnoses to get accommodations like extra test time, priority housing, and flexible deadlines.
  2. Younger people and privileged students increasingly see bending rules and claiming victimhood as acceptable ways to get ahead, which makes gaming the system feel normal.
  3. The system creates perverse incentives—wealthy families can buy diagnoses and clinicians face conflicts of interest—so institutions may be training future leaders to exploit advantages and erode social trust.

Quantifying Curriculum Degradation: Evidence from the University of Chicago

Heterodox STEM • 192 implied HN points • 15 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. A keyword-based method can flag courses as engaging with progressive ideas or the Western canon, and while this approach is blunt and prone to errors or manipulation, it is useful for tracking changes over time and comparing institutions.
  2. At the University of Chicago (2012–2025) the share of courses matching progressive keywords rose from about 12.7% to 28.3% while canon-related courses stayed near 12%, so progressive signals now outpace canon signals especially in humanities and social sciences and even show up in STEM.
  3. A public Curriculum Content Index built from catalogs, syllabi, and enrollment could give families, donors, and policymakers transparent comparisons across universities, but such an index should be treated as a noisy first pass and not as a basis for micromanaging curricula or replacing careful evaluation.

Why Grad Students at Columbia May Go on Strike

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 459 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. About 3,500 graduate student workers could authorize a strike that would halt teaching, grading, and research, potentially disrupting Columbia’s academic operations.
  2. The strike vote is happening amid campus turmoil over pro‑Palestinian protests and clashes between university leaders and federal scrutiny over alleged antisemitism.
  3. The union’s political focus is controversial among students, and an affirmative vote could quickly escalate tensions by triggering an immediate walkout.

Neanderthals, Morality, Ivy League Criticism

Rob Henderson's Newsletter • 1117 implied HN points • 04 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Graduates can legitimately criticize elite colleges without being labeled hypocrites; defenders often attack the critics instead of addressing the substantive problems, which discourages informed dissent.
  2. Moral behavior is driven more by emotions and intuitions than by abstract philosophical reasoning, so moral psychology (including theories like Haidt’s and Gray’s) explains everyday judgments and how traits, sex differences, and development shape morality and happiness.
  3. Recent findings include sex-biased Neanderthal–modern-human interbreeding patterns, evidence that social stigma deters crime more effectively than threats of distant harsh punishment, and a link between openness and crystallized (accumulated) intelligence rather than fluid reasoning.

Why College Students Can't Read Books

Erick Erickson's Confessions of a Political Junkie • 1119 implied HN points • 09 Oct 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Many college freshmen have never read a whole book, which surprises their professors. This shows a gap in reading experience among students entering college.
  2. Curricula like Common Core focus more on articles and excerpts rather than full books. This might not prepare students well for the demands of college reading.
  3. There is a lot of discussion about why this is happening, but Common Core isn't often mentioned as a reason. It suggests that the structure of education could be contributing to the problem.

The Damage Done by Accreditors

Heterodox STEM • 490 implied HN points • 04 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Accreditation bodies (like CACREP) can dictate not just standards but the ideological content of training programs, using “professional dispositions” to evaluate students’ beliefs and values.
  2. When programs enforce identity-based frameworks as a gatekeeping tool, students can be blocked from licensure, suffer emotional and financial harm, and the profession risks turning therapy into activism that erodes trust.
  3. Because accreditation is tied to federal funding, universities have strong incentives to comply, so real change will likely require new laws, accountability measures, and organized advocacy to protect student rights and free expression.

Colleges

David Friedman’s Substack • 305 implied HN points • 11 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. College has become much more expensive partly because schools now offer luxurious amenities and many more administrative and support services, and they use heavy price discrimination so published tuition often overstates what students actually pay.
  2. Many colleges actively organize students' social lives with curated housing groups, orientation trips, and staff-led programs, which reduces opportunities for students to learn how to make friendships on their own.
  3. Recent campus sexual-misconduct policies give institutions strong power to adjudicate disputes and can chill sexual activity by creating risks for one partner if accusations arise, effectively replacing old parental rules with administrative enforcement.

Rescuing Science

Heterodox STEM • 241 implied HN points • 08 Mar 26
🔬 Science Higher education
  1. Massive federal funding has created an entrenched system of universities, agencies, publishers, and politicians that protects funding flows rather than fostering open scientific discovery.
  2. The grant-centric culture — short funding cycles, heavy administration, and productivity metrics — drains creativity and sometimes drives researchers to play the funding game instead of doing bold science.
  3. Fixing this means slowly reducing federal control by reforming indirect costs, making funds portable and tied to scientists, and restoring philanthropic and institutional support so research priorities return to scientists and discovery can flourish.

Are White Men a "Lost Generation"? Interview With Author Jacob Savage

TK News by Matt Taibbi • 6578 implied HN points • 17 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Higher education
  1. Since the mid-2010s, white men have lost significant ground in many media, academic, and creative jobs as diversity and inclusion policies reshaped hiring, leaving them feeling shut out of spaces they once dominated.
  2. That loss has real personal costs: stalled careers, economic hardship, and regret from men who expected fair treatment but found doors closing instead of opportunities opening.
  3. Many men are afraid to tell their stories because of workplace and social risks, which makes honest conversation about these changes rare and could hide wider social tensions with long-term consequences.

Come and be my intern (to talk about J.S. Mill)

The Common Reader • 1382 implied HN points • 27 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. There's a Mercatus summer internship focused on classical liberalism and the mainline political economy tradition, blending economics and philosophy.
  2. The program treats literature as essential to liberal thought and will spend a lot of time reading and debating J.S. Mill, so applicants should be ready to discuss Mill's essays regularly.
  3. Undergraduates, recent graduates, and early-stage grad students are encouraged to apply, and interns can propose their own literature projects across many authors and topics, with initiative welcomed.

Shutting Down NCAR Is Vindictive Governance

The Honest Broker Newsletter • 3591 implied HN points • 17 Dec 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. Shutting down NCAR appears politically motivated and vindictive, not based on a clear national need. It would harm U.S. scientific capacity and undermine research that supports public safety and the economy.
  2. NCAR is a large, federally funded research center that provides broad atmospheric science, community models, and high-performance computing used worldwide, and it is not simply a hub of ‘climate alarmism.’ Its work spans weather, climate, space physics, and observational technology essential to many sectors.
  3. NCAR has real issues like mission creep and competition with universities that deserve reform, but modernizing and narrowing its mission is far smarter than dismantling the center. Terminating the center would cause unnecessary, long-lasting damage to the scientific enterprise.

Manufactured Inevitability and the Need for Courage

The Convivial Society • 3308 implied HN points • 15 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Higher education
  1. Technological inevitability is a myth; there are real choices about which technologies are adopted and many alternative paths get ignored.
  2. Powerful actors often manufacture inevitability by normalizing and mandating AI, which shifts responsibility away from those who shape technology.
  3. Ordinary civil courage is needed: people and professionals must make moral choices and resist pressure to accept technologies as unavoidable.

How Federal Law Made Us All Disabled

Richard Hanania's Newsletter • 4705 implied HN points • 04 Dec 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. More students are identifying as disabled to get extra help in school, especially at top universities, which raises questions about fairness. This system seems to benefit wealthier students more than those who truly need help.
  2. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has expanded over time, sometimes to an unreasonable extent, making many conditions qualify as disabilities. This has led to debates about how many people truly need accommodations.
  3. Societal pressure often prevents people from pushing back against ideas that sound good, even if they might lead to unfair situations. This can cause problems when laws are made without careful consideration.

Yes, liberal hypocrisy has an actual face

Unreported Truths • 39 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. A Princeton history professor openly opposes Donald Trump and generally supports progressive ideas and science, though he admits limits to how progressive he is.
  2. He lives in a university-subsidized house on Edgehill Road and objects to new housing being built close to his home.
  3. Many see this as a clear case of liberal hypocrisy — backing broad progressive policies while fighting local development that would affect his own neighborhood — and others find the contrast ironic.

I’m a Harvard Student. It’s Too Easy to Get an A.

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 551 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. A faculty proposal would cap A grades at 20% per class and replace GPA ranking with average percentile rank for honors and prizes.
  2. Most undergraduates strongly oppose the cap, but critics say current grade inflation makes it too easy to get an A and pushes students into damage-control instead of genuine intellectual risk-taking.
  3. The reforms aim to curb grade inflation and change incentives so grades become more meaningful and encourage real academic ambition.

READING: JOHN WARNER: David Brooks Sucks

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 468 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
🎭️ Culture Higher education
  1. He avoids taking clear moral or factual stances in public, often deferring to investigations instead of calling out obvious wrongdoing.
  2. He repeatedly misrepresents, exaggerates, or invents research and data, turning weak or false claims into broad social theories.
  3. Major media and academic institutions keep giving him influential platforms, which amplifies misleading ideas and harms public discourse.

How is teaching going?

In My Tribe • 364 implied HN points • 11 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Seminar-style paper discussions don't fit less-prepared freshmen, so classes often turn into lectures; assigning core concepts and short written answers before class would establish a common baseline for discussion.
  2. AI can be used effectively for grading and feedback, as practice exams with AI grading matched instructor judgments; building an AI teaching assistant for intro courses is feasible but would take several months to a year of development.
  3. Student engagement is limited by competing commitments and time constraints, so active projects have produced mixed results and early morning classes reduce participation.

Education Links, 2/18/2026

In My Tribe • 227 implied HN points • 18 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Blurring high school, college, and career can give students real work experience, college courses, and employer-valued credentials before they graduate, making schooling more directly relevant to careers.
  2. Using metrics like cost per graduate or return on investment lets policymakers compare programs and see which models produce more graduates for the money, guiding funding and design decisions.
  3. Dollar-focused metrics miss important non-monetary benefits—like lifelong enrichment from arts—and overlook the value of creativity and combining skills, so education should also cultivate personal growth and skill-stacking.

College-for-All Means Homework-for-All

Five’s Substack • 1358 implied HN points • 22 Jul 24
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Many college students have a lot of work and study to do outside of class, making their schedule very busy. It's common for students to work part-time or even full-time jobs while studying.
  2. Homework is really important for truly understanding subjects in college. Doing the readings and assignments helps students think on their own and learn more effectively.
  3. It's vital to protect students' time for learning, not just to earn degrees. Education should be about more than just getting a job; it should allow for real thinking and personal growth.

Corporate Soap Opera at UATX

In My Tribe • 531 implied HN points • 17 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Personality and ego conflicts get amplified into supposed principled battles. Many disputes are more about people than deep ideological differences.
  2. The school’s challenges go beyond DEI to include debates over AI, curriculum, and earlier rushed commitments. A lack of shared priorities means individuals launch initiatives that often collide.
  3. Stronger internal processes and some bureaucracy are needed to manage trade-offs and reduce drama. A change in leadership may have made the place better positioned to improve things.

Tyler Cowen's AI Campus

In My Tribe • 531 implied HN points • 16 Jan 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Higher education can be reshaped around AI: students pair with mentors while AI designs syllabi, lessons, and assessments, and a big part of current teaching should focus on learning how to work with AI during this fast-changing transition.
  2. Small, AI-built apps and free-form natural-language interfaces can replace clunky courseware, letting users ask plain questions like “When is my next paper due?” and get immediate answers, and these tools can be prototyped very quickly.
  3. Policy teaching should be comparative and skeptical: markets sometimes fail but governments also fail due to information limits and perverse incentives, so solutions should weigh Pigovian-style fixes against Coasean bargaining, community governance, and constitutional design.

The Kollel and the Quad

What Is Called Thinking? • 146 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Both the Haredi kollel system and many humanities departments claim intrinsic value to block accountability while still drawing public subsidies.
  2. What began as narrow exemptions for elite practitioners has expanded into mass entitlement, protected by self-certification, ideological gatekeeping, and the romanticizing of poverty to excuse low standards and avoided obligations.
  3. A better model pairs deep study with civic duty; examples like hesder yeshivot and veterans-turned-scholars show that service and learning can reinforce each other, so intrinsic value should come with reciprocal public responsibility.

What Qatar Bought from Carnegie Mellon for $1 Billion

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 315 implied HN points • 02 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Qatar has poured far more money into American universities than other countries, spending about $6.6 billion since the 1960s and outpacing China.
  2. Carnegie Mellon received roughly $1 billion from Qatar and runs a campus in Doha.
  3. A Jewish student's antisemitism lawsuit and unsealed court documents have raised questions about whether large Qatari gifts come with strings or influence university decisions and policies.

When The Times asked, “Why is Britain educating China’s scientists?” What did they really overlook? by Michael Jinghan ZENG

Pekingnology • 101 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Treating Chinese students as strategic threats and closing academic openness will damage the UK's universities and its role as a global centre of ideas.
  2. UK universities depend heavily on tuition from international students, especially Chinese postgrads, and losing that income would trigger layoffs, cuts, and a fall in research capacity.
  3. The global higher-education map is changing as Asian universities rise and students have more options, so the share of Chinese students in the UK will likely adjust; narrowing the focus to ‘British’ STEM while sidelining the humanities would weaken the UK's soft power and intellectual influence.

The NYT Recruiting Brochure for New College

Can We Still Govern? • 808 implied HN points • 28 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Major coverage presents the takeover as a manageable makeover but leaves out many critical facts and voices, mostly quoting people aligned with the new regime.
  2. The political takeover has sharply curtailed academic freedom: programs were closed, books removed, faculty were fired or denied tenure, and classroom speech is chilled by state pressure and surveillance.
  3. The overhaul is politically driven and financially unsustainable — per‑student costs have exploded, academic standards dropped with heavy athletic recruiting, and the campus now depends on ongoing government subsidies.

Troublemaking Dissent

Heterodox STEM • 213 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. Non-conformist, truth-seeking dissent is socially valuable because it corrects consensus errors and spurs innovation, even though it often brings ridicule and personal cost.
  2. People with lived experience under repressive leftist regimes often flip the usual political associations of dissent and lean right, showing that dissent’s political direction depends on history and context.
  3. Many contemporary academic spaces favor identity and power narratives over open debate, which undermines the principle of defending dissent; truth-seeking dissent should be protected regardless of political label.

2025: A Jewish Perspective

In My Tribe • 622 implied HN points • 24 Dec 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. Israel wants peace but faces deep rejectionism from militant movements that refuse a Jewish state, so responsibility for many civilian deaths lies with groups like Hamas rather than Israel.
  2. Older right-leaning Jews welcome moves against campus antisemitism and DEI and appreciate strong US support for Israel, but they fear heavy-handed tactics could alienate allies and that American backing may not be durable.
  3. Rising antisemitism reflects a broader ideological crisis where Jews become scapegoats, and the suggested remedy is stronger security measures — more intelligence, strict law enforcement, and aggressive action against terrorists — rather than just education.

Yes, Affirmative Action Justifies Discrimination

Cremieux Recueil • 893 implied HN points • 18 Dec 25
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Affirmative action often results in beneficiaries being, on average, less qualified by standard ability measures than those selected without preference, which creates measurable performance gaps.
  2. Because those gaps devalue the credentials of favored groups, it can be rational for employers or consumers to avoid or discriminate against beneficiaries to protect quality.
  3. These effects misallocate talent, strengthen credentialism, and lack solid evidence of compensating benefits, making affirmative action both practically harmful and morally questionable.

Brown University Deserved Better

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 751 implied HN points • 19 Dec 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Higher education
  1. It took five days for authorities to find the shooter, who killed two Brown students and was later found dead; investigators also believe he was behind the murder of an MIT professor.
  2. The university's response was chaotic and slow, creating days of institutional paralysis that let fear and misinformation spread across campus.
  3. A flood of online accounts tried to do the work of police during the crisis but largely failed, amplifying confusion and falsehoods.

Have universities become bastions of ideology instead of truth?

Heterodox STEM • 206 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26
🚌 Education Higher education
  1. Many universities show ideological conformity, with measurable patterns of disagreement and exclusion on campus.
  2. That conformity risks harming truth-seeking—examples like frequent deplatforming around topics such as Israel-Palestine show both sides try to silence opponents, though the full effect on research and teaching is still uncertain.
  3. Policy responses should protect academic freedom with clear time, place, and manner rules and avoid treating exposure to opposing viewpoints as harassment or creating biased protections for particular groups.