The Teaching Problem

Higher education is much in the news, but the central challenge that colleges and universities are failing to meet is receiving hardly any attention. The big stories have been student loans, protests and demonstrations, affirmative action, ratings and rankings, racial and ethnic equity, funding and costs. Most recently, higher-ed news has been hijacked by the Trump administration’s incoherent and destructive attack on universities and foreign students. This is serious, and we can only hope that it doesn’t last long. But it is also a distraction from the most important long-term challenge facing higher education.