I like your piece about Vanderbilt. A lot of students from Kentucky have gone there for ages, but it still had a bit of university of Mississippi fraternity vibe to it. Adding lots of Jewish students has helped.
When I went to Duke, I remember talking to someone in admissions department IN 1073. He said they look to have a diverse student body, this is before the DSE cult, and they could easily fill the student body with people only from Long Island in Chicago based on test scores.
As result, and there were people there from every state in the union and most countries. I remember seeing the Swahili professor, who had to the rites of male passage carved or seared into his face. He looked like he had to wrestle a lion to prove his manhood. I was from West Virginia and it was an awakening, in a good way.
Thanks for Alpha School reading. I have been reading Austin Scholar, but after a while, I got a whiff that it was a bit cultish and self promoting. Like the author of the piece, I want it to succeed as well, but without the self promotion..
What regions of the United Stated are best for higher education?
In my youth, I believed the answer was the West Coast (mainly California) and the Northeast, but after much research, it’s looking like the South East offers better learning opportunities, especially when considering FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings.
Here’s what I observe in FIRE’s 2026 ranking. Of the 257 colleges that FIRE ranks:
Six of the top 30 colleges are located in one state—North Carolina.
13 of the top 30 colleges are located in North Carolina or in a state adjacent to North Carolina.
60% of the top 30 colleges are located in the South East.
I took a knockoff Hermes scarf into the Chicago Hermes store, and they couldn't tell it was a knockoff. When I informed them it was a KO, they tried to wrestle it away from me. Am I trafficking in false equivalences? Yeah...but sometimes they're fine. As Roger noted, it's so often about perceptions and prestige.
"“Learning outcomes” are a list of “competencies” (like learning to read a graph) that students must “attain” to pass a course. Quality and rigor are irrelevant."
It seems to me that if a student can't read a graph, the course isn't very rigorous. If "competencies" are relevant, not ridiculously low, and accurately measured, they seem a rough measure of the quality of the course. Now, perhaps in practice, they are ridiculously low, or are not accurately measured but that is a different issue.
That seems to be the real problem. The examples she gives of economics "outcomes" are ridiculously vague and probably impossible to measure. Which brings me to something that annoyed me about the piece. It seems to throw out contradictory complaints. "Outcomes are ridiculously low and vague. And teachers don't actually care about them or measure them." "The food in this place is awful. And the portions are so small."
I think there is a very valid problem if "learning outcomes" are the equivalent of food standards that say "an orange is round, between 2 and 4 inches in diameter, and colored orange." A number 5 billiard ball would meet the standards. They don't get at what is important about an orange. A true measure of outcomes would actually signal that a student has gotten what is important out of a course. Perhaps Hollis Robbins thinks it is impossible to do that . We must rely on the prestige of the institution. That may be right, but prestige is often wrong. Nobel prize winners often make terrible teachers.
(In part 2, she tells parents to choose on the basis of quality of teachers. Kind of sensible. But how to find out the quality of teachers? If she means, choose those those with highest degrees and the biggest research production, she is a fool.)
And, no, a brand name on an item does not always indicate quality. For fashion, it often measures prestige. It does not measure something empirical. It measures something social.
It's certainly a dollar not spent on something else. That's physics (which is, of course, where opportunity/alternative cost comes from). But I'm not sure that gets us much of anywhere. It does suggest, "you can't do good things until you stop doing bad things." But the question remains: how does anyone outside the course or the institution know what the quality of teaching in a course is?
When I was teaching outcomes were basically the more granular version of the course title. If you taught Intermediate Economics the teaching outcomes were basically a list of "What we expect to go over in Intermediate Economics". It was kind of redundant in some classes, but I suppose in others where no one even knows what it is about it makes some sense.
The real trouble though is the constant one with our education structure: the person who says whether or not a student learned something is the same one who was supposed to teach it to them. There is a huge incentive to just pass students, or at least give them so much opportunity to pass that they don't feel like they need to work much at all.
Long story short: Accreditation is a very awkward and ineffective way to try to control quality, and is much more a method of controlling quantity.
I like your piece about Vanderbilt. A lot of students from Kentucky have gone there for ages, but it still had a bit of university of Mississippi fraternity vibe to it. Adding lots of Jewish students has helped.
When I went to Duke, I remember talking to someone in admissions department IN 1073. He said they look to have a diverse student body, this is before the DSE cult, and they could easily fill the student body with people only from Long Island in Chicago based on test scores.
As result, and there were people there from every state in the union and most countries. I remember seeing the Swahili professor, who had to the rites of male passage carved or seared into his face. He looked like he had to wrestle a lion to prove his manhood. I was from West Virginia and it was an awakening, in a good way.
Thanks for Alpha School reading. I have been reading Austin Scholar, but after a while, I got a whiff that it was a bit cultish and self promoting. Like the author of the piece, I want it to succeed as well, but without the self promotion..
"hell bent on accreditation" tells me UATX will soon become just another liberal arts school. A fundamental mistake.
What regions of the United Stated are best for higher education?
In my youth, I believed the answer was the West Coast (mainly California) and the Northeast, but after much research, it’s looking like the South East offers better learning opportunities, especially when considering FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings.
Here’s what I observe in FIRE’s 2026 ranking. Of the 257 colleges that FIRE ranks:
Six of the top 30 colleges are located in one state—North Carolina.
13 of the top 30 colleges are located in North Carolina or in a state adjacent to North Carolina.
60% of the top 30 colleges are located in the South East.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/the-new-frontier-in-higher-education
I took a knockoff Hermes scarf into the Chicago Hermes store, and they couldn't tell it was a knockoff. When I informed them it was a KO, they tried to wrestle it away from me. Am I trafficking in false equivalences? Yeah...but sometimes they're fine. As Roger noted, it's so often about perceptions and prestige.
"“Learning outcomes” are a list of “competencies” (like learning to read a graph) that students must “attain” to pass a course. Quality and rigor are irrelevant."
It seems to me that if a student can't read a graph, the course isn't very rigorous. If "competencies" are relevant, not ridiculously low, and accurately measured, they seem a rough measure of the quality of the course. Now, perhaps in practice, they are ridiculously low, or are not accurately measured but that is a different issue.
That seems to be the real problem. The examples she gives of economics "outcomes" are ridiculously vague and probably impossible to measure. Which brings me to something that annoyed me about the piece. It seems to throw out contradictory complaints. "Outcomes are ridiculously low and vague. And teachers don't actually care about them or measure them." "The food in this place is awful. And the portions are so small."
I think there is a very valid problem if "learning outcomes" are the equivalent of food standards that say "an orange is round, between 2 and 4 inches in diameter, and colored orange." A number 5 billiard ball would meet the standards. They don't get at what is important about an orange. A true measure of outcomes would actually signal that a student has gotten what is important out of a course. Perhaps Hollis Robbins thinks it is impossible to do that . We must rely on the prestige of the institution. That may be right, but prestige is often wrong. Nobel prize winners often make terrible teachers.
(In part 2, she tells parents to choose on the basis of quality of teachers. Kind of sensible. But how to find out the quality of teachers? If she means, choose those those with highest degrees and the biggest research production, she is a fool.)
And, no, a brand name on an item does not always indicate quality. For fashion, it often measures prestige. It does not measure something empirical. It measures something social.
Every dollar spent ensuring that learning outcomes are “legible” and transferable across institutions is a dollar not spent on quality teaching.
It's certainly a dollar not spent on something else. That's physics (which is, of course, where opportunity/alternative cost comes from). But I'm not sure that gets us much of anywhere. It does suggest, "you can't do good things until you stop doing bad things." But the question remains: how does anyone outside the course or the institution know what the quality of teaching in a course is?
When I was teaching outcomes were basically the more granular version of the course title. If you taught Intermediate Economics the teaching outcomes were basically a list of "What we expect to go over in Intermediate Economics". It was kind of redundant in some classes, but I suppose in others where no one even knows what it is about it makes some sense.
The real trouble though is the constant one with our education structure: the person who says whether or not a student learned something is the same one who was supposed to teach it to them. There is a huge incentive to just pass students, or at least give them so much opportunity to pass that they don't feel like they need to work much at all.
Long story short: Accreditation is a very awkward and ineffective way to try to control quality, and is much more a method of controlling quantity.
Yes.