There have been articles about the competitiveness of elite colleges and universities and the need to provide courses or partial courses or seminars in failure. The idea is legitimizing failure; it happens to everyone after all. But, since some college students have never experienced failure, the colleges need to include instruction on how to…

In the era of globalization, accountability, and benchmarking, university rankings have achieved a kind of iconic status. The major ones--the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, or the "Shanghai rankings"), the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds Limited) World University Rankings, and the "Times Higher Education" World…

This summer, Forbes magazine published its new rankings of "America's Best Colleges," implying that it had developed a methodology that would give the public the information that it needed to choose a college wisely. "U.S. News & World Report," which in 1983 published the first annual ranking, just announced its latest ratings last week--including…

An effective trademark protection program is advocated. The protection of a college's or university's reputation through preemption of the use of its name in a manner that subjects it to misrepresentation or ridicule is considered as well as protection of school profits from the use of its trademarks. (MLW)

Opinions about quality are seen as the only relevant measures of quality that can be collected. A different view of quality in higher education, and a different set of university rankings are proposed. A system that draws pairwise comparisons of university performance across nine disciplines is described. (MLW)

The "Flexner Report" of 1910, which described 155 U.S. and Canadian medical schools, is discussed, along with its influence on later studies of academic quality. Scholars almost universally agree that the Flexner Report dramatically changed the nature of medical education in the United States, although they disagree about how this…

We are universally testing children to see if elementary schools are doing their job. So, too, in high school. Only in college is a person deemed educated merely for having collected enough hours. Open admissions, the absence of a required core, and ubiquitous indoctrination have so devalued those credit hours that today's degree reliably…

A sampling of "Change" readers taken to identify higher education's most admired people, literature, and institutions, is presented. Included are ratings for three major reports on undergraduate education, confidence in organizations that play key roles in higher education, and best book about higher education. (MLW)

The use of marketing concepts to maintain and enhance the image of a university is considered. Over all, what is needed is a system for image assessment to provide a basis for image development. Without this system and its information outputs, misconceptions can enter the policy-making process at critical junctures, and the life of the institution…