Can the Best Part of Higher Education in the US Be Salvaged?

US higher education is in danger of collapse when the education bubble bursts. Rapid inflation of tuition charges combined with administrative bloat, an oppressive air of political correctness, and the too-frequent substitution of ideological indoctrination in place of genuine education -- these things and more spell the doom of US higher education. Unless things can quickly and decisively change.

Many universities, and not a few colleges, have come to resemble Fortune 500 companies with their layers of highly paid executives presiding over complex empires that contain semi-professional athletic programs, medical and business schools, and expensive research programs along with the traditional academic departments charged with providing instruction to undergraduate students. Like other industries, higher education has its own trade magazines and newspapers, influential lobbying groups in Washington, and paid advertising agents reminding the public of how important their enterprise is to the national welfare. In contrast to corporate businesses, whose members generally agree on their overall purpose, colleges and universities have great difficulty defining what their enterprise is for. What is a college education? On just about any campus, at any given time, one can find faculty members in intense debate about what a college education entails and what the mission of their institution should be. Few businesses would dare to offer a highly expensive product that they are incapable of defining for the inquiring consumer. Yet this is what colleges and universities have done at least since the 1960s, and they have done so with surprising success. _NewCriterion

James Piereson has published an incisive review of US higher education -- and of recently published scholarly books which examine US higher education. He summarises some key reforms which should bring about critical improvements in relatively short order:

(1) Shelve the utopian idea that every young person should attend college and also the notion that the nation’s prosperity depends upon universal college attendance. Many youngsters are not prepared or motivated for college. Let them prepare for a vocation. The attempt to push them through college is weakening the enterprise for everyone else.


(2) Terminate most Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences. There is little point in training able people in research programs when they have no prospect of gaining employment afterwards. The research enterprise has also corrupted all of these fields, particularly in the humanities.

(3) Develop programs in these fields that will allow students to earn graduate degrees based upon teaching rather than research. Such programs will be intellectually broad rather than specialized and will equip graduates to teach in several fields in the humanities. This will strengthen teaching in the liberal arts and perhaps even revive the field from its current condition.

(4) Reverse the expansion of administrative layers, especially those offices and programs created to satisfy campus pressure groups. If campus groups want their own administrative offices, they should pay for them themselves, rather than asking other students (and their parents) to do so. Colleges and universities should make it a practice to hire at least three new faculty members for every new administrator hired.

(5) Bring back general education requirements and core curricula to ensure that every student is exposed to the important ideas in the sciences and humanities that have shaped our civilization. There are many ways of doing this. Columbia University has always done it through a “great books” approach; other institutions do it through a series of survey courses in the sciences and liberal arts. How it is done matters less than that it is done. _NewCriterion

Al Fin education specialists assert that these reforms should be seen as a bare beginning. US higher education is in need of a thorough overhaul, which is only likely to happen in the lee of some very unfortunate events for society as a whole. Much of the dead weight in the staff and faculty of US colleges will be ejected as a result of upcoming economic difficulties occurring in both the private and public sectors of the US economy.

Dead weight government programs which affect education, such as affirmative action, Title IX, etc. will cling to existence for as long as possible -- to the detriment of affected institutions and society at large. Eventually, they too will have to fall by the wayside.

First published at Al Fin, the Next Level

The Great $1 Trillion University Funding Confidence Game

As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is "only" $27,650. What the Board doesn't say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that. _Atlantic

University presidents can collect salaries in the millions of dollars, university professors on sabbatical can be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every few years for not teaching. Luxurious facilities are being built on expanding university campuses in the middle of an ongoing recession. And universities are bursting with "administrative bloat," a serious problem pushing higher education costs upward far above inflation rates.

A fact of academic life is that the tuition-debt nexus keeps most colleges going. At Loyola University in Chicago, 77 percent enroll with loans, as do 85 percent in New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce. At historically black colleges, where endowments are low and students are often poor, it's usually 90 percent. Nor is soaring private tuition the only reason. At public Kentucky State University, with only $6,210 in charges, 76 percent sign up for loans; so do 85 percent at the University of North Dakota, where state residents pay $6,934. What these figures suggest that borrowing is as much to finance living away from home as for bursars' bills. Books, travel, and socializing quickly add up. Room and board charges have doubled in actual dollars since 1982 to enhance campus life. Bowdoin's menu features vegetable polenta and butternut soup, while Penn State provides legal downloads of music numbering two million songs a week. But let's be clear. It's not the colleges which are paying for these and similar amenities. It's the students, mainly by borrowing, which the colleges actively encourage. _Atlantic

Where else do we see this type of irreversible bloat and skyrocketing costs? Oh, yes. In the public sector union arena. And would it surprise you to learn that university staff and faculty across the US are pushing for union representation and collective bargaining rights? Can you imagine the scam running up to $10 trillion a year, with a little union help?

Only in government, academia, and the media does one see such a total disconnect from the brutal realities of economic life in a recession. Such huge multi-trillion dollar debts could only be run up when these giant special interest groups cover for each other. It is a perfect storm of obfuscation and lead-up to massive ruination of ordinary lives.

The sacrifice and long term burdens and economic scars would perhaps be worth it to many young people and families -- if only the youth were receiving valuable training and preparation for life. Instead, as a rule, they are receiving an indoctrination into a dysfunctional ideology, rather than a worthwhile education. That is what makes the entire confidence game so completely destructive.

US College Girls: Were You Raped Without Your Knowledge?

According to a report commissioned by Obama's National Institute of Justice, 20% of US college girls have been raped at least once in their lives. And yet, if you were to ask almost all of the girls surveyed for the the report if they had been raped, they would tell you "no." Is it possible the US college girls are being raped without their knowledge?

Imagine that 20 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape — a rate of sexual assault astronomically higher than anything seen in America’s most violent cities (in Detroit, for example, there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, a rate of 0.037 percent).

...The White House claims that one in five female students has been victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault while at college. Such bogus statistics have been the mainstay of campus-rape-epidemic propaganda for years. They are generated by a variety of clever techniques, but the most important is this: The survey-taker, rather than the female respondent, decides whether the latter has been raped or not. When you ask the girls directly whether they view themselves as victims of rape, the answer overwhelmingly comes in: No. _HeatherMacDonald

More on the government report claiming 1 in 5 college women were sexually assaulted:

...college women were asked about their sexual experiences, on campus and off, and the researchers—not the women themselves—decided whether they had been assaulted. The researchers employed an expansive definition of sexual assault that included "forced kissing" and even "attempted" forced kissing. The survey also asked subjects if they had sexual contact with someone when they were unable to give consent because they were drunk. A "yes" answer was automatically counted as a rape or assault. According to the authors, "an intoxicated person cannot legally consent to sexual contact."

Surely, reasonable people can disagree on that: If sexual intimacy under the influence of alcohol is by definition assault, then a significant percentage of sexual intercourse throughout the world and down the ages qualifies as crime.

The Justice Department stamped a disclaimer on every page of the survey report, advising that it is not a publication of the Justice Department and does not necessarily reflect its positions or policies. Ali [US Asst. Secretary of Education], however, treats it as an official government finding and ignores the controversies and ambiguities surrounding her "one in five" figure.

Deans at institutions including Yale, Stanford, and Brandeis Universities and the Universities of Georgia and of Oklahoma are already rushing to change their disciplinary procedures to meet the Education Department's decree. Now, on campuses throughout the country, we face the prospect of academic committees—armed with vague definitions of sexual assault, low standards of proof, and official sanction for the notion that sex under the influence is, ipso facto assault or rape—deciding the fate of students accused of a serious crime. _AEI

So what we have is a govenment-sponsored hoax on a grand scale, being perpetrated by the US Department of Education, and being used as a pretense to bring about the pall of an inquisitional witch hunt over university campuses across the US. If universities do not adopt the new quasi-fascist rules of judicial process being promoted by the US Department of Education, they risk losing all their federal funding.

Is this truly the kind of government that Americans want to pay for -- to go bankrupt for? Not very likely. What can they do about it? Not much, as long as Obama and his cronies are in charge.

If you plan to send your son to a large university, keep in mind the risk you are taking by sending him into this atmosphere of sexual inquisition and administrative injustice.

More regarding Assistant Secretary of Education Ali's brave new crusade against campus sex crime:

"We will use all of the tools at our disposal including ... withholding federal funds ... to ensure that women are free from sexual violence," Ali told NPR last year. One such tool is the standard of proof that college disciplinary committees use when determining guilt. Many colleges employ a "beyond a reasonable doubt" or a "clear and convincing" standard. (Roughly speaking, "beyond a reasonable doubt" requires a 98-percent certainty of guilt; clear and convincing, an 80-percent certainty.) Ali, however, orders all colleges to adopt the far-less-demanding standard of "preponderance of the evidence." Using that standard, a defendant can be found guilty if members of a disciplinary committee believe there is slightly more than a 50/50 chance that he committed the crime. That standard will make it far easier for disciplinary committees to try, convict, and punish an accused student (almost always a male).

Marching under the banner of Title IX and freed of high standards of proof, campus disciplinary committees, once relatively weak and feckless, will be transformed into powerful instruments of gender justice. At least, that is the fantasy. But here is the reality: Campus disciplinary committees—often a casual mix of professors, students, and an assistant dean or two—are well suited to resolving cases involving purported plagiarism and cheating, and violations of college rules on drugs and alcohol. But no one considers them prepared to adjudicate murder, arson, or kidnapping cases, or criminal assault. They lack the training and the resources to investigate and adjudicate felonies. So why are they expected to determine guilt or innocence in cases of rape? _AEI

Life is the Education, Not College

Update 25May2011: An article describing the Peter Thiel Fellowship -- which pays fellows $100,000 not to attend college -- providing further details and information on this theme.

Humans begin learning as soon as the central nervous system begins to develop in the womb. Learning during infancy and early childhood is more intensive than any other learning in a person's life. Over historical and pre-historical time, most humans learned about life from observation, imitation, apprenticeship, and experimentation -- and just doing it. Only recently has it been thought necessary for every child to receive a formal, government-approved education before being released into the real world.

And still it is life that is the real education, not schools, not colleges. Schools can only prepare a student for a few of the things he will confront in real life, the rest is up to the lifelong student's capacity to adapt and grow in the real world.


Don't Let Your Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education

There is a significant mismatch between what schools "teach" and what life will demand of a student. School curricula do not generally provide the education a person needs to confront the real challenges to be faced. While a child may be forced to attend school up to a certain age or level, there is no guarantee that he will learn even the barest of necessities. In today's climate of indoctrination-by-school, what the child learns in school may be both patently false and outright counter-productive to his life prospects -- besides being a total waste of his time and a distraction from his true education.

Too much of the time, the actual "education" a child receives from lower education is an induction into delinquency and basic groupthink. Proceeding to "higher education," advanced studies in binge drinking, fornication, and an indoctrination into dysfunctional ideology and advanced groupthink, help to complete the blunting of the once-promising prospects which the child may have possessed.

Most bright and observant people have come to doubt whether it is in the best interests of families and society to pay the huge and ruinous price to maintain the modern system of "education." Particularly when a better education is readily obtainable at a minimal cost via the internet, libraries, used book stores, and real life.

The raucous marching of the paid, truant, and quasi-violent drones in Madison, Wisconsin, was but a gentle preview of the truly violent clashes to come, between the entitled establishment and the embattled taxpayer.

Most Americans think college is not worth the money

Winds of change in college infrastructure portend massive changes in how advanced education will be provided

In place of "unions" in the cartoons, one could also write "tenured professors" and "university administrations." A sense of entitlement runs deep and rampant in "educational" circles, and in societies with topheavy governments in general.

The College Imperative and the Coming Idiocracy

More: Now we are learning that as many as 85% of US college graduates are forced by debt to move back in with their parents when they leave college. Perhaps someone should have told their parents this was going to happen, before the fact?

For several decades, American children have been pushed toward a college education as the path to life and career success. More and more children are enrolling in college -- over 70% of American high school graduates enrolled in college over the past decade. Yet there are many reasons to believe that this rush to a college education is not only counter-productive, but may be downright destructive to a society.

Image Source
It has been argued persuasively that a rigorous 4 year college degree can only be put to good use by a person at or above the 80th percentile of IQ. Forcing more people into the system requires a dumbing down of admissions, a dumbing down of course work, and a dumbing down of evaluations and credentials.

If 70.1% of high school graduates enroll in a college or university, how does a college degree give you an advantage over the rest of the population? Back in the early 1960s, Americans didn't need to go to college. We were a creditor nation with a strong manufacturing base. With an unemployment rate of only 5%, jobs were available to almost everybody. Less than 50% of American high school graduates enrolled into college. For those who did attend college and graduate with a degree, it was actually something special that made you stand out from the rest of the field, because not everybody had one.

...The current college education bubble is one of the largest bubbles in U.S. history. The college bubble has been fueled by the U.S. government's willingness to give out cheap and easy student loans to anybody who applied for them, regardless of if they will ever have the ability to pay the loans back. Student loan debt in America is now larger than credit card debt, but unlike credit card debt, student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. _CollegeBubble

The situation is even worse for women. Women who go put all their energies into the higher education bubble and a career, all too often risk dying childless and unloved, and deeply in debt besides. Even so, the proportion of women attending college is growing and approaching 60% as the proportion of men continues to fall toward 40%.

It is the most intelligent and best educated women who are choosing careers over motherhood, while the least intelligent women are bearing the lioness' share of children. Given the choice of sex partners by less intelligent women, it is likely that the average intelligence of newcomers to society is declining -- a dysgenic process leading to Idiocracy.

GNXP
The same trend toward higher proportion of births from low-IQ populations is taking place in nations across the western world -- in no small part due to the push for more children to go to college, particularly women.

Many other potentially catastrophic side effects of the "college imperative" are put on display in the documentary "College Conspiracy." The college bubble is a source of massive capital misallocation and extreme (often frivolous) debt, for youth just beginning their lives. The psychological impact of living under so much debt is incalculable. Many young people must postpone thoughts of marriage and raising a family for many years -- and sometimes indefinitely -- due to massive educational debt. And the problem is only growing worse over time.

Is college a waste of time? No, it is a waste of lives and a waste of human capital. The college imperative is becoming the waste of the future -- the midwifing of the Idiocracy.

Science Unshackled: Putting Knowledge in Real People's Hands

Modern humans have become slaves to the "hyperspecialist," the so-called experts who tell us what to think and how we should act. But the hyperspecialisation of modern society is a huge step backward to an authoritarian society, ruled from the top down. Much better for as many people as possible -- credentialed or not -- to acquire the specialised knowledge and tools which will reveal the path to a higher level of knowing and being.

One of the pivotal areas of knowledge and research which should be propagated widely, is the new biology and genetics. Bio-hobbyists and bio-hackers are pushing against legal and institutional constrictions and biases, asserting the rights of individuals to master these important tools. Journalist Marcus Wohlsen recently published the book "Biopunk," which looks more closely at the phenomenon of bio-hacking.

In Biopunk, journalist Marcus Wohlsen surveys the rising tide of the biohacker movement, which has been made possible by a convergence of better and cheaper technologies. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can send some spit to a sequencing company and receive a complete DNA scan, and then use free software to analyze the results. Custom-made DNA can be mail-ordered off websites, and affordable biotech gear is available on Craigslist and eBay.

Wohlson discovers that biohackers, like the open-source programmers and software hackers who came before, are united by a profound idealism. They believe in the power of individuals as opposed to corporate interests, in the wisdom of crowds as opposed to the single-mindedness of experts, and in the incentive to do good for the world as opposed to the need to turn a profit. Suspicious of scientific elitism and inspired by the success of open-source computing, the bio DIYers believe that individuals have a fundamental right to biological information, that spreading the tools of biotech to the masses will accelerate the pace of progress, and that the fruits of the biosciences should be delivered into the hands of the people who need them the most.

With all their ingenuity and idealism, it's difficult not to root for the biohackers Wohlsen meets. Take MIT grad student Kay Aull, who built her own genetic testing kit in her closet after her father was diagnosed with the hereditary disease hemochromatosis. "Aull's test does not represent new science but a new way of doing science," Wohlsen writes. Aull's self-test for the disease-causing mutation came back positive.

Or take Meredith Patterson, who is trying to create a cheap, decentralized way to test milk for melamine poisoning without relying on government regulators. Patterson has written a "Biopunk Manifesto" that reads in part, "Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them."

Biohackers Josh Perfetto and Tito Jankowski created OpenPCR, a cheap, hackable DNA Xerox machine (PCR stands for "polymerase chain reaction," the name for a method of replicating DNA). Interested biohackers can pre-order one for just over $500 or, once it's ready, download the blueprint free and make their own. According to the website, its apps include DNA sequencing and a test to "check that sushi is legit." Jankowski "hopes to introduce young people to the tools and techniques of biotech in a way that makes gene tweaking as much a part of everyday technology as texting," Wohlsen writes. Jankowski, together with Joseph Jackson and Eri Gentry, also founded BioCurious, a collaborative lab space for biohackers in the Bay area. "Got an idea for a startup? Join the DIY, 'garage biology' movement and found a new breed of biotech," their website exhorts.

Then there's Andrew Hessel, a biohacker fed up with the biotech business model, which he believes is built on the hoarding of intellectual property and leads companies to prioritize one-size-fits-all blockbuster drugs. "During the sixty years or so that computers went from a roomful of vacuum tubes to iPhones, the pace of drug development has never quickened," Hessel tells Wohlsen. Hoping to change that, Hessel is developing the first DIY drug development company, the Pink Army Cooperative, whose goal is to bioengineer custom-made viruses that will battle breast cancer. "Personalized therapies made just for you. In weeks or days, not years. Believe it. It's time for a revolution," the company's website proclaims. "We are trying to be the Linux of cancer," Hessel explains. _TechnologyReview

Bio-hackers tend to be as intelligent as mainstream researchers, but a bit more unorthodox, and sometimes skeptical of mainstream approaches. In science, skepticism and lack of orthodoxy can be very good things, leading to new approaches to problem-solving. Conventional scientists and other academics and institutional workers too often get caught up in "groupthink," where they fear the risks of moving too far away from the herd.

A good example of this "herd thinking" is the reaction of many scientists to 81 year old celebrated biologist Edward O. Wilson's new ideas on group selection in evolution. Wilson has moved away from the popular concept of "kin selection" to a broader concept of evolutionary selection that applies to groups, rather than only to individuals and their close kin. The blowback from "the group" has been furious.

His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.

The last time Wilson found himself embroiled in controversy as scalding as the current one was after the publication of his book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” in 1975. In that landmark book, he made an argument about the power of genetics, demonstrating how all manner of social behaviors observed in insects and animals could be seen as the result of natural selection. What landed Wilson in trouble was the last chapter, in which he extended his argument to humans. That chapter thrust Wilson into a long and loaded debate over how much our genetic heritage — as opposed to, say, culture — has shaped our behavior. Amid the outcry over “Sociobiology,” Wilson was pilloried by critics on the left as an agent of biological determinism and racist science. Protestors once interrupted Wilson while he was speaking at a science conference and poured a glass of water on his head.

....What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. _boston

Notice that the focus of the controversy circles around the concept of the origin of "altruism" and "self-sacrifice." But such concepts have almost nothing to do with the main thrust of evolution, or the most important questions which evolutionary theorists must answer. Far more important to evolutionary progress than altruism, is "cooperation." Politically correct scientists and science journalists are attempting to construct PC moralistic edifices upon tangential scientific and pseudo-scientific foundations. And they get away with it because knowledge is "supposed to" come from the top down.

It is this "beside the pointness" of much of scientific argument -- and most of the journalistic inspired arguments about science -- which reflect and reveal the destructiveness of hyperspecialisation and "top-down science" and scholarship. The need for citizen science, and citizen scholarship in general, has never been clearer than in modern times, when the "experts" have been so widely coopted by political interests and political correctness.

Bio-hacking should be one useful restorative to the balance of knowledge tools -- and the balance of knowledge power. But much more is needed. We are on the fast road to Idiocratic authoritarianism, aided by the dual crises of skyrocketing debt and demographic decline.

Give it some thought. You may come up with some solutions on your own, which is what all of this is about.

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, As Is a Country

CarpeDiem_via_TaxProf

University tuition costs have been rising at least twice as fast as inflation and home prices. A large part of this higher education bubble-bloat is due to an explosive hiring of non-faculty staff members. People such as "sexual orientation counselors" and "diversity co-ordinators" are laughing about the bubble all the way to the bank.

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily." _mjperry_quoting_GlennReynolds

If the housing bubble brought down the economies of the western world, what will happen when the "higher indoctrination bubble" bursts? Overpriced university re-programming has been shifting away from providing a useful education in favour of providing a "consciousness-raising" brainwashing experience -- while simultaneously putting students and families in debt for decades.

This is a far more destructive process than buying an overpriced home and being foreclosed upon. In the case of institutions of higher indoctrination, it is your mind and the minds of your children that have been fore-closed by dogmatic professors and staff.

Get your download of the report on administrative bloat in higher education: the real reason for high costs in higher education. __ PDF Download __This is the report that is creating such a stir in the media and on university campuses.

Bonus: An interactive US map allowing you to examine the condition of K-12 education state-by-state. via_Jay P Greene

PLUS on the state of US K-12 Ed: 7 MB PDF report card on K-12 American Education via_Jay P Greene

Here is more coverage from US media on administrative bloat and rising tuition costs in US higher indoctrination:

Op-eds
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Baltimore Sun
Indianapolis Star
AOLNews
News
Dallas Morning News
Indianapolis Star
USA Today
Chronicle of Higher Education
Arizona Republic
Arizona Daily Star
Sunshine News
Phoenix Business Journal
AZ Daily Sun
Arizona Capitol Times
Inside Higher Ed
Modesto Bee
Time
Kiplinger’s
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
Baylor Lariat
Columnists / Editorials
The Economist
Forbes
Arizona Republic
Dallas Morning News
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Denver Post
Dallas Morning News
Selected Blogs
Instavision
National Association of Scholars
Instapundit
Cato@Liberty
Phi Beta Cons
Reason Foundation — Nick Gillespie
Reason Foundation — Lisa Snell
George W. Bush Institute
Pelican Institute
MacIver Institute
Nevada Policy Research Institute
The Five Year Party
Carolina Journal
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
The Volokh Conspiracy
Minding the Campus
And here is our rebuttal to ASU’s statement attacking the report.  The rebuttal works for most of the issues raised by other universities as well:
Our Rebuttal_JayPGreene

Brain Spa

Brain anatomy. 16th century diagram of the anatomy of the human brain and the nerves associated with the senses of hearing, taste, sight and smell. The diagram, which is labeled in Latin, is from Magnus Hundt's Antropologium (Leipzig, 1501).

Have you been multitasking so much you feel you are losing your power of concentration? Treat yourself to a brain spa and sit in on a lecture from a great university. You don't need to take notes or prep for any exams, just find a seat, absorb the knowledge and stimulate your brain.

This week two new services, Academic Earth and YouTube EDU, have been launched to make your access to university classes even easier. There are no registration lines, no need to audit, no early classes, and no tuition fees. Try it and rejuvenate your brain!

Image courtesy of Sheila Terry / Science Photo Library