Recent economic research suggests that colleges siphon off a significant portion of federal education aid rather than lowering costs to students

The number of schools ranked highly in guides such as Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is increasing, without any evidence that these schools' instructional quality is also increasing. Applicants and their families should be wary of letting these rankings serve as the main criteria in their college decisions.

President Barack Obama has been on a tour of college campuses touting proposals to lower student loan repayments for college graduates. He hopes to rekindle the enthusiasm of young voters, who in 2008 favored him over Sen. John McCain by more than two-to-one.

Ironically, these same young Americans...

Community colleges are subsidized through direct state and local government appropriations and through student grant programs. Every student who drops out represents an investment loss by the taxpayers in that student's uncompleted education.

Sponsored by AEI's Program on American Citizenship, Frederick M. Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies; Meira Levinson, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and David E. Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, have commissioned leading researchers and scholars to explore the issues of citizenship and schooling by looking at domestic and international data, teacher training, and schools and classrooms.

Over the past decade, a number of remarkable organizations have cropped up that dramatically shape twenty-first century education reform. Joining this influx of groundbreaking, reform-minded organizations is Rice University’s Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP), housed at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

It is a view as ubiquitous as it is simplistic: To improve public education, pay teachers more—a lot more. Union officials, education reformers, scholars, laypeople, and politicians of all stripes endorse this principle in one form or another.

Not all professors are radicals and not all students are timewasters.Many still seek knowledge, if not wisdom, but gap between the ideal and the reality has seemingly never been greater.