Kevin Carey

Columbia’s Deal With Trump Stokes Fears of Federal Admissions Audits The university will hand over new details about the prospective students it admits and rejects. Is it laying the groundwork for more-aggressive government intervention?

WiDeLy OvErLoOkEd www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Agree although in this case "largely overlooked" is in the second graf of the article -- it's like "We are the only source of news that matters and since we didn't cover this initially, that lack of coverage is now, itself, a news hook"

NY Times waits two weeks to cover something lots of people were discussing the minute Columbia settled, proclaims it "widely overlooked"

I work in education policy and live among highly-educated DC rich people and I can tell you with 100% certainty that when that class purchases expensive private education for their own children they're not buying some bullshit about "prompt engineering"--those kids are reading and writing.

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

the trump administration is selling its war on higher education as a strike against the elites who have disadvantaged ordinary americans. in actuality, the administration is destroying advanced education for *everyone* in pursuit of its effort to deskill the american public

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

i think i disagree with the idea that the ferritor should have been allowed to follow his own path during his schooling, neglecting assignments and being coddled for his apparent genius. i think, in fact, that this was the problem. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-boy-ge...

Although helpful when people reveal themselves that way.

This is a very funny sentence:

"In office conference rooms, hacker houses, third-wave coffee houses or over Zoom meetings, knowledge of terms like neural network, large language' model and graphical processing unit has become mandatory.

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

August 1, 2025 AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Committee on Economic Statistics and Committee on Government Relations Statement from the American Economic Association on the Dismissal of the BLS Commissioner Leaders of the American Economic Association express their grave concern over the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier today. The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions. Undermining the independence or credibility of these agencies threatens the integrity of the information that markets, institutions, and the public rely on every day. Measuring the vast and dynamic U.S. economy in real time is inherently challenging. It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as more complete and higher-quality data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor-not failure or bias. The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions. We call upon elected officials to respect and preserve the independence of the nation's statistical infrastructure. Lawrence Katz President, American Economic Association Katharine Abraham President-Elect, American Economic Association Karen Dynan Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics Kenneth Troske Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Government Relations

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing

As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements

This is a big deal

Ally McBeal creators, cast, crew brought up on federal charges after White House intern googles "Unisex bathroom"

John Cloud was a Loser

uh oh

Your Questions About Education

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/b...

Remarkable that this was published *after* the Columbia settlement. Like saying "Putin can't just invade another country, it's against international law" while bomb craters are still smoking in Kiev.

Robert, turn on your TV and fire up the Starz television series Outlander, starring Sam Heughan and Caitriona, also available on Netflix! It has time travel, historical drama, incredibly lusty romance, and after Season 4 a lot about the Scottish diaspora in North Carolina.

Not me -- Outlander Season 1 is A++ 10/10 television.

Is that where all the characters from Outlander lived?

How Trump Defunded the Higher-Education Police The U.S. Department of Education used to employ people whose job was to stop waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, almost all of their desks are empty.

1/ I wrote for @theatlantic.com about what happened when Trump and Linda McMahon fired half the U.S. Department of Education: Everyone responsible for preventing higher education fraud is now gone. It's open season on students and taxpayers.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Just to reiterate: What this administration is doing right now is orders of magnitude more dangerous for academic freedom and free speech than anything the right has spent the last 30 years complaining about.

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Excited to share that my book "Rediscovering Kindergarten: Embracing Play and Joy in Learning" will be published by @GryphonHouse in June 2026! 📚✨

5/ 5/ The six-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court is letting the firings proceed because they apparently believe that upholding your oath to faithfully execute acts of Congress includes firing every single person responsible for enforcing the law.

In another case, a Florida woman created an independent “sports academy” that, according to fraud investigators, sold young men on the false promise of being recruited by Division I schools. Upon arriving, students and their parents were pressured into taking out federal loans to enroll in a barbering-and-cosmetology program. According to the government, the school falsely claimed that the football players were studying cosmetology for 10 to 12 hours a day, including on weekends. (One student at that school was allegedly told to do something like “curl your hair, take a video, and turn it in.”) The owner received more than $800,000 in federal-loan disbursements before the Education Department shut her down. From 2021 to August 2024, the department sanctioned 85 colleges, levied $61.7 million in fines for misconduct, and cut off 35 schools from receiving federal financial aid.

4/ And this:

PCTI is not an isolated case. In 2005, fraud inspectors caught a large mid-Atlantic trade school that, according to the department, sold students laptops at a 125 percent markup and handed out credentials in “surgical technology” to a student whose real-world training consisted of working for two weeks in a hospital storage room. A student studying phlebotomy testified that “the practice arms were so filled with holes that the fake blood would spurt out when students attempted to practice their sticks.”

3/ And this:

That conversation led to the unraveling of a years-long scheme designed to steal from the American taxpayer. The trade school, called the Professional Career Training Institute, had been recruiting homeless people from a local nonprofit. Many were high-school dropouts, some of them functionally illiterate with histories of petty crime and drug abuse. Enroll in college, they were told, and we’ll pay your rent while federal grants take care of tuition, books, and all the rest. The school fabricated diplomas from an unaccredited, possibly nonexistent high school, then set up federal financial-aid accounts and passwords for the students before secretly taking out large loans on their behalf.

2/ The DOGE-led purge of federal employees was allegedly in the service of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. But ED's job is to *prevent* fraud in the enormous federal financial aid system. Those people have all been fired. So expect to see a lot more like this in the years ahead:

How Trump Defunded the Higher-Education Police The U.S. Department of Education used to employ people whose job was to stop waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, almost all of their desks are empty.

1/ I wrote for @theatlantic.com about what happened when Trump and Linda McMahon fired half the U.S. Department of Education: Everyone responsible for preventing higher education fraud is now gone. It's open season on students and taxpayers.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

5/ The six-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court is letting the firings proceed because they apparently believe that upholding your oath to faithfully execute acts of Congress includes firing every single person responsible for actually enforcing the law.

How Trump Defunded the Higher-Education Police The U.S. Department of Education used to employ people whose job was to stop waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, almost all of their desks are empty.

"At the beginning of this year, ED employed about 220 people to make sure that money actually went toward paying for students to attend legitimate educational institutions. But no such investigations are being conducted today." Read @kevincarey1.bsky.social: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

come on now