September 1, 2011
In Higher Education Press Coverage, the Anecdote is King
Having just read a frustrating New York Times article, Generation Limbo: Waiting it Out, I was all set to write a blog post about the longstanding failure of higher education press coverage that almost exclusively focuses on unrepresentative and sensational ‘trends’ such as the ‘oversupply’ of college graduates, the ‘epidemic’ of students with six figures in debt for a four year degree in the humanities, the ‘widespread’ single digit admissions rates, and the ‘common’ $50,000 per year price tags.
And then I discovered that Kevin Carey beat me to the punch. After reading Carey’s blog post, follow his link to the piece he wrote for The New Republic, and then check below for some of our previous posts, which detail how actual data clearly show these kinds of stories and predictions to be highly misleading.