AKA Review - 03.07.2025

From The Atlantic
The Secret That Colleges Should Stop Keeping
By Rose Horowitch

By offering financial aid that deeply discounts their tuition “sticker” price, colleges nationally have ensured that, on average, Americans pay less for college than a decade ago. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news.” This article looks at the reasons for the decline in college costs and highlights the implications of the mismatch between public perceptions and actual costs, including the negative effects for high-achieving low-income students and declining public confidence in higher education. Read this article

From The New Yorker
The End of Children
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

This look at population decline worldwide offers a good backdrop against which to consider America’s projected college enrollment cliff. Crashing birthrates will affect a host of natural, social, and cultural phenomena. Korea, with the world’s lowest birthrate, offers a desolate example, including intensified competition for college admission and growing inequality as universities close en masse. “The end of the world is usually dramatized as convulsive and feverish, but population loss is an apocalypse on an installment plan.” Read this article

From The Iowa Capital Dispatch
Diversity ‘still matters,’ University of Iowa president tells lawmakers
By Brooklyn Draisey

Coming from the president of a flagship university in a red state, last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education “Quote of the Day” stood out: “I can’t imagine getting rid of the word diversity, you all” (Barbara Wilson, Univ. of Iowa). Her remark echoes some of the best current writing on DEI, which argues that institutions need to promote a more nuanced view of the benefits and flaws of DEI while defending the centrality and long history of diversity and social mobility in higher ed. Here’s how one college president is making that case, “you all”! Read this article

From The Atlantic

DEI Has Lost All Meaning

By Conor Friedersdorf

“DEI” has no broadly shared definition, the author argues. Citizens heatedly debating it are frequently talking about different things, often without recognizing that they are doing so. He examines conflicting definitions of DEI and the common failure to distinguish between “the most and least sensible things done in its name.” Rival camps, he concludes, would find more common ground if they “tabooed” DEI’s abstract terms and instead focused on the actual substance of policies and what they hope to accomplish. Read this article

From The Washington Post
Finally, Something is Puncturing Conspiracy Theories
By Annie Duke

Researchers have long struggled to find techniques to weaken the grip of conspiracy theories on their believers. Now, a paper in Science describes an AI chatbot that has been effective in tempering the views of even the most extreme conspiracy believers by targeting specific evidence they provided. Noting how extreme beliefs distance individuals from others and become integral to their identity, this article hypothesizes that they become more open-minded when they interact with a “neutral” machine rather than a person with opposing views. Read this article