One consequence is that we appear to be reading less these days, and while our attention span does not (yet) rival that of the much-maligned goldfish (eight seconds), it is getting discernibly shorter.

First, is this thinking true? And, second, do our technological gadgets predispose us to this phenomenon? Are we sacrificing something important, turning from books to bots? The truth is in the numbers.

Research suggests that we are reading less and less about more and more. The research suggests that we read less and less about more and more, moving rapidly from one topic to another within shorter and shorter time increments. And our technological prowess (especially our beloved smartphones) is fostering this, along with attention spans that are shrinking as we “speak” (or, in our case, read).

More and more Americans are not reading books. Nearly half of all U.S. adults (46 percent) did not read a book in 2023. That continues a 10-year trend reflecting serious deterioration in our reading habits.

The reading problem is not limited to our adult population. With the advent of the Internet, Americans seem to be reading more, but not necessarily with depth; books no longer seem to be a primary source of our “edification.” And the problem is not limited to our adult population.

Indeed, there appears to be a generational shift in the reading habits of young people, including some from Gen Z who don’t view reading as important at all.

Social psychologist Jean Twenge offers perspective on “Gen Z,” those born between 1996 and 2010. “Zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, grew up with the Internet and smartphone. But this experience has created problems for many Zoomers now in college: They struggle with the intellectual stamina required to read book-length material.

In educational contexts, there’s an increasing emphasis on digital literacy and multimedia learning, often at the expense of traditional reading. Simultaneously, there’s a noticeable preference for content that entertains rather than educates.

Students are increasingly using individual computers at school, where they’re reading a variety of short, digital texts rather than the longform classics. Research shows that reading from a screen can have consequences. It interferes with in-depth learning.

“Reading stamina must be built often,” says Gloria Mark, attention researcher at UC-Irvine. “So, if students aren’t learning how to read entire books at home or school, that habit often carries into adulthood.”

What counts as actual reading is also part of the problem. Adults and students alike seem to equate reading something quickly on a phone or tablet with reading a book, when, in fact, the former often means skimming and scanning information or stories. Professor Maryanne Wolf says that “skimming is the new normal, and it is affecting society profoundly.”

Moreover, the science on “paying attention” is clear. Mark continues, noting that attention spans are getting shorter and not just on the Internet. In 2003, “attention spans averaged about two-and-a-half minutes on any screen before people switched. In the last five, six years, they’re averaging 47 seconds on a screen.”

The College Experience

The combination of the loss of book-length reading stamina and shorter attention spans has conspired to produce college students ill-equipped to handle the reading demands of university curricula.

College students now seem increasingly incapable of reading whole books, a problem professors say is becoming the norm, even at some of the nation’s most elite colleges.

College students now seem increasingly incapable of reading whole books, a problem professors say is becoming the norm. Literature professor Nicholas Dames at Columbia University says his students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books,” Dames says. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”

Gen Z was “raised” on the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The pandemic and increased online schooling accelerated the movement away from reading whole texts. Moreover, Gen Z is now of college age and was “raised” on the Internet, smartphones, and social media. These sources offer quick and easy access to information without requiring the reading stamina needed for book-length media.

Clarity, Relevancy, and Accessibility Encourage Reading

At the inception of my career in academia, I taught philosophy for two years at the community-college level. As is the case today, many of the students then were insufficiently prepared for college work, especially lacking reading stamina and an ability to organize their thoughts, often reflected in their writing.

In an effort to better enable my students to handle the vocabulary, concepts, and length of the assigned reading, I instituted the following regimen with favorable results. Clarity, relevancy, and accessibility were always at the forefront. As long as students understood precisely what was required and that I was not trying to make the material more difficult but rather more accessible, they made the effort. That is what any academic should do for, and want from, his or her students.

Simply put, it is we the professors who have to put in the work up front (and as the course progresses) if “students reading more” is our priority. Course material must be clear, relevant, and accessible. Consider the following suggestions:

1) Develop a course syllabus with a clear statement about required readings and their benefit to the student—how they will be used in course discussions and assessments (exams and assignments).

2) Refer students to specific material in the textbook, such as graphs, key words, and concepts, that demonstrate relevance to lecture material and assessments.

3) Illustrate (graphically and in-person) the “big picture” of the course, beginning to end. Provide an overview and introduction to the textbook and other required readings before students get started. Provide relevancy.

4) Encourage students to write in the text. Demonstrate how to annotate: to circle key ideas, highlight concepts, and make notes about them in the margins or on paper. Illustrate how to better organize what one is learning. (Science is done differently than the humanities.)

5) Require students to bring their assigned reading to class, then use it for discussions and activities.

6) Explain that just scanning a text or glancing over college readings once will not be enough. Illustrate the point.

Explain that just scanning a text or glancing over college readings once will not be enough. Illustrate the point. 7) Develop a course packet that illustrates how and where the lectures and texts correlate. Students need to know “where they are” as the course progresses so they don’t get lost along the way.

8) Do not summarize or lecture the readings; students will be less motivated to complete the assigned reading if the professor covers it in detail within a lecture.

9) Make reading the text relevant to students. Supplement required readings by introducing current events and supportive material from popular media. Keep them interested.

Our focus on technology as a Promethean entity has brought unwanted consequences. 10) Encourage students to come to the professor’s office and talk. Students often feel isolated and alone when they engage with unfamiliar material.

Technological advancements in education have been, and will continue to be, exceedingly beneficial. But there is no substitute for developing reading stamina, along with the vocabulary and organized thought attendant to it. That happens only if one engages longer-length readings.

Jennifer Frey, University of Tulsa philosophy professor, says that reducing course content or “excerpting assigned reading” seems disrespectful to the intelligence of students. She says such moves represent the “tyranny of low expectations.” “It is actually incredibly important that students just read a massive amount. […] Reading widely and deeply is incredibly important … in terms of building the skills that are necessary, no matter what you’re going to go on to do.”

Our focus on technology as a Promethean entity bearing the gift of immediate knowledge has brought unwanted consequences. Now that we know this, how shall we proceed? The freedom to speak, read, and write is essential to our democracy. The less we exercise the former, the less we will have of the latter.

Andrew Wolf, Jr., is director of the Fulcrum Institute, a new organization of current and former scholars in the humanities, foreign affairs, and philosophy. He has contributed essays to the American Spectator, the American Thinker, Academic Questions (National Association of Scholars), and other venues.

The post Help College Students Read appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

At the start of his junior year of high school, Basile attended a lunch information session where a Wake Tech advisor spoke about the Career and College Promise (CCP) program. Available across the state, CCP allows high-school students to participate in dual enrollment at any of the state’s community colleges, thus receiving college credits while completing their high-school education. After the information session, Basile says, he “became obsessed with just learning more about the program.” One perk that stood out was free college credit. “If I take CCP courses while I’m enrolled in high school,” Basile remembers learning, “all the CCP courses are completely free. The only thing I have to pay are out-of-pocket costs like software or books.”

Basile’s story should remind us of the money-saving strategies that are available to students all over the state. After further research, Basile enrolled in the program for the spring semester of his junior year of high school. Simply by taking that first step, Basile put himself ahead of the vast majority of his peers. Less than a quarter (24 percent) of the North Carolina community college student headcount during the 2022-23 year were dually enrolled students.

Basile enrolled in two college classes that first semester, then three over the summer, four in the fall, five the next spring, and so on, expanding his workload to maximize what he could properly handle while accumulating as many college credits as possible. He ultimately graduated high school with 70 credits that fully transferred to an in-state public college.

“It’s really smart to apply to in-state colleges, because I know all of these credits will transfer.” “A great thing about the CCP program,” Basile told the Martin Center, “is that, because of the CAA, which is the articulation agreement of the state, if I come in with an associate in arts degree to any university in the UNC System, I must be a junior. So after doing my research, learning about the CAA, I said to myself, well, it’s really smart to apply to in-state colleges, because I know all of these credits will transfer, and I can fulfill my goal of graduating early so I can go to law school.”

The CCP program has been instrumental in helping Basile get closer to his ideal career. “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” he told the Martin Center, “and I’d be the first law student in my family. This was one avenue to get that done in the quickest way possible.”

Basile feels as though his time being dually enrolled helped prepare him for further education and the workforce: “It was definitely a way to adjust myself to being prepared to work in the future. I was handling classes in my high school while going to Wake Tech classes, as well. This was a great skill-builder for me, because I was able to learn time management in the midst of it.”

When it came to gathering information about the CCP program, Basile says, it took some digging to find what he needed. “It was a lot of calling community colleges like Wake Tech. And it was a lot less of talking to high-school advisors, who are not as knowledgeable as a Wake Tech advisor [about the program].”

Basile points to his knack for taking initiative for much of his success in getting started, stating, “You really had to go get it. Like my dad tells me, high agency is the greatest policy. So that’s what I try to take into my life. If there’s information to go get, I’ll be the one to go get it. I’m not going to wait on anyone else.”

Basile reiterates that CCP classes were an invaluable preparation for further education. “It was a great way to prepare me for what actual college work was like. The classes I was taking in community college through the CCP program, compared [to AP classes], are just so different. You’re getting actual college instruction instead of a high-school teacher, [and] you’re getting that in a different environment with other college students.”

“One semester that was kind of crazy in high school,” Basile went on, “I took six CCP classes while enrolled in all of my high-school classes at the same time. And I tried to emulate this in my college career, when, in my last semester in the fall, I took 30 college credits to graduate. I had to get the dean’s approval, and I had to talk to people high up, because my personal advisor was telling me, ‘Is this a good idea?’ So, I was definitely in the mindset of, [this] is going to save me money, [this] is going to help my family financially. I had a lot of skin in the game, because I was the one taking out the loans, and it’s going to be the same way for law school as well.”

Basile is grateful for his new, full-time job at Cisco, which is allowing him to obtain job experience and be able to more easily fund graduate school. “So I’m extremely blessed and capable of pushing the envelope and doing better things in my life because of a program like this. This is a program that really let me flourish.”

Basile found out in high school that the duel-enrollment classes he was taking would count towards his GPA for law school. Basile found out in high school that the classes he was taking would count towards his GPA for law school. “That’s really what drove me,” he told the Martin Center. “I was valedictorian of my class at NCSU. I was probably middle of the [road] in my high school. So a lot of things changed in the latter half of my high-school career. And I didn’t get a single B on any CCP classes or any NC State classes, all A’s and A+’s, because of that mindset and because I really knew that law school was the thing I wanted to do.”

“It’s not like you’re born with procrastination, or you’re born thinking this way. You can change that.” While Basile was successful in juggling his heavy course load while achieving top grades, he did face certain challenges while being dually enrolled, specifically time management. “I say time management [was a challenge] for sure, but also being able to cultivate [my] skills in between all those classes when [I’m] taking in a lot of information. It can be hard to [grasp] or understand important concepts that you’re learning. It taught me a lot about learning not to procrastinate. When things get assigned to me, I complete them. I don’t let things linger anymore. And I think that was a trait that I had in my early high-school years. So it really has taught me that, through hard work, and if you’re ambitious, you can teach yourself to act differently. [It’s] not like you’re born with procrastination, or you’re born thinking this way. You can change that.”

Basile hopes to see improvement in the way students are educated about the CCP program and has ideas for how to achieve that. “I’ve been in touch with the N.C. DPI, which is the Department of Public Instruction. I thought of an idea, and I want it to be completely available, free to the public.” Basile would like to create “a suite of videos that are step-by-step processes of how to find out about your public school’s in-state CCP program.”

He would also like to see promotion of the CCP program to incoming high-school freshmen, so that they can get started as early as possible. He pointed out that there are “two avenues for eligibility [for] the CCP program. One of them is, if you’re a freshman or sophomore, you can start taking college classes, but only if you’re an [Academically or Intellectually Gifted (AIG)] student. I applied for AIG in third grade, [and] I failed miserably, so I didn’t go through that pipeline.” Non-AIG students, by contrast, may gain eligibility as high-school juniors or seniors. “[If] you’re coming into high school,” Basile said, “it is super important when you’re a freshman or when you’re a sophomore that you should be thinking about it, not that time that I learned about it heading into my junior year. Obviously it all worked out, but the quicker you get it, the better.”

Basile’s personal experience will help pave the way for future students who wish to join the CCP program: “I think a lot of advisors try to push back on students doing this,” thinking, “‘Is this possible? Is this a good avenue for you?’ I think, let the students make that decision for themselves. If this is something they want to move forward with, let them do it themselves. I felt that sentiment a lot when I was meeting with advisors. They [would] say, ‘Are you ready for a workload like this?’ And I would tell them, just let me try to worry about the workload myself. If you see my grades [falling], then let it be known. But let me be the one to make those decisions.”

Basile’s advice to younger students is to not be held back by low expectations or standards that are often set for teens. “One of the last things I’ll leave with is: Try to take advantage of your early years as much as you can. When you’re in high school, there’s just so much to think about, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. There’s a lot of uncertainties, [but] if you can narrow down the uncertainties, that will make you a lot better in life.”

Experiences such as Basile’s indicate how capable students can be. “One thing about me,” Basile concluded “is that I’m 19, but I [feel] like I’ve grown just way faster—for good or for bad, I think mostly for good. The reason I’ve been able to do something like this is because of my personal circumstances, the things I’ve wanted to get done and accomplish early in my life. Right now, I’m at a serene moment. I’m at a job I really like, and I’m looking forward to going to law school. I’m looking forward to fulfilling my dreams, and I want other people to experience something like this, as well. Because it’s really magical.”

Experiences such as Basile’s indicate how capable students can be, reminding us that it is possible to avoid much of the financial burden of college and fast-track your way to a career. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for Basile and wish him the best of luck pursuing a law degree and other endeavors.

Ashlynn Warta is the North Carolina reporter for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Some of the quotations in this interview have been lightly edited for readability.

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Putting aside the unprecedented fiscal challenges brought about by the overall shrinking population of college-age students, the larger truth is that not everyone is college material. It takes a certain IQ to handle college-level work, despite exaggerated claims about the role that grit plays. It’s generally believed that an IQ of about 115 is necessary. The large number of freshmen who drop out each year serves as evidence that many are academically in over their heads.

Some institutions are colleges in name only, in fact little more than residential high schools. Such students would have been much better served if they had pursued a vocational curriculum and an apprenticeship. Instead, they were led to believe that, without a bachelor’s degree, their future was bleak. Even worse, some of the colleges they enrolled in were colleges in name only, in fact little more than residential high schools. As a result, such institutions’ closures were a blessing for students who would have been saddled with debt for a worthless degree.

Such institutions’ closures are a blessing for students who would have been saddled with debt for a worthless degree. The closures in question were partly due to Covid, but that masks a more fundamental reason: Americans have soured in their view of higher education. Last year’s much-remarked-upon Lumina-Gallup study found that fewer than half believe it is doing a good job. They question the overall value of a four-year degree. This skepticism has been slow in developing but is understandable in light of new realities. When most young people’s formal education ended with high-school graduation, anyone with a bachelor’s degree had a distinct leg up in finding and keeping a well-paying job. But today, the proliferation of colleges and myriad majors have created a totally different situation. In fact, “college graduates with poor academic performance, graduating in the bottom quartile of their class, earn roughly the same after graduation as high school graduates,” according to Restoring the Promise, by economist Richard Vedder.

That means that unless colleges can find a way to meet the unique needs and interests of today’s younger generation, they face an uphill battle in staying in business. Their job shouldn’t be to funnel as many high-school graduates as possible onto their campuses but instead to make college available only to those who have the demonstrated wherewithal to profit from the experience. So far, they have not been successful. It’s unlikely they ever will be as long as they persist in believing that college is for everyone (or in feigning that belief for financial purposes). When students learn they are ill-prepared to handle rigorous college-level material, they drop out, often with their self-esteem shattered or with heavy debt. Admitting unqualified students only sets such students up for failure. That should serve as a reality check for higher education, but it hasn’t.

The trouble is that college today is seen as an inalienable right for everyone, regardless of how qualified he or she is. That wasn’t always the case. Prior to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, college was almost always for the well-to-do, who were better prepared because of their backgrounds. In 1940, for example, less than five percent of those 25 and over had completed four years of college. The GI Bill made going to college normal, as seen by the 7.8 million World War II vets who took advantage of it. As Diane Ravitch wrote in The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 to 1980, “the link between income and educational opportunity was broken.”

But what started as a way to make college unexceptional has turned into a trap for too many young people, who have been led falsely to believe that without a four-year degree they have a bleak future. As a result, the number of colleges multiplied even though they, too often, were indistinguishable from high schools. That led to the situation we have today, whereby students are being shortchanged. Tuition continues to rise with no end in sight. At the same time, students question whether what they are studying will pay off after graduation. They are often right to do so, because the number of graduates has increased faster than the number of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree. As a result of this and the previously mentioned question of intelligence, many drop out, forcing less selective schools to close or merge with others.

Colleges have no incentive to change because of student-loan forgiveness and other political shenanigans. Colleges have no incentive to change because of student-loan forgiveness and other political shenanigans. If they were required to pay a portion of the loans for borrowers who default, their admissions departments would be differently motivated. Otherwise, colleges will continue to admit those with little chance of graduating. Change is further complicated by attempts to help the poor, even when that means lowering standards. Ironically, the percentage of the poor graduating from college has fallen even as tuition assistance has increased.

High-school counselors can play a crucial role by challenging the notion that college is the only option. Higher education is at an historic crossroads in this country. What was once seen as a ticket to the American dream has become an illusion for too many young people. With tuition and student debt continuing to climb, going down the same road is no longer an option. Whether we have the will as a nation to take the necessary steps to change is the question. One promising note is the belated movement to treat vocational education as an equally valid choice alongside four-year degrees. High-school counselors can play a crucial role in this regard by challenging the notion that college is the only option for most students. For example, they can educate their charges about the benefits of taking a gap year. In short, they need to align the interests and abilities of students with real-world possibilities to correct (or account for) the crisis of confidence in higher education. Unless they do, the 42 million adults who started college and never finished will be eclipsed by many millions more.

If reform ever comes, it will result in more colleges closing or merging. Rather than bemoan that result, we should accept it as a blessing for students who can then be better served by other means. John Keats said it best in 1965 in The Sheepskin Psychosis: “College is merely the most convenient place to learn how to learn. There is nothing here that cannot be acquired elsewhere than in college at various times of one’s life.” In short, we have been wildly oversold on the importance of college.

Walt Gardner was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education.

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A new report by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity lays out best practices for using performance-funding models in higher education. UNC’s new funding model meets most of the criteria.

The new model addresses concerns about cost, complexity, and rigor. “Aligning State Higher Education Funding with Student Outcomes,” by Annie Bowers, argues that “outcomes-based funding has the potential to drive higher education reform, but its success depends on selecting the best performance measures and ensuring consistent funding over time.” Bowers examines a successful outcomes-based-funding (OBF) model at Texas State Technical College (TSTC) that is based exclusively on graduates’ earnings and that “steadily improved former students’ wages by 45 percent over eight years.”

Based on TSTC’s experience, as well as an examination of OBF metrics across various institutions, the report includes five policy recommendations:

• Choose the right metrics;

• Support higher-education accessibility;

• Keep OBF formulas consistent;

• Keep incentives strong;

• Incorporate a transition period.

The UNC System’s new model, presented to the Board of Governors for discussion last month, follows most of these recommendations (it omits only a transition period). It also addresses the North Carolina General Assembly’s concerns about the previous model’s cost, complexity, and rigor.

Here’s now UNC Performance Funding 2.0 would work, according to last month’s presentation:

The metrics remain unchanged from UNC’s previous model: four-year graduation rate, undergraduate degree efficiency, first-time student debt, transfer student debt, education and related spending per degree, and one metric to be selected by the institution (e.g. research funding at UNC-Chapel Hill). Another metric the UNC System should consider is students’ return on investment.

More could be done if the formula incorporated return-on-investment. Two of the model’s metrics—first-time student debt and transfer student debt—directly relate to accessibility. The remaining metrics incentivize student success and institutional efficiency.

If implemented, the new formula would begin to align universities’ incentives with the UNC System’s goals of access, student success, affordability, and efficiency. However, more could be done if the formula incorporated ROI and represented a larger proportion of the System’s total funding. For now, it’s a step in the right direction.

Jenna A. Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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• extended the COVID-19 interest-accumulation freeze;
• introduced the new SAVE plan, which offered unprecedented interest forgiveness;
• began the process of blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 for borrowers.

The second and third initiatives were so aggressive that the judicial branch ultimately blocked them.

And, although student-loan forgiveness was not the headline of every speech by Vice President Kamala Harris, it was clear to voters that Democrats were the way forward for removing student debt.

Vice President Harris’s defeat sends a clear message. Student-loan forgiveness is dead for the foreseeable future. Harris’s defeat, then, sends a clear message. Student-loan forgiveness is dead—at least for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty safe to say that the majority of millennials have almost no chance to see it.

There are two major reasons why this is so. First, the basic math must be considered. The youngest millennials are around 28 years old. That means the average millennial who has gone to college has already graduated.

Any millennials who graduated before 2020 and went to the workforce have already paid one or more years into their loans. Loan payments were paused in 2020 and remained paused until early this year.

Even the youngest millennials will have paid at least 50 percent of their loans off over the next few years. There’s no chance of loan forgiveness in the Trump era (one hopes and assumes), so most millennials will pay four years of student loans during his term. When you add on the fact that most millennials had already begun paying before the 2020 pause, and the fact that most student-loan repayment terms are 10 years, it becomes clear that even the youngest millennials will have paid at least 50 percent of their loans off over the next few years. The older millennials will be even further into payments.

There are exceptions to this. Some borrowers get on plans with generous 20-year repayment terms. Others may work their loans into forbearance. However, the more people go this route, the more they risk massive interest accumulation. Furthermore, some students may leverage already existing loan-forgiveness programs such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

However, there’s a second reason to believe that even the youngest millennials won’t see the tail-end of their balances forgiven. To see why, let’s consider why Harris lost and Trump won.

Regressive Progressive Woes

The story of Trump’s re-election is not that he won but how he won. Trump’s re-election came about because he over-performed with many demographics. Trump had record-breaking performances with Latino voters. For example, in Georgia, Harris won Latinos with a margin of +18 according to data from NPR. That sounds good until you consider that Hillary Clinton won that group by +40, and Biden won them by +25.

The same trend happened in Arizona and Nevada. In Michigan, Trump even won the Latino vote with a margin of +3. Biden won this group with +24 just four years ago. The same is somewhat true of black voters (for example, in Wisconsin, they swung 32 points away from Democrats relative to 2020).

However, it wasn’t all lost ground for Harris. In particular, the vice president did well with high-income, high-education voters. Data journalist Patrick Flynn shared the following graph on X:

Hard to overstate just how rapid the changes in US party coalitions have been.

The Democrats are now the party of high education *and* high income voters. Just 12 years ago, the inverse was true.

On these terms, the Trump coalition was closer to Obama 2008 than the Harris one! pic.twitter.com/7GqqT8G7rb

— Patrick Flynn (@patrickjfl) November 7, 2024

The visualization is stunning. In 2012, Republicans were the party of high-income, high-education voters. In the last three elections, Trump has reversed those trends. The gap between voters with and without formal higher education has not been greater in recent history.

It’s no surprise that Democrats are becoming the party of blanket student-loan forgiveness. The group that stands to gain the most from student-loan forgiveness is high-income, college-educated voters—in other words, supporters of Democrats. This is obvious because many high-income jobs (e.g. doctor and lawyer) involve taking on significant debt but reward graduates with high incomes.

The support from the high-income, educated voting bloc is not enough to carry an election. However, there’s a problem here. Harris lost. The support from the high-income, educated voting bloc is not enough to carry an election. Pandering to this group has come at the expense of Democrats losing hold of many of the voters who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Those who don’t get degrees and have lower incomes (though not so low as to avoid paying taxes entirely) are on the hook to subsidize loan forgiveness with their tax dollars. Blanket student-loan forgiveness is thus a regressive tax. Student-loan forgiveness could be targeted to low-income recipients only, but that certainly isn’t how Biden positioned the topic by the 2024 election, and I didn’t see any rebuke from Harris of Biden’s approach.

The median voter theorem tells us that politicians win by appealing to the median rather than the outliers. This is why I think Trump’s election spells death for student-loan forgiveness. If Democrats learn from 2024, one of the lessons they’ll take away for 2028 is that they don’t need to expend more resources catering to high-education, high-income voters. The median voter theorem, if applicable to our system, tells us that politicians win by appealing to the median rather than the outliers.

Winning will mean re-focusing on gaining back demographics Trump has siphoned away, including degreeless voters for whom the only result of loan forgiveness is higher future taxes.

Even if Democrats win in 2028 (which is by no means a given), it seems unlikely that their candidate will focus on loan forgiveness at all, and, subsequently, it’s unlikely to happen. This means another four years on the clock. Even if the following election (2032) brought loan forgiveness back to the table, the executive, legislative, and judicial processes associated with it would likely cause the process to take a year or more. By that point, almost every millennial on a normal payment track will have paid off his or her loans completely.

All of this also ignores the looming reality of the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which seems likely to block the otherwise most politically tractable forms of loan forgiveness (as they did with Biden).

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last decade of American politics, it’s that things can change on a dime. With that in mind, I can’t declare student-loan forgiveness permanently dead. However, millennial student-loan forgiveness looks less alive than it has at any time in the last decade.

What Will Trump Do?

This leads us to another question—what will Trump do with student loans? We can’t be sure yet, but we have some ideas.

In his first term, one of Trump’s suggested budgets involved changing things such that fewer graduate-student loans are forgiven. Andrew Gillen, writing for the Martin Center, highlights that the current system leads to between 24 and 34 percent of graduate loan dollars not being repaid. Trump may target this issue again in his second term, which may help lower graduate tuition as demand falls.

Watch for Trump to rewrite the rules to allow students to leverage current education support for non-university pathways. His platform says, “To reduce the cost of Higher Education, Republicans will support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.”

On that note, Trump has mentioned the possibility of taxing university endowments to fund a higher-education alternative called American Academy, but there aren’t many details behind this proposal.

Questions remain on what Trump will do with students enrolled in the legally stalled SAVE plans or with students who have defaulted on loans. A likely option will be that many will transfer to income-based repayment plans, because those plans were instituted by Congress and are therefore beyond Trump’s reach.

Peter Jacobsen is an assistant professor of economics at Ottawa University and the Gwartney Professor of Economic Education and Research at the Gwartney Institute.

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The most recent application round for the PhD Project—for the conference to be held March 20-21, 2025—stated that eligibility was limited to those who “Identify as Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American, or Native American/Canadian Indigenous.” In previous years, eligibility was similarly limited to “Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American or Native American” applicants (with Canadian Indigenous applicants excluded). These restrictions by race and ethnicity violate civil-rights laws.

Universities that partner with the PhD Project have been violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Most of all, universities that partner with the PhD Project have been violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Universities partner with the organization, and become eligible for “partnership benefits,” by paying $5,000 per year if a doctoral-granting institution or $3,000 per year if not. The students of partner universities become eligible to apply for conference participation—if they are of the right race or ethnicity.

Or at least that was true until the PhD Project scrubbed its website. Participants from prior years, anyway, continue to be part of the PhD Project’s network. These participants, over decades, were filtered on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Each participating university paid the partnership fee on the basis of the old eligibility rule. What did partner universities get themselves into? They knew: “The PhD Project is a network of Black/African Americans, Hispanic/Latinx and Native Americans/Canadian Indigenous (U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. residents, or DACA recipients) who are interested in getting more information about business doctoral programs.”

What else did university partners know? There was no ambiguity: “The conference provides a rare networking and information gathering opportunity for Black/African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic Americans and Native Americans/Canadian Indigenous.”

The original deadline for the 2025 conference was November 30, 2024. Each participating university paid the partnership fee and made the opportunity available to its students on the basis of the eligibility rule in effect prior to that date.

Texas A&M University (TAMU) went further, acknowledging that it also sends its own “representatives” to the conference each year. We know this because the program gained attention on January 13, 2025, when an email from TAMU leaked to the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo. TAMU officials were claiming that the clearly, blatantly discriminatory program somehow was allowed, even under Texas’s strict law against supporting race-based programs.

After TAMU got caught and senior members of Texas government got involved, every public university in Texas withdrew from membership. The PhD Project also removed the discriminatory language from its website and extended the application deadline to February 7, 2025.

The PhD Project used to admit that it “was founded in 1994 with the goal of diversifying corporate America by diversifying the role models in the front of classrooms.” It claimed success in that it “more than quintupled the number of historically underrepresented business professors” in the United States, and that about 300 “diverse doctoral students” are “currently receiving our help to pursue their academic careers.”

Presumably, past racially and ethnically selected students are still receiving such help. But now the PhD Project claims that its goal all along has been nondiscriminatory: “The PhD Project was founded in 1994 with the goal of creating more role models in the front of business classrooms.” This claim is misleading and false. The goal was not more role models per se; the goal until very recently was “diversifying corporate America” by selecting role models and conference participants on the basis of race and ethnicity.

No amount of website scrubbing can alter the actual mission of the PhD Project (officially the PhD Project Association). This mission, as the organization tells the government through its Form 990, is “to increase workplace diversity by increasing the diversity of business school faculty who encourage, mentor, support and enhance the preparation of tomorrow’s leaders.” On the Candid.org website where one can view such forms, under “population served,” the field reads “ethnic and racial groups.” The Form 990 for the year 2022 (the most recent on record there) adds that “the organization attracts black/African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans to business PhD programs and provides a network of peer support on their journey to becoming professors.”

No amount of website scrubbing can alter the actual mission of the PhD Project. This is the discriminatory mission that the PhD Project’s partner universities signed onto. To the extent that the organization continues to provide mentoring and networking to past participants—again, people who were eligible only if they had the right race or ethnicity—the partner universities continue to pay for such benefits, which they knowingly expect to do through their annual partnership fees.

On January 19, 2025, I filed Title VI federal civil-rights complaints against every U.S. college or university that was still listed as a university partner. These included 11 universities in North Carolina—public and private—all of which remain listed as partners:

• Duke University
• East Carolina University
• Elon University
• North Carolina A&T State University
• North Carolina Central University
• North Carolina State University
• UNC Charlotte
• UNC Greensboro
• UNC Wilmington
• Wake Forest University
• Western Carolina University

For each listed partner, the PhD Project also links to the unit of the university that has partnered with it—typically the business school or college of business. For example, the UNCW listing links to its Cameron School of Business, and the UNCG listing links to the Bryan School of Business & Economics.

My complaints went to all 12 regional offices of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Acknowledgment of a complaint usually occurs within a few weeks. At the time of this writing, seven regional offices have acknowledged the complaints. The other five have not yet responded. Among those not responding is the DC Metro office, which handles federal civil-rights complaints regarding educational opportunities at North Carolina universities.

OCR complaints can be handled quickly or very slowly—from days to years—even when the applicable facts and law are straightforward. Justice tends to be served more quickly when others act ahead of the agency. At any rate, North Carolina universities should stop discriminating immediately rather than waiting for OCR to make a determination, which risks their federal funding.

The right move in this situation, therefore, is for each North Carolina university to cancel its membership in the PhD Project and stop sending representatives and applicants. The whole idea of the project is, and always has been, to have a disparate impact on the basis of race. Until and unless the organization changes its official mission in its formal documents and changes its actual activities—not just cosmetically changing its public website—there is really no other choice.

Federal law and regulations against discrimination are not the only things for North Carolina universities to worry about. Besides, federal law and regulations against discrimination—not to mention the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Constitution itself—are not the only things for North Carolina universities to worry about. State and local laws ban discrimination. Ironically, participation in the PhD Project also violates the universities’ own nondiscrimination policies.

For example, UNCW’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Policy claims that UNCW “is committed to and will provide equality of educational and employment opportunity for all persons regardless of race.” UNCW adds, however, that “a results-oriented equal opportunity/affirmative action program has been implemented to overcome the effects of past discrimination and to eliminate any artificial barriers to educational or employment opportunities for all qualified individuals that may exist in any of our programs.”

Trustees of North Carolina universities should be working to ensure that discriminatory policies no longer exist at their institutions. Such efforts are no longer allowed. For one thing, the Students for Fair Admissions opinion from the Supreme Court made clear that such a results-oriented approach is off limits. For another thing, “the effects of past discrimination” cannot be claimed as an excuse for discriminating forever, not for decades after any purported discrimination by UNCW, and not to redress general discrimination across society. To be safe against discrimination claims for partnering with the PhD Project, UNCW would have to claim and acknowledge its own recent discrimination, if any, against black and Hispanic students in order to justify discriminating today in favor of such students.

The trustees and senior officers of North Carolina universities should be working to ensure that discriminatory policies no longer exist at their institutions. Comporting with current case law and common sense means ending partnerships, especially paid partnerships, with organizations that explicitly discriminate.

Each university also should initiate a civil-rights audit to ensure full compliance. Intentional disparate impact by race—far worse than unintended disparate impact—remains pervasive in U.S. colleges and universities. Honest, comprehensive civil-rights audits must get illegal discrimination out of our institutions of higher education for good.

[Editor’s note: As of February 26, 2025, East Carolina, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Wilmington are no longer partners of the PhD Project.]

Adam Kissel is a senior fellow at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy. 

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ED has done great damage to American higher education by these means. At the same time, ED remains immensely popular with the American public for its core higher-education spending: Pell Grants for disadvantaged college students and William D. Ford Federal Direct Loans for just about every college student who applies for one. The Trump administration already has issued a flurry of executive orders to reform all parts of the federal government, including ED, but it’s not yet clear what strategy it will use to align ED’s postsecondary-education policies with these executive orders.

Reformers should simplify and depoliticize the education department’s higher-ed spending and regulations. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) recommends in Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism that education reformers enact comprehensive reform to simplify and depoliticize ED’s higher-education spending and regulations. This strategy will make ED transparent and accountable to the public and to policymakers. Reformers shouldn’t jeopardize real reform by a hasty attempt to eliminate ED entirely—which might be ineffective and certainly would alienate large swathes of the American public. Education reformers instead should build on comprehensive reform that makes it possible for the American public to get a clear look at ED’s core spending programs, then make the case for further reform.

Much education department spending on postsecondary education should go. Yet much ED spending on postsecondary education should go. ED spends billions annually on subsidies for race discrimination, “mental-health” initiatives that fund the therapeutic-managerial complex in American postsecondary education, and a myriad of discretionary-spending programs that ED bureaucrats can use to supercharge radicalizing bureaucracies at American colleges and universities. Above all, it spends billions on the TRIO programs to “prepare” students for college—though the money really bribes colleges to lower their academic standards for unprepared students. Congress should rescind every one of the dozens of federal statutes that authorize spending for this labyrinth of programs. Congress should be willing to compensate for zeroing out this funding with compensatory funding increases for Pell Grants and Ford Loans. Revenue-neutral reform that eliminates every radicalizing or useless program would be a great bargain.

Education reformers should make an exception for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs). America has historic relationships to HBCUs, American Indian tribes, Alaska Native entities, and Hawaiian Native entities. These programs should be housed in a new office explicitly devoted to these historic relationships. Reformers will be better able to fulfill the Trump administration’s mandate to eliminate race discrimination and gender ideology from ED postsecondary funding and regulation, and with broader support from the American people, if they retain funding for HBCUs and TCCUs.

Education reformers also should transfer the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education and all programs for vocational and career education to the Labor Department, where they should be integrated with the Labor Department’s other workforce-training programs. ED can then focus on non-vocational postsecondary education: Pell Grants, Ford Loans, and virtually nothing else. Congress then should enact ironclad legislation to remove the power of any future administration to imitate the Biden administration and illegally “forgive” student loans.

Policymakers also should adjust the conditions by which ED disburses grants and loans to students. Congress should limit total Title IV loans to $75,000 per borrower. It also should require that borrowers have family incomes below 150 percent of the poverty level, maintain a 2.5 grade point average, and have received federal loans and/or grants for no more than four previous years. Congress finally should make colleges and universities jointly responsible with individual borrowers for student-loan defaults. These reforms will direct federal monies to students with a reasonable chance of succeeding academically at college and give colleges and universities a financial incentive not to admit unprepared students.

Reformers should work to ensure that the education department explicitly renounces the theory of “disparate impact.” This programmatic reform must be accompanied by reforms of the ED’s regulatory structure, which ED has used to radicalize education. Above all, ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) must be prevented from ever again imposing a radical political agenda on colleges and universities in the name of civil rights. The Trump administration’s first executive orders must be carried out, to ensure universities do not engage in race discrimination, promote gender ideology, or abrogate due-process protections. Education reformers also should work to ensure that ED declares that it explicitly renounces the theory of “disparate impact,” that civil-rights laws concerning sex do not concern sexual orientation, and that civil-rights laws concerning sexual discrimination do not concern sexual harassment or sexual violence. Much mischief has followed this confusion.

The education department should act more aggressively in defense of liberty and national interest. Education reformers also should reform the accrediting organizations for postsecondary institutions—both the seven regional accreditors and all disciplinary accrediting organizations. These now operate in a limbo between federal and state authority and impose politicized, bloated bureaucracies on colleges and universities, with no public accountability. ED should act to bring the accrediting organizations under control.

ED also should act more aggressively in defense of liberty and national interest. We should remove the ability of dictatorial regimes in China and the Islamic world to turn American colleges and universities into fifth columns that host spies, lobbyists, and Jew-hating mobs—and we should defund any college that insists on acting as a “sanctuary” for illegal aliens or that unconstitutionally suppresses freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or freedom of association. These initiatives will be far easier to undertake when ED’s programmatic structure has been reformed and OCR and the accrediting organizations defanged.

Education reformers should engage in comprehensive reform by rescinding the statutory basis for a host of individual ED programs and by revoking an equally large host of ED and accrediting regulations. The public and policymakers then will be equipped to exert oversight on ED’s core programs, Pell Grants and Ford Loans, and ensure that ED postsecondary spending and regulation are depoliticized, transparent, and accountable.

This policy agenda should not be the end of federal postsecondary-education policy reform. But these practical goals will establish a solid foundation for even more ambitious education reform in the future.

David Randall is executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars.

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The survey, released in Dec. 2024, polled 1,216 U.S. respondents. Generally, the data show that while Americans have differing opinions on whether higher education is worth the cost, a new trend favors technical and community colleges over Ivy League schools.

As the above data indicate, a mere 69 percent of respondents believe that Ivy League colleges and universities offer a “very” or “somewhat” high educational value. Meanwhile, 85 percent of respondents said as much about trade or technical schools.

The survey also inquired about the cost of college. The vast majority of voters believe that college is too expensive, with 87 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans, and 80 percent of independents agreeing.

At a near even split, 48 percent of respondents agreed that college is worth the cost, while 45 percent disagreed (seven percent were unsure). Fewer than half of Republicans and independents believe the benefits of college outweigh the costs (44 and 39 percent, respectively), compared to 57 percent of Democrats.

A mere 69 percent of respondents believe that Ivy League colleges offer a “very” or “somewhat” high value. With student-loan debt a hot topic in today’s political climate, it’s no surprise that many now believe college is too expensive. Rather than simply jump-starting one’s career, college saddles many with debt that follows them for far longer than anticipated. As such, it’s no surprise that many are taking a careful look at the educational options available to them and declaring value to be a top priority.

Harvard ($56,550 per year) is surely a better school than Bunker Hill Community College (approximately $12,500). But is it $88,000 better (over two years) for everyone? Obviously not.

One interesting thing to note is that trade-school enrollments grew 4.9 percent from 2020 to 2023. Over the same time period, traditional higher-education enrollment dropped by 0.6 percent. Many choose the trade-school route for one of two reasons: It’s faster and cheaper than traditional higher education. So while enrollment in traditional four-year programs is waning, many are turning to trade schools to improve their career opportunities.

While Ivy League schools still dominate the conversation, Americans have begun to value community and trade schools more. The average American is not as concerned with the prestige of the Ivy League if it comes at such a high price. Indeed, more than half of respondents (64 percent) support increased funding for trade colleges, a figure that drops to just one-third for private universities. Legislators should take note: Focus on improving trade and community schools before worrying about the big behemoths.

Grace Hall is a communications assistant at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. She works and lives in Georgia.

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Journal papers are foundational building blocks in the political and legal realm. Scientific studies, peer reviewed and published in journals, are necessarily relied upon by expert witnesses in their opinions in judicial proceedings, as well as in the promulgation of sound regulatory and legislative rules that protect our health and safety.

For some time, the practice of scientific publication has suffered from threats to the integrity and validity of published papers. For some time, however, the practice of scientific publication has suffered from threats to the integrity and validity of published papers. These threats undermine trust in science, as well as public health and the rule of law.

We do not have to look hard for evidence that the foundation is crumbling. Criticisms of science publishing practices have been around for some time, especially in the field of epidemiology of potential health risks. In 1999, a prominent epidemiologist, Lewis Kuller, published a commentary, “Circular Epidemiology,” which criticized the practice of publishing studies that showed associations that were already well established, or consistently ruled out, without adding any increased analytical rigor.

We do not have to look hard for evidence that the foundation of scholarly publishing is crumbling. A few years after Kuller’s commentary, in 2005, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis published a paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” which raised consciousness of a crisis in the failure of replication or reproducibility of biomedical studies. Ioannidis identified several factors that correlated highly with false findings in the medical literature, for example that using small study sample sizes, chasing ever-smaller putative effect sizes, data dredging, exercising undue flexibility in study designs, failing to pre-specify statistical tests and key variable definitions, withholding financial and non-financial conflicts of interest, and engaging in advocacy and sensationalism were all associated with false and non-replicable research findings.

Within a few years of Ioannidis’s 2005 paper, awareness of and concern over the “replication crisis” spread beyond biomedical research to other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and economics. Concerns over replication soon entered the popular discourse. In 2010, David H. Freedman wrote an essay in The Atlantic, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” which presented Ioannidis’s and others’ work for a general audience. Freedman did not water down the message when he wrote that “much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flatout wrong.”

Proliferation of Junk Science

The erosion of trust in the validity of published studies disrupts the down-stream process of aggregating and evaluating data on specific issues across studies. In the last couple of decades, the systematic review in biomedical research has emerged as the gold-standard methodology to synthesize data across studies and to assess whether causal inferences are justified. The systematic reviewer must clearly state the research question and pre-specify what kinds of studies, with what kinds of study designs and included measurements, will be considered as offering important and valid information to answer the pending question. This pre-specification process is designed to prevent opportunistic, post-hoc reliance upon poorly conducted research that aligns with the reviewers’ preferences.

The proliferation of papers with “fishy data,” however, has undermined the validity of meta-research that synthesizes data across studies, to reach conclusions with more robust data sets. A recent 2024 report in Science noted that scientists now undertaking systematic reviews must wade through mounds of published detritus to find studies that are worthy of inclusion in their reviews. Scientists themselves are losing trust in the available datasets and analyses, with the result that the whole enterprise of “systematic reviews,” and seeking broad conclusions from many studies, is in peril. The high prevalence of “fake papers” compromises research synthesis and causal inference.

Unfortunately, not all systematic reviewers are discerning in what studies they include in their research syntheses. Back in 2016, Professor Ioannidis noted that the thoughtless proliferation of studies had already expanded to include the metastasis of poorly conducted systematic reviews. In his paper “The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses,” Ioannidis described the fulsome production of poorly conducted systematic reviews as undermining evidence-based health care and eroding trust in medical science.

In 2023, various journals retracted over 10,000 research papers. What Goes Up Must Come Down—Retractions

Consumers rightly interpret frequent product recalls as evidence of manufacturing defects. In the world of scientific publishing, publishers have long used retraction as a way to remove their imprimatur from a published article later found to have deviated from scientific or editorial standards of care. Historically, retractions were rare events. In 2023, however, various journals retracted over 10,000 research papers. Dr. Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of the website Retraction Watch, has argued that, although the rate of retractions is increasing, it is not keeping up with the number of defective articles published. Unlike a recall of a manufactured product, journals do not refund the costs of purchasing the retracted article.

Unlike a recall of a manufactured product, journals do not refund the costs of purchasing the retracted article. Editors in Revolt

Late last year, almost all of the editors of the Journal of Human Evolution, published by Elsevier, resigned in protest over what appears to have been Elsevier’s policy of maximizing profit without regard for scientific quality. Elsevier increased charges to authors for article processing and reduced various forms of editorial support, oversight, and editing. According to the website Retraction Watch, the mass resignation of editors at this journal was the 20th such event since early 2023.

Predatory Journals

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine and several other clinical medical journals published an editorial, “Predatory Journals—What Can We Do to Protect Their Prey?,” to call attention to the growing problem of journals published for financial gain that flout scholarly standards and prey upon young scientists eager to build their curricula vitae. The editorial’s 16 authors estimated that over 15,000 journals, as of 2021, were polluting the scientific information ecosystem with grossly inadequate editing, peer review, and management of conflicts of interest. The authors noted that many of the predatory journals ignore or otherwise fail to comply with the ethical and publication standards of well-respected groups such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Some of the questionable journals fabricate citation metrics to lure unsuspecting scientists to submit their manuscripts and convince universities to subscribe.

Why the Failure?

The present situation in the world of scientific-journal publishing has all the earmarks of a market failure. Commercial publishers have invaded the market for scientific publications and driven prices through the roof. According to one recent provocative review, “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward,” scientific societies, which had been the mainstay for publishing papers in the 19th and early-20th centuries, charged a couple of dollars per article as late as 1992, while commercial publishers were already charging about $44 an article. Today, the prices for both types of publishers are even higher, often with additional charges to access letters to the editor, in which problems with the published article are detailed.

If lawyers looked at retracted articles as defective “products,” they might well invoke consumer-protection laws. We might also see claims by granting organizations and researchers for detrimental reliance upon retracted articles. Many publishers delay retractions, however, leaving the scientific community to rely upon dodgy science. When articles are retracted, some journals continue to leave the retracted article behind a paywall, and, in some instances, contrary to the publishing guidelines of groups such as COPE, publishers also leave the notice of retraction behind a paywall.

Not surprisingly, the lawsuit industry has not acquiesced to caveat emptor for the world of scientific publishing. With profits for commercial scientific-journal publishers approaching 40 percent, lawyers would naturally see publishers as both unpopular and enticing targets. Last year, a prominent plaintiffs’ law firm filed a class action on behalf of Professor Lucina Uddin and others against Elsevier and several other commercial publishers. Uddin’s complaint, filed in federal court in Brooklyn, was styled as an “Antitrust Class Action to Challenge Collusion among the World’s Six Largest For-profit Publishers of Peer-reviewed Scholarly Journals.” The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants violated federal antitrust laws through unlawful agreements in restraint of trade, designed to maintain high prices and exorbitant profits. The lawsuit seeks treble damages from the publishers and injunctions against their business practices.

The plaintiffs allege that the defendants violated federal antitrust laws through unlawful agreements in restraint of trade. Uddin’s complaint outlines three theories of unlawful anti-trust restraint of trade. First, Uddin alleges that the scheme flows from a supposed agreement among the defendants not to compensate authors and scholars for their articles or for serving as peer reviewers to the journals in question. Second, Uddin asserts that the single submission rule, which requires authors to submit a manuscript to only one journal at a time and await each journal’s decision, is an unlawful restraint of trade. Third, Uddin alleges that the publishers colluded to impose a gag rule on scientists to prevent them from discussing their studies and data before publication and to impose a uniform requirement that authors assign their intellectual property rights to the journals.

While Professor Uddin’s lawsuit may have resulted in widespread schadenfreude, its factual allegations are dubious. The gag rule, for instance, is often known as the “Ingelfinger Rule” after Franz Ingelfinger, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who introduced the practice in 1969. Ingelfinger’s goal was to ensure originality and reduce redundant publications. Similarly, the practices of not paying authors and peer reviewers, as well as submitting manuscripts to one journal at a time, have long been accepted, well before the rise of rapacious commercial publishing houses.

The potential failure of Professor Uddin’s legal theories does not, however, mean that the plaintiffs have not identified a serious social problem. While the defendants have raised their prices, both for subscriptions and for individual articles, the costs of production have plummeted. Scientific publishing once required labor-intensive, specialized typesetting and expensive artwork for graphs, figures, equations, and tables. Today, the published output is largely generated by computer software, at tremendous savings in labor and costs that are not reflected in market prices. The high costs of acquiring published studies are drains on university budgets and are, in turn, often footed by taxpayers through research grants. The high paywalls not only divert money from scientific research, they diminish public discussion and debate when journalists report new research based upon hyperbolic press releases and abstracts, without ever reading the underlying papers.

Esoteric legal theories may redound to the benefit of the lawsuit industry, but the origins of the crisis in scientific publishing may not be a consequence of collusive behavior. The proliferation of scientists, chasing ever-increasing numbers of research hypotheses under relentless pressure to publish, have no doubt perpetuated many of the ills of scientific publication, with its surfeit of dodgy scientific studies. With the reduced costs of publication, the time may have come for scientific societies to reassert themselves, take control over scientific journals, and push the over-priced commercial publishers out of business.

Nathan Schachtman is a practicing lawyer who has defended against claims of health effects in products-liability litigation for over 40 years.

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