The article "Hold Colleges Accountable to the Real World" written by Victor Hanson in the National Review political blog, details his opinions of changes that should occur relating to colleges in America. The intended audience is likely students, people of voting age or people involved in higher education. He's a historian with positions at multiple colleges and has written all kinds of articles for big name papers and magazines, like the New York Times. His credibility is very strong because of his involvement with academia and the large number of works he's had published. His message in the article is that colleges are not structured properly in regards to finances, being realistic about post-grad success, and admitting a student body of ideologically diverse students.
The article makes some very good points, but ultimately reads a bit like a rant. He claims that students aren't learning or accomplishing enough in their degrees, and proposes that there be some sort of standardized test to certify graduates in their degrees. He throws out a potential solution of adding some type of standardized tests to each degree, in a sort of cheap way, as a quick and easy fix to a vague problem of "underprepared graduates". There's a lot of generalizations in his article that would be much more convincing if he included more statistical data or real life examples. He also claims that campuses are 95%-5% on the hot topic issues rather than 50%-50% like in the real world. This is a strange claim to make without any evidence, let alone describing how a university would measure such a thing ethically. As far as criticism of the financial problems of higher education, this is something that has become common knowledge as far as I can tell, and he doesn't bring up the subject with much original thought. He doesn't investigate the issue deeply enough, because the colleges can't get all the blame when citizens are also the ones agreeing to partake in the financial risks of investing in their education. I agree with a lot of the sentiments in this article, but there was no balance of research to all the general statements. It wasn't very organized, either, the topic seems to jump around a bit without fully covering any one thing.
