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We have too few books that feature designers who work in 24 hour (potentially magical) bookstores who can program in Ruby and who are obsessed with fantasy literature and data visualization.

Sometime in the past week I heard a line on a public radio program that has been running through my head: Women today can have it all, just not necessarily all at the same time. I wasn’t paying careful attention to the program, or time of day, so I don’t know to whom this quote should be attributed. It was only later that I remembered it and it resonated.

I want to write about the adjunct faculty who go above and beyond the call of duty. You need to tell me who they are.

For the last decade, higher education has spent considerable and increasingly scarce funds defending itself from the publishing and entertainment industry, which, if they are sincere in their belief that it is colleges and universities causing their problems, both faculty and students, they would do well to listen carefully to the comments yesterday.

Much media attention has recently been given to the Thiel Fellowships, an effort described by The New York Times as “one of the most unusual experiments in higher education today.” But -- in these critical years for their development as persons -- will these young people spend time thinking about the meaning of their lives, about their moral obligations to fellow human beings?

A few years ago, I floated the idea of an upscale proprietary. (For convenience, I called it Mercedes U.) My argument was that for-profits have, until now, focused on the lower end of the market, where they have to compete with (subsidized) community colleges. Since they can’t compete on price at the low end, I suggested, better to try on the high end. (In California, at this point, they can compete simply by being open. But in the other 49 states, the argument still stands.) The only attempt I saw, Founders College, quickly ran aground on the shoals of Ayn Randian ideology and some pretty iffy management. Since then, nothing.

Last week, Cardale Jones, a first-year student at Ohio State University, posted the following to Twitter: "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS." A short time after Jones' post, that tweet (and his account on Twitter) were removed. Jones was also suspended for last weekend's game against Nebraska. According to the Ohio State student directory, he is currently in the University's Exploration Program with a major in Management and Industry Exploration. Like a lot of first-year students, Jones is still trying to figure out his academic major. It's a typical experience.

Have you downloaded the IHE survey Debt, Jobs, Diversity and Who Gets In: A Survey of Admissions Directors?