Most high governmental officials who speak of education policy seem to conceive of education in this light - as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth. I strongly disagree with this approach.

Once you start worrying about a national football championship, then you begin to worry about getting the quality of athlete, and the numbers needed, to win a national championship. And that worry leads to pressure to compromise academic standards to admit those athletes.

Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers.

The college that takes students with modest entering abilities and improves their abilities substantially contributes more than the school that takes very bright students and helps them develop only modestly.

There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.

What college is all about is some kind of 4-year game about who is going to end up with the highest grades. And I don't mean to say that academic achievement isn't important. But it is, after all, a means to an end.

There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.

The oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.

Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged.

Education, and I regret to say this as an educator, but there's no indication that education has a direct effect on happiness.

Fewer than half of all university professors publish as much as one article per year.

Freshly minted Ph.Ds typically teach the way their favorite professors taught.

Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.

I think it's sort of an outrage that companies should have to hire firms to teach the college graduates they employ how to write.

I think one thing that does cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.

I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

The first country to adopt happiness as an official goal of public policy is the tiny little country of Bhutan in Asia near China and India.