Laura Pappano Quotes

Congress and the public don't seem to have noticed that, while largely ignoring our own students, we are putting our money and our best talent into training our economic competitors.

Before all else, the modern university is a business selling a product.

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions…

Higher education has never been economically self-supporting; it has hardly ever been fully organized from public funds; everywhere it has remained parasitic on the private munificence of wealthy persons. The peril is too obvious to need further enforcement: it is the hand of the prospective, the potential donor that fetters intellectual freedom in our colleges, and will do so more and more so long as the duty of organizing public higher education for a nation out of public funds fails of recognition..

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

There is a large change coming in the jobs of America and competition from abroad. We should prepare for it rather than let history overwhelm us.

The best jobs will go to the best educated people.

Colleges sort as much as they teach.

It’s harder and harder to get a job if you just have a strong back. You need an education.

There are not enough good jobs for the skill levels we have.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

90% of the fastest growing jobs require some form of post-secondary education.

College football promotes drinking, dishonesty, and neglect of academic work.

We can't go on appropriating more and more money to state universities without knowing that we're getting an excellent product back out of them.

Students now see college more as a credentialing institution rather than an academic institution.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

Immigration is not without economic costs. Those costs fall most heavily on some Americans who have the fewest resources to bear them …. Workers with less than twelve years of education are the most adversely affected by low-skilled immigrant workers.

Build a roof over a capital and you have the best of all universities.

I went to nine different universities and never paid a nickle of my own money. My wife got many scholarships. We are children of the United States.

Nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths strong-armed men

We're living in a world of piranha economics in regard to education.

Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished

Higher education is now the business of delivering consumer satisfaction.

The free market economy provides an unparalleled example of a continuing healthy circulation of elites. In this dynamic economy, failure to keep up with competitors, failure to satisfy the demands of consumers in the best possible way, will topple elites quickly and establish new ones who do the job better.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.