A guest blog in The Washington Post singled out Linfield’s students and faculty for praise.The column, by Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker, placed Linfield among the top 15 schools in the nation for offering quality education at an accessible price.
“We like that it offers a fine education on an unassuming budget,” Dreifus and Hacker say. Linfield spends significantly less per student than an Ivy League school like Swarthmore, but “its faculty is just as good and its students just as inquiring.”
Hacker and New York Times reporter Dreifus take American colleges to task and praise Linfield in their new book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.
The two authors and professors say many schools have lost track of their primary mission: teaching college students. Instead, they say, many professors negotiate to teach as little as possible, while colleges lure students with expensive sports facilities and dorms, pushing a four-year education at a private school to a quarter million dollars.
In an earlier Atlantic interview the authors said Linfield “professors care. They spend time with the students.” And on their education blog they said Linfield “manages to educate its bright students without frills. Its campus is attractive, but simple. Teaching matters there.”
The book, now generating headlines across the country, is the result of several years of interviews with students, government officials and higher education administrators.
