General World News

The 14 best colleges in the Midwest

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Business Insider released its annual ranking of the best colleges in America, highlighting schools that provide a quality education and graduate students on time, set graduates up to earn well-paying jobs early in their career, and create a memorable and enjoyable campus experience. (You can read about the methodology in detail here.) Location wasn’t a […]

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The top 10 schools for coding in the US

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Graduating with a degree in coding seems like it all but guarantees you a high-paying job with awesome perks. But with so many universities beefing up their computer science programs, which US universities are your best bet? HackerRank, a free coding practice website that allows developers to hone their coding skills by solving challenges, launched […]

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Trump has claimed American schools are worse than those in ‘third-world countries’ — here’s why he’ll probably continue to do so

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Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump repeatedly disparaged what he saw as America’s failing school system. “We are rated 28 in the world. The United States, think of it, 28 in the world,” he said in a video he uploaded to Facebook earlier this year. “Third-world countries are ahead of us.” Though he never explicitly mentioned […]

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The latest ranking of top countries in math, reading, and science is out — and the US didn’t crack the top 10

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The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the results of its 2015 global rankings on student performance in mathematics, reading, and science, on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The PISA is a worldwide exam administered every three years that measures 15-year-olds in 72 countries. About 540,000 students took the exam […]

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For-profit college debt strikers plead with Obama to discharge their loans: ‘Don’t leave us at the mercy of President Trump’

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In early 2015, 15 students at Corinthian Colleges, then one of the largest for-profit college chains, formed a group called the Corinthian 15 and pledged to strike until their student loans were discharged. Corinthian Colleges shuttered its doors just months later, displacing roughly 16,000 students. Today, as a part of the organization called the Debt […]

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Soon-to-be ‘first kid’ Barron Trump will continue at his Manhattan prep school — here’s where the other first kids went to school

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In November, President-elect Trump and his wife Melania announced that the family will keep their son Barron enrolled in his New York City-based day school rather than moving to Washington, D.C. right away. A spokesperson for the Trump’s noted that there is “obviously a sensitivity to pulling out a 10-year-old in the middle of the […]

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A professor on a ‘watchlist’ that aims to expose ‘leftist propaganda’ claims its a ‘new species of McCarthyism’

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In late November, a website called “Professor Watchlist” launched with the mission to “expose and document” college professors the website claims “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Created by a nonprofit organization called Turning Point USA, the site currently has more than 100 professors listed, and includes their photographs and […]

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San Francisco schools are vowing to be a ‘safe space’ for immigrant children

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The San Francisco Unified School District sent an automated phone message to thousands of parents Wednesday informing them that the district will continue to provide a “safe space” for recent immigrants “regardless of immigration status” and affirming the city’s status as a so-called sanctuary city for non-citizen immigrants. The message seems to be a response […]

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Trump once called for the Department of Education to be eliminated — here’s what the federal agency actually does

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During his campaign, President-elect Trump repeatedly hit out at the role of federal government in education, arguing instead for increased local control of schools, and hinting that the Department of Education (ED) should be abolished. In his book “Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America,” Trump writes: “A lot of people believe the Department […]

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The 13 most powerful members of ‘Skull and Bones’

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In 1832, Yale students — including future President William Howard Taft’s father — founded one of America’s most famous secret societies: Skull and Bones. Since then, the group has come to signify all that both mesmerizes and repulses the public about the elite. Each year, only 15 juniors are “tapped,” or chosen, for lifetime membership […]

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Every Supreme Court justice went to Harvard or Yale Law School — here’s where they went for undergrad

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Harvard and Yale Law School graduates have established themselves in some of America’s most powerful positions — from president to Supreme Court justice. In fact, every single current member of the Supreme Court attended law school at Harvard or Yale — though Ruth Bader Ginsburg ultimately got her degree from Columbia Law School after transferring […]

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Meet Betsy DeVos, the polarizing charter-school advocate Trump has tapped as education secretary

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President-elect Donald Trump tapped Michigan billionaire and charter-school advocate Betsy DeVos as his choice for education secretary Wednesday, a move that has prompted a flurry of praise and backlash from either political side throughout the week. DeVos, a fierce proponent of school vouchers allowing students to use public funds to attend private schools, heads up […]

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14 things that are harder to get into than Harvard

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Harvard is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, school accepted just 5.2% of roughly 39,000 applications for its class of 2020. As Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said in 2014, “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians.” The school seeks out students who not only have high […]

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The 15 best colleges for your money

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It’s hard to estimate the impact your chosen college — or your children’s — will have on your life. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t try. To come up with the “best colleges for your money “— defined as schools that offer “a great education, at an affordable price, that prepares students for rewarding careers” […]

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7 of Yale’s super-elite secret societies ranked by wealth

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Yale’s secret societies often seem shrouded in mystery. They are bastions of influence and intrigue that hold among their members some of the world’s most powerful people. But some information about secret societies isn’t as clandestine as some might think. Yale’s “landed societies” — those that meet in tombs or halls — are registered with […]

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One of Trump’s rumored picks for secretary of education disagrees with almost all of his policy proposals

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Michelle Rhee, former head of Washington, DC’s public schools, and Betsy DeVos, chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, met with President-elect Trump at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey over the weekend. The meeting fueled speculation that one of the education stalwarts may become the next secretary of education. The meeting with DeVos, […]

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The flood of foreign students at US universities poses an important question about the future of American higher ed

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The number of foreign students in American schools has been surging over the past decade, and numbers are up again, according to newly released data from the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education (IIE). Foreign students in the US were up 7.1% from last year […]

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Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address totally overshadowed this guy’s two-hour speech at the same event

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On November 19, 1863, famed orator and former Secretary of State Edward Everett delivered a two-hour speech at the Gettysburg National Cemetery — but most people only remember the two-minute speech given by President Abraham Lincoln. Arguably, Everett’s words that day deserve just as much attention and praise as Lincoln’s. His speech backhanded the Confederacy […]

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Trump is the first UPenn graduate to make it to the White House — here are the colleges that have produced the most US presidents

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President-elect Donald Trump is the first University of Pennsylvania graduate to ever be elected President of the United States. Trump started out at Fordham University, located in the Bronx borough in New York City, but he transferred to UPenn’s Wharton School of Finance his junior year and graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science […]

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Finland has one of the best education systems in the world — here are 4 things it does better than the US

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Finland is an innovative country when it comes to education, and its innovation yields results. It’s consistently one of the highest performing developed countries on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an important tool for measuring education systems worldwide. While Finland’s ranking dropped to 12 in the most recent PISA ranking, it’s still a […]

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Columbia is suspending its wrestling season after a leak of offensive text messages

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Columbia University suspended its wrestling team’s season on Monday while it investigates a leak of illicit text messages sent among team members, The New York Times reported. The messages, shared on the private messaging app GroupMe, were peppered with derogatory references to women, minorities, and gay people. Screenshots of the messages were made public by […]

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This powerful essay about a painful childhood memory got a student into 14 colleges including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton

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We all have memories from our childhood that we’d likely rather forget. Sometimes it’s those very same painful life lessons that have the most lasting impact on your world view. Recent Harvard University graduate Soa Andrian used one of her childhood memories as a jumping-off point on her college admissions essay. She told the story […]

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Middle school students in Michigan chanted ‘build the wall!’ during lunch in a video that is going viral

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Some students at Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan were recorded chanting “build the wall!” during their lunch period on Wednesday in a video that is quickly going viral. Their words echo the same ubiquitous call that took hold during President-elect Trump’s campaign. A video that appears to show the incident currently has more than […]

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Donald Trump has called for a major federal agency to be eliminated — here’s how he could legally do it

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During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly hit out at the role of federal government in education, arguing instead for increased local control in schools. He’s also hinted in the past that the US Department of Education (ED) should be abolished. “A lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated. Get […]