Is A Simpler Mortgage Application Good Or Bad, If The House Isn’t Inspected? More Ironic Than I Thought.

In my prevous post , I did’t comment on the fact that one of the authors is on the faculty of Columbia Teachers College.  I did now.  Here is the comment.

One of the authors of this piece is from Columbia Teachers College. I didn’t notice that when I posted an earlier comment. That fact, though, makes this article even more analogous to the banking business trying to find ways to make it easier for people to get mortgages, than they are in the quality of the homes, or, the future ability of the debtors to pay – once the bank has the money. Here is why.

At the same time that this article is appearing there are some serious questions about how Columbia Teachers College (and the university itself) goes about doing its business. Here are some of them. (All can be found with comments and links on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com .)

In this newspaper, there was a report that Mayor Bloomberg’s office found that many more of the Teachers College’s graduates made poor teachers than other schools.

Then, there was a report issued by Columbia’s “College Educational Quality Project” that, ineffectively, tried to show that the book “Academically” was wrong about the poor quality of education today . (For example, the report noted the high quality of syllabi. C’mon. Has anyone had a course where they didn’t even have to read the material? )

Columbia’s 3-2 engineering program lets in anybody who just passes science requirements at some highly UNselective schools. Do they dumb down their courses for this to work?

I don’t think any of this reflects on this particular author; but, it certainly reflects on the system.