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Boston Globe
10-07-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Trump's attack on Harvard underscores existential risk of weaponizing college accreditation
As a higher education researcher and a former Harvard College dean who has experienced and contributed to the accreditation process, I believe this is an existential threat to an essential mechanism that has shaped the character of American higher education: pluralistic, decentralized, and, until recently, largely insulated from direct political control. Advertisement Since our country's founding, America's colleges and universities have been defined by institutional autonomy. This is the result of a social compact by which, in return for a commitment to serving society, institutions have been overseen by a decentralized self-regulation system that has allowed variety to flourish, innovation to emerge, and legitimacy to be earned — through professional norms, not external mandates. Today, that social compact is fraying. Accreditation, once an esoteric, peer-driven mechanism for ensuring institutional integrity, has become another proxy battlefield in the nation's higher education wars. Advertisement Accreditation was never intended to be a lever of state power, and it wasn't meant to evaluate schools on narrow economic criteria such as the immediate starting salaries of its graduates. Instead, it grew from the American tradition of voluntary civic self-organization in service to the public good. Educational institutions collaborated to define, evaluate, and improve themselves without surrendering their independence to centralized authority. The accreditation system has sought not to impose uniformity from above but to cultivate shared standards from within, thereby earning public confidence. Accreditation emerged in the late 19th century in response to a fragmented educational landscape. Regional associations emerged to address inconsistent standards and expectations among high schools and colleges. Early efforts addressed basic but vital questions: What is a college? Who is qualified to teach? Accreditation became a civic mechanism for quality assurance, while avoiding direct government control over higher education's mission and governance. Including this principle of mission-based evaluation allowed American educational pluralism to thrive. Elite research universities, faith-based schools, small liberal arts colleges, technical institutes, and teaching colleges could all be recognized without being made uniform. Accreditation became a steward of institutional diversity, safeguarding the public interest while honoring difference. After World War II, this civic covenant shifted dramatically. The GI Bill democratized higher education by opening college doors to millions of veterans. But with expansion came opportunism. Unscrupulous schools and for-profit diploma mills sprang up to tap federal funds, prompting widespread concern over fraud and substandard instruction. Advertisement Some policy makers initially proposed the federal government take over accreditation. However, the example of authoritarian regimes in Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union, where centralized ministries of education decimated academic freedom and politicized scholarship, made many Americans deeply wary of federal government intervention. Instead, Congress opted for a characteristically American solution: In 1952, it required the commissioner of education to identify 'nationally recognized accrediting agencies' that could serve as gatekeepers of federal funds. What had begun as a voluntary, peer-led process now carried the weight — and the risks — of official regulatory authority. So colleges, once supported by tuition and private donors (which presented their own problems of access and influence), became more financially dependent on federal dollars and subjected to federal regulation, making them increasingly susceptible to political interference. Accreditation thus became a double-edged sword. It conferred legitimacy and enabled access to public resources, but it also pulled accrediting agencies into a quasi-regulatory role they were never designed to fill. Today, accreditation is under threat from forces betraying its founding principles. Government officials have begun to wield accreditation as a political weapon, threatening schools' status over disputes related to diversity, discrimination, hiring decisions, curriculum content, or degree programs deemed to have 'low economic value.' Commercial lobbying for relaxed or no meaningful standards threatens to reduce accreditation to a market tool. Such interventions risk transforming peer-based educational evaluation into a mechanism for ideological or financial compliance. Rather than cultivating trust and academic integrity, these approaches may chill institutional missions, restrict curricular freedom, and undermine pluralism under the guise of accountability. Advertisement These interventions are not technical tweaks. They represent a growing effort to consolidate control over higher education in the hands of political actors or subordinate the sector to market forces, weakening the professional norms and pluralism that have long been the foundation of America's higher education system. Together, these political and commercial threats pose systemic risk. If accreditors are pressured to serve partisan or profit-driven agendas, the pluralism that distinguishes American higher education will collapse. Peer review will degrade into checklist compliance or ideologically driven oversight. Politicizing accreditation corrodes trust, undermines expertise, and imperils democratic norms. Accreditation must evolve. But it should do so deliberately, not disruptively. Its strength lies in peer review: iterative, imperfect, and slow by design. In an age of hot takes, such deliberation may seem outdated. But it is how, since the dawn of the scientific revolution, knowledge safeguards itself. Change must come from within, rooted in professional responsibility and review, not be imposed by political agendas or profit motives. America must defend what keeps higher education free. If we break it, we risk universities turning into instruments of politics or profit. Advertisement
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Yahoo
A timeline of homelessness in Los Angeles
Los Angeles experienced its first wide-scale homelessness during two periods of national upheaval — the Great Depression and the housing crunch after World War II. In both cases, the crises abated. In the 1970s, though, economic events and public policy decisions conspired to drive people onto the streets again — and, ever since, Los Angeles has suffered chronic homelessness, with more unsheltered people than any other city in the United States. Going back to the 1800s, the city keeps "tramps," "hobos," "vagrants" and "winos" off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county "poor farm." In 1896, the city builds a new jail with double the capacity of the old one. Read about how policing has contributed to homelessness. The population of Los Angeles quintuples in two decades. In the first months of 1921, more than 25,000 building permits are issued. The area on the eastern side of downtown Los Angeles whose cheap residential hotels, bars, liquor stores and missions made it a magnet for transients becomes widely known as Skid Row. A homeless census in 48 of California's 58 counties finds 101,174 homeless people in a state with a population of 5.7 million. (In 2022, the state had 171,521 homeless people — far more than in 1933, but not per capita, when you consider that the overall population now is about seven times larger.) It is estimated that 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, are living in tents, garages, vehicles and other substandard accommodations, according to a 2021 report by UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. Read about how housing policies exacerbated homelessness in Los Angeles: More than a half-million dwelling units are built from 1940 to 1950 in the L.A. metro area, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more are built during the 1950s. The construction boom, fueled by the GI Bill, quickly ends the epidemic in homelessness. Authorities had pushed out most of the 1,800 families who lived in the Mexican American neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine to build a public housing project called Elysian Park Heights to house 17,000 people. But at the height of anti-communist hysteria, real estate interests, seeing their profits threatened by public housing, launch a successful campaign against it, financing opposition groups that call it "socialist housing." The project is scratched, and Mayor Norris Poulson promises that no new ones will be approved. Some 15,000 single-room occupancy units are demolished in Skid Row and 7,000 low-income Victorian homes are razed on Bunker Hill as civic leaders move to modernize downtown. The act decrees, among other things, that authorities can take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds, ending long-term commitments in the state's 10 psychiatric hospitals. But with few community clinics for patients to seek treatment, many end up on the street. Read more. The average price of a house in Los Angeles hits $100,000, four times what it was in 1970 (about $380,000 in today's dollars, or less than 40% of what the average home costs now). The county estimates that there are 30,000 homeless people on the streets, including 10,000 in Skid Row. By 1984, the Department of Housing and Urban Development finds that L.A.'s homeless numbers surpass New York's. Read how cuts in social services contributed to the homeless crisis: As crack cocaine tears through neighborhoods, legislators respond by passing shockingly stiff mandatory prison terms for the drug, even as more affluent cocaine users face far lighter sentences on the rare occasions when they are arrested. Crack users and other felons leave prison for Skid Row with criminal records that rob them of the ability to make a living, qualify for welfare or subsidized housing, contributing to the area's sudden transformation into a strongly Black enclave. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in April 2006 that in the absence of sufficient shelter beds, arrests for resting or sleeping on the sidewalks constitute 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Almost immediately, tents mushroom on the streets of L.A. The 9th Circuit's Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling bars property owners from calling in garbage trucks to dispose of people's belongings in Skid Row. Overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County increase 515% from 2016 to 2022, as fentanyl flooded the illegal drug market. By 2023, fentanyl would be detected in 70% of such deaths. The average single-family home hits $563,721 in April 2015. Ten years later, it is $1,060,048, according to Zillow. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if there are not enough shelter beds available to the homeless, in effect becoming the law in most of the West when the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case in 2019. After a backlash against encampments in many Western cities, the Supreme Court rules in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson that local governments' use of civil and criminal penalties for illegally camping on public land does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Homelessness in California used to be much worse. Here's how L.A. turned it around
The tragedy of homelessness can never be long out of mind here in California, where tents line sidewalks and freeway underpasses and lost street-corner souls rant at God knows what. We gawk in sadness and amazement. And we tell ourselves: It's never been this bad. But it has. At least in relative numbers, it was once even worse. California's homeless population zoomed to 101,174 in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression — according to a census of 48 of the state's 58 counties. That meant that 1.8% of the population of 5.7 million lived with no permanent roof overhead. Contrast that with 2022, when a federal report put the number of California homeless at 171,521, or about 0.4% of the 39 million who now live here. That's one of many things I learned in a deep and probing investigation by The Times and reporters Mitchell Landsberg and Gale Holland into the roots of California's homeless crisis. Their thoroughly researched and nuanced story is a far cry from how The Times used to cover homelessness. Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the bombastic publisher of the newspaper, had this to say about the homeless in an 1882 editorial: 'Don't feed the worthless chaps. It only encourages them in their idleness and viciousness.' The economic boom that came along with World War II, the subsequent GI Bill and low-cost veterans loans to help those returning from war move into their dream houses. More than a half-million dwelling units were built in the L.A. metro area from 1940 to 1950, according to the U.S. census, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more were built during the 1950s. The city added nearly as many homes as there were Angelenos. Homelessness had all but disappeared. Not long after that postwar boom, the city and the state put the brakes on the kind of development needed to provide enough homes for California's consistently growing population. Voters and their representatives failed to approve large apartment projects in many neighborhoods. Zoning and restrictive loan practices prohibited Black and Latino people from moving into certain neighborhoods. When the state mental hospitals disappeared in the 1960s, Gov. Ronald Reagan and Democrats in the Legislature didn't come anywhere close to producing the community-based clinics that were supposed to care for some of our most fragile residents. Yes. The public has shown, with the passage of new taxes, in particular a half-cent sales tax in Los Angeles County, that it's ready to pay to resolve the problem. The Legislature and governor have recently joined in, easing the rules surrounding new housing construction. L.A. County's homeless numbers began to level off in 2023 and, this spring, the agency overseeing the homeless projected that the unsheltered population had dropped by 5% to 10%. The total of roughly 70,000 homeless in L.A. County is still far too high, and more help is needed. Here's more on homelessness in Los Angeles, including a timeline of key events and policies that have made L.A. the homeless capital of the United States. Skylar Blue writes: 'My favorite Beach is Centerville Beach in Ferndale, California!' Ray Highfill writes: 'LaJolla, Calif.' Email us at @ and your response might appear in the newsletter this week. On July 10, 2015, the movie 'Minions' — a spinoff of the wildly popular 'Despicable Me' movie series — was released in theaters. Here's what The Times thought at the time about the film, which puts the titular yellow sidekicks to history's greatest villains in the spotlight. Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
Los Angeles Times
10-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
A timeline of homelessness in Los Angeles
Los Angeles experienced its first wide-scale homelessness during two periods of national upheaval — the Great Depression and the housing crunch after World War II. In both cases, the crises abated. In the 1970s, though, economic events and public policy decisions conspired to drive people onto the streets again — and, ever since, Los Angeles has suffered chronic homelessness, with more unsheltered people than any other city in the United States. Going back to the 1800s, the city keeps 'tramps,' 'hobos,' 'vagrants' and 'winos' off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county 'poor farm.' In 1896, the city builds a new jail with double the capacity of the old one. Read about how policing has contributed to homelessness. The population of Los Angeles quintuples in two decades. In the first months of 1921, more than 25,000 building permits are issued. The area on the eastern side of downtown Los Angeles whose cheap residential hotels, bars, liquor stores and missions made it a magnet for transients becomes widely known as Skid Row. A homeless census in 48 of California's 58 counties finds 101,174 homeless people in a state with a population of 5.7 million. (In 2022, the state had 171,521 homeless people — far more than in 1933, but not per capita, when you consider that the overall population now is about seven times larger.) It is estimated that 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, are living in tents, garages, vehicles and other substandard accommodations, according to a 2021 report by UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. Read about how housing policies exacerbated homelessness in Los Angeles: More than a half-million dwelling units are built from 1940 to 1950 in the L.A. metro area, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more are built during the 1950s. The construction boom, fueled by the GI Bill, quickly ends the epidemic in homelessness. Authorities had pushed out most of the 1,800 families who lived in the Mexican American neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine to build a public housing project called Elysian Park Heights to house 17,000 people. But at the height of anti-communist hysteria, real estate interests, seeing their profits threatened by public housing, launch a successful campaign against it, financing opposition groups that call it 'socialist housing.' The project is scratched, and Mayor Norris Poulson promises that no new ones will be approved. Some 15,000 single-room occupancy units are demolished in Skid Row and 7,000 low-income Victorian homes are razed on Bunker Hill as civic leaders move to modernize downtown. The act decrees, among other things, that authorities can take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds, ending long-term commitments in the state's 10 psychiatric hospitals. But with few community clinics for patients to seek treatment, many end up on the street. Read more. The average price of a house in Los Angeles hits $100,000, four times what it was in 1970 (about $380,000 in today's dollars, or less than 40% of what the average home costs now). The county estimates that there are 30,000 homeless people on the streets, including 10,000 in Skid Row. By 1984, the Department of Housing and Urban Development finds that L.A.'s homeless numbers surpass New York's. Read how cuts in social services contributed to the homeless crisis: As crack cocaine tears through neighborhoods, legislators respond by passing shockingly stiff mandatory prison terms for the drug, even as more affluent cocaine users face far lighter sentences on the rare occasions when they are arrested. Crack users and other felons leave prison for Skid Row with criminal records that rob them of the ability to make a living, qualify for welfare or subsidized housing, contributing to the area's sudden transformation into a strongly Black enclave. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in April 2006 that in the absence of sufficient shelter beds, arrests for resting or sleeping on the sidewalks constitute 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Almost immediately, tents mushroom on the streets of L.A. The 9th Circuit's Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling bars property owners from calling in garbage trucks to dispose of people's belongings in Skid Row. Overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County increase 515% from 2016 to 2022, as fentanyl flooded the illegal drug market. By 2023, fentanyl would be detected in 70% of such deaths. The average single-family home hits $563,721 in April 2015. Ten years later, it is $1,060,048, according to Zillow. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if there are not enough shelter beds available to the homeless, in effect becoming the law in most of the West when the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case in 2019. After a backlash against encampments in many Western cities, the Supreme Court rules in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson that local governments' use of civil and criminal penalties for illegally camping on public land does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.
New York Post
07-07-2025
- Business
- New York Post
What will happen to the housing market during a ‘baby dust'?
Advertisement The American dream was built around a timeline: Get married, buy a home, start a family. But that timeline is breaking down. Today, Americans are waiting longer or opting out entirely: Fewer marriages, fewer babies, delayed moves. And behind it all, a housing market that increasingly seems like it was built for a different time. That's why some experts are warning that the next big stress test for housing might not be affordability—but fertility. Politicians and pundits have begun sounding the alarm about America's declining birth rate, framing it as an existential threat to the economy, social safety nets, and the future of the country itself. To fix it, they're calling on young Americans to start families and invoking a familiar, almost mythic era as the model: the baby boom. Advertisement But the baby boom wasn't just a spike in births; it was also a blueprint for how Americans lived. Young couples married early, bought homes young, and raised families in newly built suburbs. It's the version of adulthood the housing market was built around, and it's a version that fewer Americans are living today. 3 Young Americans are being called to start families and invoking a familiar, almost mythic era as the model: the baby boom. Hernan Schmidt – So, what happens to a housing market built for growth when growth slows down? The baby boom blueprint that shaped U.S. housing Advertisement When Americans talk about ideal housing patterns, they're often referencing a very specific moment in history: the post-World War II baby boom. During that period, household formation surged alongside population growth, giving rise to a generation of young families, newly built homes, and widespread homeownership. It was the birth of the starter home as we know it—a modest, affordable house for a growing family. 'GI Joe and Rosie the Riveter got together right after World War II, got married, and births exploded,' explains James Hughes, a population and housing expert at Rutgers University. 'So we had rapid household formation.' That boom in household creation was closely tied to rapid housing production and policy support. 'You had the GI Bill, basically making over 4 million low-cost mortgages available to returning service members that really fueled homeownership,' explains Diana Elliott, senior vice president of programs at Population Reference Bureau, an organization that studies population. Advertisement Together, these forces created a blueprint that would shape American housing expectations for generations: Finish school, get married, buy a home, start a family—all before age 30. By 1984, this pattern was still holding, with 78% of 30-year-olds at the time married, according to data from John Burns Research & Consulting. But over the past few decades, each successive generation has followed a different, slower path. Delayed milestones, delayed demand 'The ordering in which [household formation and childbearing] happens is not as linear as it maybe was following World War II,' explains Elliott. Some of that comes down to economic and structural barriers. 'There's more of that startup time to become an adult that wasn't the case 50, 75 years ago,' she adds, pointing to rising education levels and changing job expectations. But part of it is also about choice. 'Preferences are really important here,' she notes. 'Some people increasingly have the ability to say that they don't want families … which wasn't necessarily how people felt post-World War II.' The ripple effect extends beyond the personal. As Americans put off starting families, the national fertility rate has dropped far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. While that has inspired a national conversation about how to foster another baby boom, the likelihood of a second boom is 'very, very low,' Elliott says. 'Other countries have tried to enact really explicit policies to change this. … It hasn't worked.' Advertisement 3 During the baby boom, household formation surged alongside population growth, giving rise to a generation of young families, newly built homes, and widespread homeownership. Monkey Business – Yet the nostalgia for another baby boom persists—mirroring the postwar optimism that helped fuel the rise of suburban homeownership. And for those holding out hope that millennials will 'catch up,' the demographic math gets more complicated with time. 'What we have a lot of today: double income, no kids. … They're certainly delaying it if they're going to have children,' says Hughes. 'But some are questioning whether they are ever going to have children.' So what happens when an entire generation delays family formation long enough that the replacement rate slips out of reach—and with it, the demand that's propped up the housing market for decades? The future buyer: Older, fewer, different needs Advertisement When life milestones are delayed, so is household formation, and that ripple effect can reshape the entire housing market. One of the clearest signs of this shift is in who's renting. Right now, 72% of U.S. renters are aged 30 or older—an all-time high, according to John Burns Research & Consulting. It reflects a shift in typical homebuying age and, by extension, a significant change in the timing of household formation. The reasons for this delay are both structural and economic. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! Advertisement 'Expensive housing makes it very, very difficult, particularly for single people, to leave their parents' house and rent an apartment,' says Hughes, the population and housing expert at Rutgers. Facing high housing costs and limited inventory, young adults are staying home longer, waiting longer to rent, and pushing off buying altogether. But the consequences don't stop there. When people delay forming independent households, other milestones—like having children—often get delayed, too. And those individual decisions can have long-term implications. 'The fewer children that are being born today means fewer people in 25 years who will be purchasing homes and starting their own households,' says Elliott. It's a compounding cycle: Delayed households today could mean fewer buyers and less demand tomorrow. What happens when household growth slows? Advertisement While America's youth population has already peaked and is projected to decline by 2.4 million over the next decade, housing experts still expect to see steady demand in the near term. But the long-term picture looks very different. Net household growth has slowed for the second year in a row, according to research from Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 2024, the U.S. added just 1.56 million households, down from 1.61 million in 2023. As of early 2025, that number has slowed even further to an annualized pace of 1.26 million. That's a steep drop from the 1.93 million annual average seen between 2019 and 2022. This slowdown is unfolding at a moment of rising uncertainty across all major drivers of household formation: employment rates, income growth, immigration, and demographics. Perhaps most critically, the immigration surge that helped sustain population growth in recent years came to an end in early 2025. And the demographic headwinds are only intensifying. Beginning this year, the baby boomer generation will begin turning 80, ushering in a period where rising mortality rates might begin to overshadow the formation of new households. Without a surge in immigration, Elliott estimates we could begin to see more births than deaths in the U.S. as early as 2029. Hughes agrees: 'If there is no immigration, eventually the population and number of households are going to contract.' One thing is certain: The fastest-growing housing segment will be older adults. That raises major questions about whether today's housing supply and the homes we're building will match what tomorrow's population will need. And these shifts aren't playing out uniformly. 'You also have regional differentials,' says Hughes. 'The Northeast and the Midwest regions are the demographic laggards [compared with] the South and the West … who have been the recipients of migration.' 3 While America's youth population has already peaked and is projected to decline by 2.4 million over the next decade, housing experts still expect to see steady demand in the near term. But the long-term picture looks very different. Spiroview Inc. – Can builders keep up with the shift? With later household formation, shrinking family sizes, and slowing population growth, housing demand is evolving—and builders, developers, and policymakers will need to evolve with it. 'Housing, I think, in terms of facing contraction, is still pretty far off,' says Hughes. But while demand might hold, it will likely be for a different kind of housing entirely. Buyers aren't vanishing—they're showing up later, older, and with different needs. The challenge, then, isn't just to build more homes; it's to build the right homes for a slower-growth, later-blooming America. That could mean designing smaller homes in emerging metros or prioritizing flexibility for multigenerational households—trends that we're already seeing crop up across the country. It could also mean finally preparing for the wave of older homeowners who will dominate household growth in the coming decades. 'We might need to think about what housing for older people in the future looks like,' Elliott adds—especially as millennials age into retirement with different expectations than their parents. The sooner we accept that the old model isn't coming back, the sooner we can design a new one that fits where America is headed. What does it look like to build homes for buyers who arrive later, need less space, and want more flexibility? What happens to markets where household growth slows or reverses? And how can we ensure that the next generation o
