The report is from an admissions workgroup consisting of university faculty and a handful of administrators. It focuses on a remedial math course UCSD introduced in 2016 to help freshmen fill gaps in high school–level math. The course initially enrolled about one percent of incoming students. However, instructors began to realize many students lacked even more fundamental middle- and elementary-level math skills. In response, the math department split the course into two courses: one focused on elementary and middle school math, and the other on high school math.

By 2024, more than 900 students—12.5 percent of the entering freshman class at UCSD—placed into these remedial courses.

To give a sense of the skill deficiencies among students in these remedial courses, the report shows specific math problems along with the fractions of students who could answer them correctly. Here are three example questions at the elementary level (edited very lightly for presentation here):

1. Fill in the blank: 7 + 2 = __ + 6

2. Round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.

3. Find (13/16) ÷ 2

While it would be reasonable to expect every student who is accepted into an elite public university to be able to answer these questions correctly, many tested students could not. Just 75, 39, and 34 percent of test takers gave the correct answers to these questions, respectively.

The report identifies several factors that contribute to these disturbing—and frankly embarrassing—outcomes, including grade inflation in California’s K-12 schools that allows students to graduate with good grades but weak skills, the pandemic (every educator’s favorite scapegoat), and the UC system’s stubborn refusal to require standardized tests for admissions. But beneath all of this lies a deeper issue: a system-wide erosion of meritocracy. When merit is downplayed and standards are continually lowered, you end up with students arriving at elite universities unable to do elementary math.

To be clear, UCSD is not the only institution that has this problem, and I don’t want to punish it unduly for being transparent. In fact, the report talks about similar problems at other UC campuses, and what it describes aligns with my own experience as a professor at the University of Missouri.

There is evidence all around us of the shift away from meritocracy in education. Nationally and in Missouri, student grades, and high school and college graduation rates, are at historic or near-historic highs despite clear evidence of declining academic skills. Educational administrators at all levels of schooling have demonstrated a blatant disregard for excellence.

(Disclosure: I am a proud —though less so by the day—alumnus of UC San Diego, where I received my BA, MA, and Ph.D.)

The post We’re Destroying Meritocracy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis has a reputation for being a violent city. Crime issues have helped push people out in droves and deterred newcomers from settling in the area. St. Louis City’s population has decreased by over 30% since the 1980s, and the number of vacant downtown buildings has increased substantially. The Wall Street Journal went as far as to call downtown a “real estate nightmare.”

Although St. Louis continues to rank among the most dangerous cities in the country, efforts have been made to solve the ongoing crime problem, beginning with the replacement of former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in 2023. Gardner exacerbated the crime issue in several ways, including having an exclusion list of police officers who were not allowed to bring cases to her office and creating a massive backlog of more than 6,700 cases that awaited charging decisions. The current St. Louis Circuit Attorney, Gabe Gore, has since cleared all cases in the backlog.

More recent efforts include House Bill (HB) 495, signed by Governor Mike Kehoe into law in March. This legislation transfers control of the St. Louis Police Department to a state-appointed board. The governor has already made five interim appointments to the six-person board (the mayor is the sixth member of the board). In addition, a $45 million 911 dispatch center broke ground last year in St. Louis with the goal of improving response times. In St. Louis, only half of the 911 calls in 2022 were answered within the national standard of 10 seconds.

It is unclear whether these efforts will have positive impacts on public safety in St. Louis, but what is clear is that violent crime in the city is down. It was down 7.8% in 2024 compared to 2023. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) reported homicides were down 6.3 % in 2024. It is worth noting that crime is down across the country, so this may be part of a larger trend.

The fact that St. Louis has lower violent crime and homicide rates is a positive sign, but time will tell if the city can sustain this success and lose the moniker of being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities.

The post St. Louis’s Improving Crime Data appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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In a time when some people argue that Big Tech has gotten too big, Robby Soave’s message is simple: don’t panic. In his new book, Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future, Robby argues that whatever challenges the future holds, we will be better prepared to handle them as a country, as a society, and as individuals if the government hasn’t vaporized social media via some giant, metaphorical “Unfriend” button.

Robby is a senior editor at Reason and has also been published in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and U.S. News & World Report. Named on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list in 2017, he became well known for his correction of a Rolling Stone article on sexual assault at the University of Virginia and his correction of the highly reported incident concerning Catholic high school students at the Lincoln Memorial in 2019.

Please join the Show-Me Institute and Reason for an evening of conversation. The webinar link will be sent to you after you register.

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The post What Should We Do About Facebook? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Read Chris’s full report: A Plan to Make Medicaid Fair, Focused, and Accountable

Chris Pope is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he was director of policy research at West Health, a nonprofit medical research organization; health-policy fellow at the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce; and research manager at the American Enterprise Institute. Pope’s research focuses on healthcare payment policy, and he has recently published reports on hospital-market regulation, entitlement design, and insurance-market reform. His work has appeared in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Health Affairs, US News and World Report, and Politico.

Pope holds a B.Sc. in government and economics from the London School of Economics and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis.​

The post SMI Podcast: Chris Pope – A New Plan for Medicaid appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At Haas Hall Academy, a charter public high school in Fayetteville, 100 percent of the students took at least one AP exam, and 95 percent received a passing score on the exam that could be translated to college credit. At Rock Bridge Senior High in Columbia, just 44 percent of students took an AP exam and only 38 percent received a passing score. A high school in a college town with fewer than half of their students enrolling in college-level coursework. Hmmm.

Are the students in Fayetteville smarter than the students in Columbia? I don’t think so. Here’s the difference: Arkansas doesn’t use charter schools as punishment like Missouri does. They have charter schools in urban, suburban and rural settings. Missouri only has charter schools in two failed urban districts.

I’m sure that Haas Hall Academy offers a challenging curriculum that isn’t a good fit for every student. But students are welcome to take on that challenge, if they so choose. Students in Columbia are stuck in a public-school system designed in the early part of the last century—draw a circle around a school and everyone in that circle has to go to said school. I’m completely convinced that if a school like Haas Hall Academy opened in Columbia, it would end up with a waiting list like the one in Fayetteville. Too bad Missouri legislators won’t allow it.

The post 2,532nd Best appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That was my initial reaction to this political attempt to deny Missouri parents public school choice, but there is so much more to be said.

Charter schools are no longer a new thing. They’ve been established for decades in many different forms in many different states. Initially, they may have been experiments that policymakers either chose to, or were forced to, accept in their public school districts. Today, they are an established sector of public schooling that continues to build on what early pioneers accomplished. Millions of U.S. public school students have spent their entire K-12 educational experience in charter schools, and more than 1.5 million public school students have received their high school diplomas from charter schools. A wealth of research, experience, and anecdotal evidence has shown that charters are a good option for many families and a vital option for families who live in failing school districts and don’t have the ability to move.

I’ve stood beside parents when they were fighting, with limited means but great determination, for their kids to have a chance for a decent life. Because that’s what this issue means for them—quite literally. Charter schools, without question, have made great strides in educating students who had been dismissed for decades as too difficult to educate. For low-income students of color in our worst-failing urban districts, charter schools are a lifeline.

Too many kids grow up, often without fathers, in tough neighborhoods that have abandoned properties and high crime rates. But if they can go to a good school, with principals who are allowed to keep order and teachers who have freedom and incentives to tailor the curriculum to the needs of their students, they have a chance. Cynthia Brown, a parent of a student at North Side Community School in St. Louis—a charter school that was opened in one of the highest-need neighborhoods in the city—put it this way, “It’s setting a stage for a change. When you have children who are being brought up right, being educated right, the outcome is much different. There is so much turmoil in St. Louis. A lot of it has to do with the lack of education.” The students at North Side Community School are twice as likely to be proficient in reading and three times as likely to be proficient in math than as peers at other high-poverty elementary schools in St. Louis.

The good news is that these charter schools are helping families change their trajectories. Many of them will make it out. We know that. Nine of the largest charter school networks in the nation that serve disadvantaged students and have enough alumni to track have college graduation rates that are three to five times the national average for low-income students. Not only are these students off the street and out of jail, they are starting their adult lives with college degrees.

And don’t think for a minute that these successes are only happening in poor, urban districts. Hundreds of public school districts in the U.S. are using charters as a tool in their toolbox—when enrollment is growing faster than they can add buildings, when enrollment is declining and their small-town school might be forced to close, and when parents seek unique educational programs that their public school district cannot or will not offer. Last year, five of the top ten high schools in the U.S., according to US News, were charter schools. These are five highly rigorous, suburban high schools with long waiting lists.

And yet, opponents have continued to trot out the same tired arguments for decades. Charter schools don’t cost more than public schools; typically, they cost less because charter school students only get, on average, about 78 percent of the funding that traditional public school students get. And they produce more bang for the buck. Charter schools don’t cherry pick or discriminate. They don’t charge tuition. They don’t teach religion.

To those of us who work in this field and have seen the same excuses for all these years, it’s clear that  where charter schools aren’t made widely available, it’s because they threaten a powerful establishment. In these places, charter schools might be reluctantly allowed to compete with the poorest performing schools, but they are barred from competing elsewhere, lest they expose the “good” schools as really just mediocre or worse. They threaten the public school monopoly because, if forced to compete, the monopoly may lose market share. Charter schools are agents of change, and in some places, the public education establishment, all its talk notwithstanding, is viscerally afraid of change.

This isn’t the case everywhere. In many districts, charter–district collaboration has led to increased funding for all schools, sharing of best practices and professional development, unified data and information systems for parents, and improved outcomes for all students—charter and traditional alike. While détente is possible, collaboration, as it turns out, is even better.

But, unfortunately, not for the parents and students in Missouri.

In Missouri, every time someone makes a real proposal to expand charters, the threatened interest strikes back. The public employee unions lean on liberal lawmakers from the urban areas, while school superintendents and school board members and “public spirited” corporate types lean on conservatives from the suburbs and the rural areas. Wealthy and middle-class parents—the kind of people who would insist on change if their kids were at stake—make their own arrangements for their own families and stay out of the debate. And most elected officials aren’t willing to buck the tide—not when the only real interest on the other side are marginalized people who may not vote at all and, if they do vote, probably won’t figure out who is blocking their chances anyway.

So the politicians vow to study the problem, or cite canards about charter schools in interviews with reporters who don’t know anything about the subject, or pass legislation purporting to make charters widely available while regulating them in a way that ensures they will never open.

But we’ll keep fighting. We’ll keep making the arguments; we’ll keep recruiting a few precious champions, whether liberal or conservative, and we’ll keep trying to persuade the other lawmakers to do what’s right. And we’ll keep helping parents demand what they know they deserve—high-quality education for their children, regardless of where they live.

The post Tell Me Something I Didn’t Know: We Don’t Need a Task Force for Facts about Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

New research confirms, however, that school choice gives parents an incentive to become more knowledgeable about different schooling options. A study by Michael F. Lovenheim and Patrick Walsh found “clear evidence that the availability of public school-choice options under NCLB [No Child Left Behind] increased demand for information on school quality.” When parents had the option to transfer their child to another school, internet searches about the schools in their area increased; conversely, when there was no longer a transfer option, searches dropped.

When people say that parents are not informed enough decide among school options, they fail to recognize that school choice can actually encourage parents to gather information and shop around for the best school.

Moreover, state agencies and third-party organizations can help make information on school quality more accessible. Louisiana’s Department of Education launched a website that allows families to compare schools and child care centers via customizable searches.

Show Me KC Schools is a nonprofit organization that helps parents navigate all of their options—public, charter, and private schools—in Kansas City and provides them with the information they need. In an article for US News & World Report last month, Mike McShane described what the organization does to assist parents:

They have an online school finder that allows users to compare and contrast the offerings and performance of different schools. They host a school fair that had over 700 attendees last year. They offer guided school tours that begin with a discussion of what parents are looking for and end with a debrief and conversation with other parents whose children attend the various schools they have visited.

Sure, there will be a learning curve if new school choice programs are introduced, but organizations like Show Me KC Schools can help with the transition.

The bottom line is that school choice empowers parents—it creates an incentive to find out which school will meet their child’s needs and it provides parents with an opportunity to send their child to that school. We should not underestimate parents’ desire to give their kids a better education or the time they are willing to devote to that effort if given the opportunity. 

The post Think Parents Won’t Get the Information They Need To Choose Between Schools? Think Again. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nat Malkus, an education policy research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has a terrific piece this week in U.S News & World Report, “Beware the Cost of Teacher Benefits.” In it, he shows that school districts are increasingly spending money on benefits, such as teacher pensions, at the expense of teacher salaries. Nationally, benefits increased from 21 percent of total compensation in 2003 to 28 percent in 2014.

Because of what I know about the issues with Missouri’s teacher pension systems, Malkus’ analysis got me thinking about how much of a school district’s total current expenditures go to salary and benefits. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, I found out.

In 1998, nearly 80 percent of total current expenditures went to salary and benefits.  Sixteen years later, the percentage was hardly changed at 79 percent. The big difference, however, was the shift from salary to benefits. In 1998, salary comprised 66.8 percent of total current expenditures and benefits were 12.7 percent. In 2014, salary had dropped to 60.6 percent and benefits climbed to 18.2 percent. (See the figure below; note that the vertical axis begins at 50 percent.)

But this illustration doesn’t tell the whole story. During this period, Missouri’s largest teacher retirement system increased its contribution rates from 10.5 percent from the district and 10.5 percent from the teacher to 14.5 percent from the district and 14.5 percent from the teacher. Because the district’s contributions are accounted for in the benefits calculation above but the teachers’ contributions are not, this graph understates how dramatic the shift from salary to benefits has been.

In the graph below, I separate out teachers’ salaries from their pension contributions to show the trend. As you can see, the percentage of school district expenditures that goes to benefits has grown substantially during this period. 

Once we account for teacher contributions to their pension system, teacher salaries in Missouri total less than 52 percent of Missouri school districts’ total current expenditures. Meanwhile, benefits (including employee pension contributions) account for 27 percent. And this doesn’t even take into account payments toward insurance premiums teachers are required to make or the 14.5 percent pension payment on the value of benefits they receive from their school district they are required to pay as well.

Pensions and benefits are consuming more and more of our state’s educational resources. What this means for teachers is that more of their compensation is delayed compensation. We’ll pay them on Tuesday for teaching today.

There is nothing wrong with having great benefits and a secure retirement. Yet this shift is alarming for two reasons. First, it helps perpetuate the idea that teachers are underpaid, because people rarely consider benefits when making wage comparisons. Second, this trend is a warning sign. Our pension liabilities are growing and they are diverting money from other important areas, such as salaries. If we want a competitive teacher labor market in the future, we have to address pension issues today. 

The post We’ll Gladly Pay You On Tuesday for Teaching Today appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The executive order calls for agencies to pinpoint “at least two” current regulations to be repealed for each new proposed regulation. And it says the net incremental cost for fiscal 2017 should “be no greater than zero,” meaning the cost of new regulations should be offset by existing rules that will be rescinded.

House Speaker Paul Ryan applauded the order in a statement Monday afternoon, noting that it builds on House Republicans’ “Better Way” agenda and comes as the lower chamber is set to repeal a number of Obama era regulations this week.

“The explosion of federal regulations has hamstrung small business growth and crippled our economy,” he said. “President Trump’s executive order helps bring the nation’s regulatory regime into the 21st century by putting regulators on a budget, and addressing the costs agencies can impose each year.”

After the President’s announcement, my colleague Mike McShane reminded me that, in fact, he has talked about precisely the same kind of regulatory reforms in the past. In his case, the context was education. From his US News and World Report piece from last year:

Our Tory compatriots across the pond offer a way forward. In 2010, the Conservative government of the United Kingdom implemented what they called “one in, one out” (later revised to “one in, two out“) that required government to remove a regulation of equivalent compliance cost for every new regulation that they proposed. Want to require a new form to be submitted to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills tracking how businesses recruit new employees? Lovely, not a bother at all. You simply must find another form that takes the same amount of effort or another requirement that takes the same amount of time and eliminate it.

But the regulatory push doesn’t end there, of course. Newly inaugurated governor Eric Greitens has established his own regulatory beach head to fight from, and while it may not be “one in, two out” quite yet, it’s reasonable to believe something similar is on the horizon. That regulatory freeze is important because it halts business as usual in the state bureaucracy and offers an opportunity for a clear-eyed reassessment of what the state is doing well, and doing wrong, in its rulemaking and regulatory processes.

Expect more about good-government regulatory reforms as this year’s session proceeds, but it is refreshing to see that our state and federal governments may soon be getting smaller, one rule at a time.

The post Regulatory Reform Emerges as Major Issue, Nationally and in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

By all accounts, the lion’s share of this decline is due to the protests that roiled the campus last school year. Those events were covered in short and long form in local and national press over the course of several weeks. The charging and ultimate dismissal of professor Melissa Click continues to keep the story alive.

Interestingly, just last month, researchers at Harvard Business school estimated the enrollment impacts of scandals at the nation’s top 100 universities. While they narrowly defined “scandals” as sexual assaults, murders, cheating, and hazing incidents, it’s easy to imagine large-scale protests of alleged racism and professors assaulting students as functioning similarly.

The researchers found that, on average, a scandal that gets long-form news coverage will decrease university enrollment by about 10 percent in the following year, which they say is roughly equivalent to losing 10 spots in the US News and World Report rankings. While schools that have experienced scandals are less likely to have another in the five years following one, the damage is done.

Quantifying these effects underscores the importance of solid management of our universities. Yes, some of these instances are out of the university’s control, but how they handle them will determine how the media, and prospective students, respond.  

The post Researchers Estimate Effect of Scandals on University Enrollment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri Senate Bill 493 includes a provision that would allow students in unaccredited school districts to attend non-religious private schools. This provision, the only one in the bill intended to expand opportunities for students rather than restrict them, has opponents of private school choice up in arms.

During committee hearings, Missouri Sen. Jason Holsman (D–Dist. 7) voiced the lone “no” vote against the bill. In doing so, he expressed one of the most erroneous arguments against private school choice: “Private schools have admission standards, they don’t take all kids.”

I have news for you. Public schools don’t take all kids — they only take the kids who live within a geographic boundary. In this sense, my private neighborhood swimming pool is a lot like public schools — you can get in if you can afford a house in the neighborhood.

More to the point, there are examples of public schools in Missouri that do not accept all students within the district boundaries. Here is a snippet that I wrote on Education News about one of those schools:

One prime example of a public school that does not serve all students is Metro Academic and Classical High School, a magnet school in the Saint Louis Missouri Public School District. U.S. News & World Report ranks Metro as the No. 1 public school in the state, for good reason. Metro grads regularly go on to top-tier universities and perform exceptionally well on achievement tests.

There may be great things going on at Metro, but it cannot be denied that part of the school’s success is derived from its admissions process. To be admitted, a student must score proficient or advanced on the state MAP test. In 2013, nearly 14 percent of black eighth graders in Saint Louis scored proficient or advanced. That means more than 86 percent of black students in the Saint Louis Public School District do not meet the admissions criteria for Metro.

Lincoln College Prep in Kansas City is another public magnet school with selective admissions. The school also de-selects, or kicks out, students who aren’t cutting it. If a student’s grade point average drops below a 2.5, he or she has one semester to improve or be shipped out to another district public school.

It is wrong to hold private schools up to a standard that the public schools do not meet. More importantly, it is bad policy to oppose expanding opportunities for the students who need options the most.

The post Lawmaker Holds Double Standard For Private Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the great myths in education today is that all public schools serve all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, opponents of school choice make frequent use of this falsehood in arguing against any expenditure of public money to help disadvantaged students attend private schools. They argue: “If private schools do not serve every student, they should not get tax dollars.” It is time to set the record straight: individual schools — whether public or private — do not serve all students. Nor should they.

One prime example of a public school that does not serve all students is Metro Academic and Classical High School, a magnet school in the Saint Louis Public School District. U.S. News & World Report ranks Metro as the No. 1 public school in the state, for good reason. Metro grads regularly go on to top-tier universities and perform exceptionally well on achievement tests.

There may be great things going on at Metro, but it cannot be denied that part of the school’s success is derived from its admissions process. To be admitted, a student must score proficient or advanced on the state MAP test. In 2013, nearly 14 percent of black eighth graders in Saint Louis scored proficient or advanced. That means more than 86 percent of black students in the Saint Louis Public School District do not meet the admissions criteria for Metro.

The Saint Louis Public School District has more than 25 magnet schools. Though most do not have admission standards as rigorous as those at Metro, they typically do have some requirements. By design, these admission standards keep students out.

Though they may not have magnet schools or a selective admissions process, other area districts do have special schools designed to serve their most disabled, disturbed, and/or disruptive students.

In 1992, the Parkway School District opened Fern Ridge High School. The school is designed to help “tenth through twelfth grade students, including those with disabilities, succeed when conventional methods have failed.” Students who cannot make it in the general population can be transferred to Fern Ridge. In other words, individual Parkway high schools do not serve all students.

Parkway is not alone in having a special school for students with unique challenges. In 1957, the Special School District (SSD) of Saint Louis County was established. It “was the net result of years of hard work and advocacy by parents of children whose educational needs were not being met by the existing public school system.” Today, the SSD serves approximately 23,000 students through services provided at district-run schools, independent sites, and two technical high schools.

Other students with disabilities attend the Missouri School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf, or use the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) at home.

The bottom line is that individual schools do not serve all students. That is a good thing. There are great benefits that come from having highly specialized schools that are skilled at educating special students. Bright, gifted students are challenged and receive a tremendous education at Metro High. Students with special needs are encouraged and given the tools to succeed at Fern Ridge. By specializing, these schools are able to provide students with a better education than they might have received in a traditional school.

It is ridiculous to expect individual private schools to serve all students when individual public schools do not fulfill this task. Rather than place unrealistic expectations on private schools, or public schools for that matter, we should work to give every child access to the school that is going to best meet their needs. That may be a traditional district-run school, a magnet school, a special school, a charter school, and yes, even a private school.

Through school choice, every student can be served. As Milton Friedman once wrote, “The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools.” Isn’t that what we really need — a healthy variety of schools that can meet the unique needs of each of our students?

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Public Schools Do Not Serve All Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to its release:

The Review looked at 1,130 institutions that prepare 99 percent of the nation’s traditionally trained teachers.

Overwhelmingly, it found that U.S. colleges and universities are turning out first-year teachers with inadequate knowledge and classroom management skills. On a four-star scale, less than 10 percent of rated programs earned three stars or more.

University of Missouri administrators may have expected they would perform poorly, as they actually denied researchers access to teacher syllabi, claiming they were intellectual property and protected under federal copyright law. A judge has ruled in favor of the school’s refusal. That’s right, the university system did not want to share even an outline of what it teaches its students, the same outlines that are distributed to students at the beginning of the course.

That is too bad, but their resistance won’t last long. NCTQ will be conducting a study of education schools each year and publishing the results in partnership with U.S. News & World Report, which has become the standard-bearer for university ratings. Missouri will eventually have to share with everyone exactly what it teaches its would-be teachers. We can’t move forward without knowing where we are right now; universities should support this. Moreover, students should have access to this information when deciding which college they would like to attend.

The post Who Teaches The Teachers? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The University of Missouri?Columbia has won approval to drop the hyphen from its name, in all but its most official communications.

This name change follows a series of identity crises suffered among Missouri universities. The University of Missouri?Rolla recently changed its name to Missouri University of Science and Technology; Southwest Missouri State University is now Missouri State University; and Central Missouri State University is now the University of Central Missouri.

OK, good — I’m glad that we’ve got that all cleared up now.

This name change bothers me. Yes, Mizzou, we all realize that you’re the flagship school of the University of Missouri system, but do you really have to change your name to prove it? UM?Columbia fears that the hyphen gives it the appearance of being a “regional” school.

Yes, in the same way the University of California?Berkeley is a “regional” school. Or how about that regional school, the University of Michigan?Ann Arbor. And UNC?Chapel Hill?

Maybe now that the “University of Missouri” has solved its name issue, it can concetrate on competing with those other “regional” schools in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.

The post Mizzou 38, OU 35 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.