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Articles by Dan Currell
Demographics Aren’t What’s Ailing Colleges
The ‘enrollment cliff’ is mostly an excuse not to change. Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photos via Getty Images). Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photos via Getty Images). Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. In 2010, St. Cloud State University, located an hour northwest of Minneapolis, enrolled 18,000 students. By 2024, it enrolled 10,000.
Escaping the College-For-All Trap with Dan Currell
For decades, Americans were told that success was simple: graduate high school, enroll in a four-year college, and launch a career from there. But as college enrollment has expanded and costs have skyrocketed, the results have become increasingly difficult to justify. Many students never complete a degree, others graduate without meaningful skills, all while the system continues to push young people into a single pathway that often fails to match their talents.
Breaking Down the Trump Administration’s Higher Ed Compact
President Donald Trump has made little secret of his desire to reshape America’s institutions of higher education, viewing them as entrenched factories of progressive indoctrination. His administration has frozen research funding, launched civil rights investigations, and publicly pressured university leaders. Its newest tactic is more of a carrot-and-stick approach: offering first crack at research funding in exchange for instituting sweeping reforms.
The Trump Team Turns to Education
Canada Is an Ally, Not an Enemy Donald Trump seems surprised by the ferocity of the Canadian response to his attempts to strong-arm the country with his imbecilic bullying and threats to annex it. I am not. Canadian pride may sometimes take the form of toxic anti-Americanism, but there is no doubting the resolve or the patriotism of our neighbors to the north.
Anti-DEI rhetoric is not same as legal reality (opinion)
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Just_Super/iStock/Getty Images Plus The Trump administration’s anti-DEI playlist has been booming out onto the quad since Inauguration Day. Executive orders denounced “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences,” and the Department of Justice promised to investigate “illegal DEI” activities.
Sorting Out Claims That Americans Could Receive a $5,000 ‘DOGE Dividend’ Original
Such a proposal is under consideration, but there are mitigating factors. Published February 24, 2025 Are Donald Trump and Elon Musk going to send savings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) back to the American people? Dozens of viral posts claim that the White House is considering a plan to either send Americans $5,000 checks or give taxpayers a $5,000 tax credit, all paid for by DOGE’s cost-cutting measures.
Rooting for Laundry
Christopher Scalia is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and son of the late Supreme Court justice. His Reaganite credentials are impeccable, in other words, so you can imagine how disorienting the past month has been for him. “You’re not a real conservative this week unless you support [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Eric Adams,” he quipped on Friday.
Assessing Claims That Pete Hegseth Was Drinking at a Press Conference Original
Several viral social media posts claim that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was drinking alcohol during a NATO press conference. “6 questions, 3 scotches,” reads one post by Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch News. The post had been viewed more than 3.6 million times on X by midday Tuesday. “Trump’s Drunk Secretary Hegseth just casually drinking on the job on live news,” reads another version that includes a video of the press conference.
Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, Explained Original
Shuttering the department would likely require congressional action, but efforts to curb its activities have already begun. Published February 18, 2025 Judging from the rhetoric emanating from Washington, D.C., the U.S. Department of Education appears to be living on borrowed time. President Donald Trump has said that he wants to scale it down, then work with Congress to abolish it. His nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, echoed that intention in her confirmation hearing.
Don’t let noise from D.C. interrupt class in Minnesota
Trump has talked about closing the U.S. Department of Education. Here’s what that could mean for school districts and colleges in the state. February 12, 2025 at 7:00PM The Department of Education headquarters in Washington. (ROD LAMKEY JR./The New York Times) Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
College is actually getting cheaper. Still, is it affordable?
Bottom line: How much do families need to save? Let’s say a family thinks college will cost $29,000 a year, or $116,000 over four years, including room and board. Saving $288 a month from when the child is born will likely cover college. Waiting to save until the child is 10 years old more than doubles the monthly savings number to $678. The key is for the money to grow over time, so start early if you can.
Diversity Recruiting After ‘Students for Fair Admissions’ Original
New data shows how the end of affirmative action affected campus demographics. Published September 24, 2024 Last year, in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard, the Supreme Court effectively banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions. Since then, it’s been unclear what the fallout would be. Would black and Hispanic enrollment at the nation’s most selective colleges fall dramatically? Would schools figure out ways of preserving diversity without considering race directly?
OPINION EXCHANGE | Where did Minnesota's top CEOs go to college? Hint: not the Ivy League.
Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here. ••• Next month, some students who were wait-listed by Ivy League schools this year will start classes instead at one of Minnesota's colleges. In effect, they earned their place at the top, but didn't earn quite enough luck to get in.
What’s Wrong With the FAFSA? Original
A botched software rollout has created massive problems for colleges and prospective students, but lots more problems linger. Published June 21, 2024 Even when they’re running well, big systems can produce a lot of errors. Seventeen million people fill out the U.S. Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, every year. As its name suggests, this form provides students with need-based government grants and loans for college.
Should I Fill Out the FAFSA?
Few people know what the FAFSA actually does, yet some states have gone so far as to make completing the form a high school graduation requirement, since it correlates with going to college. The official government line is that there are no income limits for student aid, but only about one-third of students qualify for the need-based aid FAFSA delivers. So should you fill out the FAFSA? First off, if you want to take out a federal student loan, you need to fill out the FAFSA.
How to Worry, Not Panic, about Artificial Intelligence
April 28, 2024 The emergence of generative artificial intelligence in the last few years has drawn a growing chorus of advocates offering proposals for how to regulate this new technology. Many of them want to treat AI as an entirely new kind of challenge that calls for entirely new regulatory tools. But starting from scratch is unlikely to lead us to effective regulation. Instead, regulators should begin from our existing tools and take the time to see what new modes of regulation might be needed.
The American Founding Has Gone Missing from High-school History Classes
The textbooks most commonly used in high-school history classes are badly deficient. These books, which shape the rising generation’s perception of the country they are inheriting, often leave out the core ideas that defined the American founding and the nation’s ideals. To recover America’s sense of itself, it’s crucial to teach high-school students the connection between ideas and events.
The American Founding Has Gone Missing from High-school History Classes
March 17, 2024 The textbooks most commonly used in high-school history classes are badly deficient. These books, which shape the rising generation’s perception of the country they are inheriting, often leave out the core ideas that defined the American founding and the nation’s ideals. To recover America’s sense of itself, it’s crucial to teach high-school students the connection between ideas and events.
Joe Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation, Explained Original
President Joe Biden announced last week the cancellation of $1.2 billion in student debt for 153,000 borrowers—an average of $7,843 per borrower. The move is one of dozens he’s made since 2021 in a multi-pronged strategy to deliver on his campaign promise to “forgive a minimum of $10,000/person of federal student loans.” To date, Biden has approved the cancellation of —an average of $35,384 per borrower, according to the White House. What about that Supreme Court decision?
The Truth about College Costs
Summer 2023 A search for "college tuition" in the New York Times returns about 24,000 articles. One noteworthy piece in the archives is a 1927 letter to the editor noting that for annual tuition, "of fifteen Eastern colleges, all but four are now charging $400." According to the author, a Mr. William Allen, nationwide data showed that another 28 colleges charged over $250, while 288 charged under $200.
The four fatal flaws of law firm panels (297)
Clients too often ignore law firm incentives and market power. They also substitute management for leadership. Editor’s note: This post returns to a subject first addressed here in Posts 29, 30, 31: successful law firm convergence and the management of law firm panels. In this article, Dan looks back over AdvanceLaw’s work in the intervening five years and identifies four of the most common and consequential flaws in corporate law firm panels.
The four fatal flaws of law firm panels (297)
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My mind is just a broken machine: Part IV of book review series on AI in law (263)
Hal, Val, and the lawyer governance problem that’s hindering AI in law Oscar Reutersvärd is the “father of the impossible figure.” Some of his impossible figures are captured on the Swedish stamps shown above. The figures are, of course, quite possible — they’re just ink on paper. But our brains turn quickly from seeing some shapes to the “realization” that they are “impossible” because the 3-D world our minds are trying to construct cannot exist.
"My new Volvo is a Mazda": Part III of book review series on AI in law (250)
Will expert systems disrupt the legal value chain? In the first installment of this book review series on AI (Post 232), I argued that AI will not reduce employment in the legal sector, and in fact, the extensive deployment of AI tools might well increase total legal employment significantly.
Did Robbie the Robot really learn to read? (book review) (237)
Examining the gap between what machines do and what lawyers do. A shiver of lawyers reading books is, perhaps, like a school of fish swimming: the fish don’t know the water is wet, and likewise, the lawyers, who may deeply consider what they are reading, will rarely stop to consider what reading is.
Legal’s AI rocket ship will be manned (book review) (232)
Lawyers are trained to be good at what machines can’t do. Will the world still need lawyers once AI gets really good? The short answer is yes—and I believe it will still be yes no matter how good AI gets. My view is not universally accepted, so I will need to lay it out, and that will involve some claims about what humans are and whether a machine can ever be like that. This will shed considerable light on what lawyers essentially do, and help us to see how machines can help us to be better lawyers.
The Great Unbundling (172)
Will 2020 unleash a long-awaited wave of legal innovation? Law firms offer a bundle of services tied tightly together, and most lawyers think of this bundle as a naturally integrated offering. But innovators have long believed that the legal services bundle is actually composed of a series of largely unrelated capabilities, and the true flowering of legal innovation will arrive only when that tight law firm bundle loosens and, perhaps, finally comes apart.
Surviving the crisis: is necessity the mother of adoption? (158)
Right now, adoption is more important than invention. We are at the end of the beginning of one of the most terrifying periods in modern economic history. An unexpected outside event has created massive unemployment, acute under-production, and isolated instances of tragic over-production all at once. We are creating a fiscal crisis and waiting for a financial crisis. With luck we will avoid a monetary crisis. Nobody knows what next month will look like.
The Swiss Army Lawyer (138)
Reflections on connection between specialization and innovation Your mother needs heart valve replacement surgery, and it’s time to choose between doctors. You will have to explain yourself to two siblings and a few other relatives, but as a practical matter the choice is in your hands. You interview two potential surgeons. Here’s what they have to say: Surgeon #1: “I’ve done heart valve replacement many times, with success. We’ve got the right facilities here and my support staff are excellent.
The Trust Revolution (book review) (130)
For frustrated legal innovators, one of the missing pieces might be found in this new book on trust. Todd Henderson and Salen Churi, two law professors, have written a deep analysis of trust — its cultural history, social mechanics, economic elements, and of course how it relates to law and regulation. As they put it, the goal of the book is “to establish trust as a lingua franca for discussion of issues that are often thought of as discreetly political but actually needn’t be” (p. xvi).
The Invisible American Founding
Current Issue In 2019, the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center combined their formidable brands in support of the 1619 Project, a mix of journalism and school curricula intended "to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation's foundational date." This bold act of revisionism escalated a long-running battle over how U.S. history is taught.
What GC Thought Leaders Experiment Is About (Hint: Not Cost)
Learn how to strengthen case strategy, pass more savings on to clients, and expand your firm’s resources. These 3 case studies reveal smart solutions to craft compelling litigation stories from data. With this subscription you will receive unlimited access to high quality, online, on-demand premium content from well-respected faculty in the legal industry.
What GC Thought Leaders Experiment Is About (Hint: Not Cost)
share Thank you for sharing! Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided. The leaders of AdvanceLaw explain the GC Thought Leaders Experiment is not about tracking billing data, but about tracking what makes for a satisfying relationship between law firm and client. This premium content is reserved for American Lawyer subscribers. Continue reading by getting started with a subscription. Already a subscriber? Log in now
The GC Thought Leaders Experiment
share Thank you for sharing! Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided. Whether we’re talking lawyers or married couples, some relationships manage to stay strong over the long run. What’s the secret? The GC Thought Leaders Experiment tackles that question. This premium content is reserved for CC Corporate Counsel subscribers. Continue reading by getting started with a subscription. Already a subscriber? Log in now
Betsy DeVos: School Choice Is Her Solution to Education Woes | National Review
Big institutions aren’t easy to change, and American public education is big: Over 3 million teachers were employed in American public schools in 2016. Walmart, the world’s largest employer, has 1.4 million U.S. employees; the American military has 1.3 million people on active duty. Since American public education needs to change, as everyone seems to agree, what would it take to turn around an institution that’s bigger than Walmart and the U.S. military combined?
Is the Legal Operating Model About to Crash
share Thank you for sharing! Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided. The needs are outpacing the ability of law departments to service them. To continue reading, become a free ALM digital reader.
Perspective: What if Facts Got a Whole Lot Cheaper?
Editor’s Note: This post is written by a director of a global legal services firm who works with in-house legal teams to adjust process and reduce costs in litigation, investigations and other document-intensive matters. Expensive justice often means no justice. Defendants suffer when plaintiffs leverage the high cost of litigation to extract larger settlements. Would-be plaintiffs suffer when meritorious claims are never pursued because it’s just too expensive.
Remodeling Outside Counsel Management
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