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Neal McCluskey

Director, Center for Educational Freedom

Cato Institute

Neal McCluskey is the director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. Prior to arriving at Cato, McCluskey served in the U.S. Army, taught high-school English, and was a freelance reporter covering municipal government and education in suburban New Jersey.
More recently, he was a policy analyst at the Center for Education Reform. McCluskey is the author of the book Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education, and his writings have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Forbes. In addition to his written work, McCluskey has appeared on C-span, CNN, the Fox News Channel, and numerous radio programs.

Blog Posts

Do colleges have an edifice complex, an amenities arms race, or both?

January 7, 2017
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Education

Think of college, and your mind may well conjure images of ivy creeping up the walls of stately, gray, Gothic stone buildings in which the deepest of learning occurs. Such buildings exist, of course, but reality is not so pleasantly simple: Those buildings cost big money to erect and maintain, money many colleges may not have. What’s more, students often demand that more fun stuff, rather than deep learning, occur inside them. Or so a new report suggests. “College and university enrollments are, in aggregate, either stable or declining,” intones the report, titled “The State of Facilities