Completion rates at colleges and universities — Don’t believe what you hear or read!
2009 Nov 19
I spend a lot of time with colleagues from traditional, face-to-face colleges and universities and often hear them dismiss schools that have been reported to have very low completion rates. It is obvious that these folks, despite working in higher education, do not understand the national problem we have with data on completion rates. And, if these folks don’t understand the problem, just imagine how confusing it is for people from outside higher education to understand that the way completion rates are calculated is just plain dumb—and misleading. Read the rest of this entry »
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Are colleges and universities trying to “game” the college rankings game?
2009 Oct 29
In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Christopher C. Morphew and Barrett J. Taylor, a professor and a doctoral student in educational leadership, describe their finding that schools often use multiple mission statements, in part to influence their standing in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. As they write, this may or may not be such a big deal. But, it is one more piece of evidence that, as much as colleges and universities like to complain about the rankings, they do whatever it takes to look better without ever really talking about learning outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »
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Challenging conventional wisdom about what college should cost
2009 Oct 19
Jane Wellman and Dennis Jones offer some important challenges to conventional wisdom about college costs in this Inside Higher Ed article. They see a developing national agenda for higher education driven by the goal put forward by President Obama to return the U.S. to world leadership in degree attainment levels by 2020. Achieving that goal will require extraordinary measures and management of costs. Read the rest of this entry »
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How to best package higher education
2009 Oct 12
Inside Higher Ed details how “skill training” is delivered at Kellogg Community College in Michigan. This is a story of breaking up the standard way that postsecondary education is packaged. That is, taking the standard 3-credit course and breaking it into its parts, taking concepts or competencies one at a time, instead of packing them together. What the folks in the College’s Regional Manufacturing Technology Center have done is to offer modules of one concept or competency or skill rather than embedding these in a larger course or even larger credential. And they have really set an accountability standard in that they get paid only if they can prove that the student is proficient in the skill they were trained on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Do colleges and universities who receive the most public funding produce the most degrees?
2009 Oct 6
All higher education institutions are under pressure to produce more degrees within current resources. This pressure is particularly strong for publicly supported colleges. Inside Higher Ed considers a new report from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability. Patrick Kelly of the National Center for Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), who conducted the study, correctly states that “how well higher education institutions perform with the resources they have, and how they can improve performance with few or no new resources, are uncomfortable questions that are here to stay.” Read the rest of this entry »
Share ThisJust what might it take to reform higher education?
2009 Sep 29
In his commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Zemsky ponders just what it would take to create change in American higher education. He suggests that the kind of reform being seen in Europe could not happen here. He notes that various reform efforts in the United States have not been fruitful – that we should learn from those efforts that strong rhetoric changes nothing, reform must come internally, cannot be externally prescribed, and there is a need for systemic change. He poses several “dislodging events” that might drive change. Read the rest of this entry »
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Are the most expensive colleges really the “best” colleges?
2009 Sep 22
I have written before about the problem of relying on reputation to judge a college or university’s quality, and I recommended that we need to measure outputs, especially learning outcomes. But I had not really thought about how that reliance on reputation as an indication of quality has impacted the rising cost of college. In this Inside Higher Ed article, Robert Martin and Andrew Gillen say that “when people don’t know the true quality of something, they tend to rely on the reputation of the supplier.” People don’t have information to judge higher education quality, and rather than supply that information, colleges spend considerable sums to compete on reputation. They say that colleges spend every dollar they have and that as prices increase, so does spending. There is a spiral in which every time revenues increase, spending increases to consume all revenues. Worse yet, people perceive that high cost equates with good quality and so reputation increases as a college charges higher prices and, in turn, the higher prices drive up costs since every dollar gets spent. Read the rest of this entry »
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Graduating At-Risk Students and Comparing Completion Rates
2009 Sep 17
This Inside Higher Ed article is interesting because it deals with graduation rates at colleges that serve students who are at risk of not completing their studies. It is about a study conducted for the Career College Association (CCA) that attempts to pull apart federal student data bases in order to compare how well different types of institutions do with different audiences, with emphasis on how well the different types of institutions do with at-risk students. While this is a preliminary report, it argues that for-profit career colleges do well in serving at-risk students when compared to other types of institutions. The report also presents data on completion rates based on race. Read the rest of this entry »
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The call for higher education accountability is not going away
2009 Sep 14
Despite the comments that follow this article, the expectation that higher education is accountable to the people who fund it and to whom it serves is not going to go away. No matter how much some folks try to diminish those who call for accountability or those who try to meet that demand, there is a rightful expectation that colleges and universities become transparent about the learning outcomes they do or do not produce. And, that they use what data they produce to continuously improve their performance. Read the rest of this entry »
Share ThisDoes a three-year bachelor’s degree make sense?
2009 Aug 31
Earlier this year, after reading several brief articles citing the surge in three-year bachelor’s degrees, I decided to take a look at what was going on in this area. To say the least, it was a disappointing undertaking since most of what is being done is to cram four years of work into three without any attempt to rethink the bachelor’s degree or to engage in innovation. What I found were simply accelerated degrees where “exceptional” students (apparently chosen for their ability to endure pain and masochistic tendencies) are allowed to attend college year round, using summer sessions to make up time, and to take exceptionally large credit loads. There was a lot of blather about the Bologna Accord and the European model, but no model that would fit the United States or evidence of an American institution actually doing anything other than talking.
But, there was one exception. One university that had engaged in serious consideration of what they intended in a business administration bachelor’s degree, what learning outcomes should be produced, how they could create an experience for the student that was tolerable, and weave an instructional design that makes sense. That program has been a success at Southern New Hampshire University, and I was pleased to see it referenced in a Chronicle of Higher Education report. Read the rest of this entry »
Share ThisWelcome to The Other 85 Percent. So what does "the other 85 percent" refer to? Research has shown that only about 15 percent of higher education students still fit the traditional definition of young adults age 18 to 22 who live on campus and go to school full time. more
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