The Other 85 Percent

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The American Enterprise Institute recently released its study titled “Diplomas and Dropouts:  Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t).”  There are parts of the study that are good.  There is an attempt to compare institutions with similar missions, and there is a strong emphasis on success, as in completion.  But, there is a [...]

After years of hard work and much deep thinking by myself and the leaders of several leading adult-serving colleges and universities, it is gratifying to see the media are recognizing Transparency by Design. U.S. News & World Report, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have published articles that examine this accountability initiative [...]

This opinion piece from the New York Times seems to use overstatement in its headline.  But, the piece makes some very interesting points.
Basically, Mark C. Taylor argues that the “dirty little secret” is that graduate students are underpaid for the work they do in helping teach and run laboratories for undergraduate students.  Taylor’s argument [...]