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, [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As stated by Inside Higher Ed, reporting on a newly released meta-analysis of research by the U. S. Department of Education, “online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning.”  Wow—this is what those of us involved in online learning have been arguing for some time in the face [...]

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 [...]

This is a perfectly silly piece. To assert that a study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities demonstrates that assessment of learning outcomes is widespread but students don’t know about it is really more than silly.  What is the purpose of assessment if students don’t know it is happening, what the results are, [...]