The Other 85 Percent

Working Learners:  Educating Our Entire Workforce for Success in the 21st Century is a good read with an important message – and it addresses the needs of the other 85 percent.  Louis Soares of the Center for American Progress writes in this paper that working students, those who combine work and postsecondary education, “have little [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Congratulations to The Council for Higher Education and Accreditation (CHEA) for its joint statement with UNESCO about how to combat diploma mills. While reported to be short on details, this type of work is important for higher education in America and around the world.
I have posted in the past about Capella’s involvement with Transparency by [...]

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 [...]