The Other 85 Percent

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

As reported on the Inside Higher Ed Web site,  the American Federation of Teachers released analysis of ten-year’s worth of data on the decline of faculty who have earned and been awarded tenure. I think this quote from Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress that is the AFT chapter at CUNY, captures [...]

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 [...]

Recently, Steve Vodhanel has made comments on this blog about the problems of student loan debt and the impact that such debt can have on people who get caught in a situation where they are unable to get a job that allows them to repay their student loans.  A recent media interview on Inside Higher [...]

I have repeatedly posted on the failings of the 21st Century GI Bill and its negative impact on veterans.  The VA is insisting on pressing forward with implementation when the evidence keeps piling on that the bill is seriously flawed and unfair.  The article below from the April 29, 2009, Inside Higher Ed provides one [...]

There has recently been a lot of activity to create new institutes, alliances, and proposals about the assessment of learning outcomes and accreditation.  See
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/23/assess
and
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/28/accredit
Note that some of the same folks were involved in both the accreditation and the learning assessment efforts.  And these are individuals and organizations that have long provided higher education leadership.  [...]