The Other 85 Percent

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this Chronicle of Higher Education commentary, Margaret Brooks claims that online courses are better than free beer.  Actually, she is responding to a colleague who does not like online courses who stated that it was wrong to offer online courses just because students demand them because “students demand free beer, too; that does not [...]