The Other 85 Percent

Hello. It has been a while since I’ve posted, but I wanted to take the time to let you know that I have decided to take a hiatus from posting to this blog for now due to my new role at Capella University. It has been a pleasure to tackle some of the critical issues [...]

Recently there have been several articles about colleges objecting to expectations that they report learning or academic outcomes. For example, this Inside Higher Ed article describes how Division III schools object to a proposed NCAA requirement to report graduation rates for their athletes. The schools say that this will drive costs up.  But, they also [...]

This New York Times blog post discusses a report from Public Agenda about a report underwritten by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation titled “With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them.” Some 600 young adults, ages 22 to 30, who had left college before getting a degree were surveyed.
I object to the opening comment that Tamar [...]

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that between 31 and 45 states are keeping some individual records on college students. I think that is a very good thing. There are others in higher education who consider such record-keeping to be problematic and threatening. So threatening that they pursued and secured legislation [...]

Not that we need more reminders about just how dire the effects of the economic downturn have been for public colleges and universities, but the California State University System has announced that it will reduce enrollment by more than 40,000 students next year. That is happening despite increasing demand.
We all know that 40,000 students is [...]

The answer, according to this report from Inside Higher Ed, may simply be because we have to do it for accreditation. What the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment report reveals is that many colleges are measuring what undergraduate students learn. The problem is that they are not using the data to make improvements.  For-profit [...]

This article in Inside Higher Ed describes how the Colorado State University Board of Governors considered, ever so briefly, privatizing part of the university system to assure survival. The idea of public institutions doing something like this has been around for decades. The idea usually picks up some steam when we are in a fiscal [...]

This piece on Inside Higher Ed is a response to the proposal to require nurses to have a bachelor’s degree in order to be licenses for practice. This is a more rational approach. It recognizes the realities facing nurses, health care, and the other 85% students. The tone is super, as Beverly [...]

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that calls for the bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) to be required for entry into the field of nursing. The authors of the study are correct in stating that the demands on nurses are increasingly complex. [...]

An Inside Higher Ed article reports on the results of the work of Carol Twigg and the National Center for Academic Transformations after ten years of working with schools to both improve learning and reduce costs. The point of the article is that Ms. Twigg had two purposes for her important and widely renowned [...]