The Other 85 Percent

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A recent article claims that the current report of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) “challenges online learning assumptions.”  But this is not the first time that NSSE has documented that students in online programs report that they are very engaged in their learning, more so than their counterparts who participate in face-to-face programs.
I [...]

I have posted several times about Transparency by Design, a consumer information and accountability initiative. Well, I have great news. This program was recently recognized by the Lumina Foundation for Education with a $629,000 grant.
This will allow the institutions involved in Transparency by Design the opportunity to expand our work. The initial public [...]

In a previous post, I questioned what Measuring Up actually measures and whether the message to state policymakers was off-base because it fails to acknowledge the contributions of cross-border online institutions, particularly in providing higher education opportunities to adults.  Clearly, those involved in Measuring Up understand that there are issues with data. Dennis Jones [...]