How to best package higher education
2009 Oct 12
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 together. What the folks in the College’s Regional Manufacturing Technology Center have done is to offer modules of one concept or competency or skill rather than embedding these in a larger course or even larger credential. And they have really set an accountability standard in that they get paid only if they can prove that the student is proficient in the skill they were trained on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Do colleges and universities who receive the most public funding produce the most degrees?
2009 Oct 6
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 study, correctly states that “how well higher education institutions perform with the resources they have, and how they can improve performance with few or no new resources, are uncomfortable questions that are here to stay.” Read the rest of this entry »
Share ThisJust what might it take to reform higher education?
2009 Sep 29
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 – that we should learn from those efforts that strong rhetoric changes nothing, reform must come internally, cannot be externally prescribed, and there is a need for systemic change. He poses several “dislodging events” that might drive change. Read the rest of this entry »
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Are the most expensive colleges really the “best” colleges?
2009 Sep 22
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. In this Inside Higher Ed article, Robert Martin and Andrew Gillen say that “when people don’t know the true quality of something, they tend to rely on the reputation of the supplier.” People don’t have information to judge higher education quality, and rather than supply that information, colleges spend considerable sums to compete on reputation. They say that colleges spend every dollar they have and that as prices increase, so does spending. There is a spiral in which every time revenues increase, spending increases to consume all revenues. Worse yet, people perceive that high cost equates with good quality and so reputation increases as a college charges higher prices and, in turn, the higher prices drive up costs since every dollar gets spent. Read the rest of this entry »
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Graduating At-Risk Students and Comparing Completion Rates
2009 Sep 17
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 well different types of institutions do with different audiences, with emphasis on how well the different types of institutions do with at-risk students. While this is a preliminary report, it argues that for-profit career colleges do well in serving at-risk students when compared to other types of institutions. The report also presents data on completion rates based on race. Read the rest of this entry »
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The call for higher education accountability is not going away
2009 Sep 14
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 is a rightful expectation that colleges and universities become transparent about the learning outcomes they do or do not produce. And, that they use what data they produce to continuously improve their performance. Read the rest of this entry »
Share ThisDoes a three-year bachelor’s degree make sense?
2009 Aug 31
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 without any attempt to rethink the bachelor’s degree or to engage in innovation. What I found were simply accelerated degrees where “exceptional” students (apparently chosen for their ability to endure pain and masochistic tendencies) are allowed to attend college year round, using summer sessions to make up time, and to take exceptionally large credit loads. There was a lot of blather about the Bologna Accord and the European model, but no model that would fit the United States or evidence of an American institution actually doing anything other than talking.
But, there was one exception. One university that had engaged in serious consideration of what they intended in a business administration bachelor’s degree, what learning outcomes should be produced, how they could create an experience for the student that was tolerable, and weave an instructional design that makes sense. That program has been a success at Southern New Hampshire University, and I was pleased to see it referenced in a Chronicle of Higher Education report. Read the rest of this entry »
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How to combat diploma mills
2009 Aug 19
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 Design, an effort to create a trust-worthy, non-marketing site for adults trying to find a college to attend. This initiative involves a number of regionally accredited institutions that specialize in serving adults at a distance. Because many of the universities involved are not household names, the adult seeking a place to attend college can wonder about their legitimacy. The accreditation process is one means to assure that an institution is viable and has been objectively reviewed by knowledgeable educators. Read the rest of this entry »
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How Long Should It Take to Earn a Bachelor’s Degree?
2009 Aug 11
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 problem, in my mind, because the study reinforces the idea that a bachelor’s degree should be completed in 4 years, and that if someone has not completed it in 6, they have “dropped out” or “failed.” Read the rest of this entry »
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The Disappearance of Tenured Faculty
2009 Aug 6
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 what was found: “What was shocking to me, even though I think about this all the time, was that the percentage of tenure and tenure-track faculty has shrunk to almost a quarter.” The AFT is calling for consumer pressure to increase the number of tenure track faculty. Ms. Bowen states the argument for why this is important: “Parents and students are beginning to see the difficulty when the part-time faculty member you loved for English 101 is no longer there for English 201, or to write a recommendation. You don’t have that continuity.”
I would be interested in hearing from faculty and students alike about how you react to that explanation for why tenure is important. Thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment.
Mike
Share ThisWelcome to The Other 85 Percent. So what does "the other 85 percent" refer to? Research has shown that only about 15 percent of higher education students still fit the traditional definition of young adults age 18 to 22 who live on campus and go to school full time. more
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