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"This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education (HE) institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. "

"Thrun seems to have 'discovered' that open-access, distance-education students struggle to complete," wrote Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University, in Britain. "I don't want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years."

What does this say about online learning platforms and courses? (Do they ever come with red, yellow and green lights that administrators see when they sign contracts for $$millions without knowing the educational effects of the online systems?) Note other skeptical views expressed in the comments section.

A precis of this appeared in NEA Higher Education Advocate Sept 2013

"Ironically, U.S. military doctrine purports to value "critical" and "creative" thinking.  Unfortunately, that emphasis hardly fits with the realities of promotion and command selection.  A recent empirical analysis by faculty from West Point's Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership concluded that "promotion and command boards may actually penalize officers for their conceptual ability."  In other words, more intelligent, educated, and skeptical officers - those with "higher cognitive ability," according to the study -- don't fare so well in the competitive promotion game."

"In their writings, Buchanan and other libertarian thinkers lay out a vision for a certain kind of society. It's a society where capitalism has free rein and the rights of the wealthy few are protected, while the many are prevented from exercising countervailing power. It's a society where government is so shrunken as to be unrecognizable. In the country they envision, most protections that benefit average Americans have vanished: Social Security has been abolished, worker and public-health protections are gone, and public schools are shuttered in favor of private education. It's a country where national parks and water supplies are sold to the highest bidder. That's not a country most Americans would recognize. And it's not a country most of us, from any political party, would want to inhabit. "

""I think most faculty regard grades as a nuisance," he says. But if professors didn't give them, "students probably wouldn't work as much and wouldn't do homework and wouldn't study for exams," he argues."