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Like the slur "anchor baby" itself, each of these claims is a fallacy. Far from "anchoring" their parents to US soil, many children born to undocumented immigrants are seeing them be deported. And for all the rhetoric spewed by the right about the need for tough new legislation to combat the immigrant "invasion," laws governing immigration to the United States have gotten more restrictive in the past fifteen years. Today, a citizen must be 21 in order to sponsor the green card application of a parent or an immediate relative. The applicant must then show documentation proving that he or she has not been in the United States unlawfully for more than one year. Barring such proof—the primary obstacle most immigrants face—the parent must return to the country of origin for ten years before being allowed to lawfully re-enter the United States and resume the application process. This is commonly referred to as the "touchback rule," explains María Blanco, director of the Earl Warren Institute at the UC, Berkeley, School of Law, and it is among the most insurmountable restrictions placed on the legal naturalization process in the name of "immigration reform" passed in 1996.

Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.

The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:  the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.

In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.

Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class's size; whether the classroom was “flipped” (meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students' own time); whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before

in Japan, where it is common for managers who have studied English with the adaptive-learning software iKnow to list their iKnow scores on their resumes.

“The reality is that it's going to be done,” says Eva Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's not going to be a little part. It's going to be a big part. And it's going to be put in place partly because it's going to be less expensive than doing professional development.”