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"In investor parlance, the price-earnings ratio on investing in higher education seems to be rising sharply. Where markets operate without external interference, there would be a correction. Sensing lower returns on their investment, the demand for higher education would fall and, with that, enrollments. "

"The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education completed its work in September 2006 with the release of its final report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education."

Somewhere out there is an ambitious but frugal high-school graduate who wants to avoid a traditional college path. Maybe she has read Anya Kamenetz's DIY U or one of the other end-higher-education-as-we-know-it manifestoes that have circulated in recent years.

Just the sort of thing that we were talking about in the first part of last night's class: The influence of a conservative movement that would apply a greater business orientation to Texas higher education came into stark relief this week, when the chancellor of one of the state's university systems unexpectedly resigned and the other seemed to push back against regents who have embraced what some call a heavy-handed ideological agenda.

"The future of higher education: how technology will shape learning is an Economist Intelligence Unit white paper, sponsored by the New Media Consortium. The Economist Intelligence Unit's editorial team executed the survey, conducted the interviews and wrote the report. The findings and views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor."

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Colleges can reap major benefits from meaningful engagement with faculty, yet many institutions find it difficult to do. In partnership with Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, Public Agenda has developed core principles and promising practices for engaging faculty in changing institutions and closing student achievement gaps. This new Cutting Edge Series paper, "Engaging Adjunct and Full-Time Faculty in Student Success Innovation," builds on our existing work in faculty engagement and is based on fresh research with higher education experts and community college faculty.

Here's a graph from a recent presentation by Anya Kamenetz about the price index of different components.

This report builds on and extends Public Agenda's ongoing research on the attitudes of various stakeholder groups toward higher education reform.[1] Here we explore the purpose and promise of more effective engagement of those stakeholders who-at first blush, at least-appear to express the deepest resistance to the productivity agenda: faculty. The report's driving questions are, what does it take to bridge the most pervasive divides in perception between productivity advocates and faculty, and what can be accomplished through deeper, more strategic engagement?[2]

The rising cost of Higher Ed is getting some press.  

An aggregator of freely available lectures from top-rated higher education institutions, organized by topics. Can be used as a supplement for current students or as a standalone for self-learners.

PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.

With a different kind of analysis, it may indeed be appropriate to conclude that many undergraduates are not benefiting as much as they should from their college experience. But the 45-percent claim is simply not justified by the data and analyses set forth in this particular report.

The bill would create "higher education curriculum review teams" to review and make recommendations to the State Board of Education on all proposed curriculum revisions. We believe this would be an important step in correcting the problems with recent curriculum adoptions - including science standards.

"This fall, Harvard will charge students $36,992 for tuition, compared to a bill 34 times less at most community colleges. Don't let the higher sticker price fool you. Community colleges offer teaching instruction comparable to their four-year counterparts but won't saddle graduates with long term debt in the process."

Here's the Doonesbury strip that I referred to in class Feb 24

People who believe in academic freedom have got to take these incidents seriously and get active before it's too late. "The perfect case is never going to come along," my old friend the historian Joshua Freeman told me. "Nobody is going to fire their Nobel laureate." Actually, City College almost did that: Ten years after losing his CCNY post, Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He certainly had the last laugh, but others weren't so lucky.

UW-Madison wants additional flexibility, therefore making it less of a public entity. Advantage: It wouldn't have to follow as many state regulations for "purchasing, building, personnel and tuition." It would still receive state funding, though.

At the beginning of this video, David Wiley describes the textbook as the "imposed curriculum". Open textbooks, on the other hand, enable educators to improve the course as they see fit.

The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts.