Group items tagged

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c

July 22, 2010 The Four Quadrants of Administrative Effectiveness Leadership Careers Illustration By Rob Jenkins First, a confession: I ripped off the basic premise for this column from an essay called "The Right Kind of Nothing," by Michael C. Munger, a professor of political science and chair of the department at Duke University. Munger argued in that January column that the best administrators are those who accept a high degree of responsibility for what goes on in their territory but don't feel the need to control everything. They know, that is, when to do "the right kind of nothing." After 18 years as a midlevel administrator at three different community colleges, I heartily concur. And, having obtained Munger's gracious permission, I would like to expand on his ideas. In doing so here, I borrow also from Stephen R. Covey, who in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, designs a memorable matrix around the concepts of "important" and "urgent." By placing those two concepts on X and Y axes, he creates four quadrants: urgent but not important, important but not urgent, both urgent and important, and neither urgent nor important. Following Covey's model, I've placed Munger's concepts of responsibility and control on similar X and Y axes to create what I call the four quadrants of administrative effectiveness. Each one represents a certain type of administrator. High responsibility, low control. High responsibility, high control. Low responsibility, low control. Low responsibility, high control.

March 18, 2012 A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups Despite recession investors see technology companies' 'Internet moment' By Nick DeSantis Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity. In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002, according to the Na­tional Venture Capital Association. The boom really took off in 2009, when venture capitalists pushed $150-million more into education-technology firms than they did in the previous year, even as the economy sank into recession. "The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting edu­cation, that education is having its Internet moment," said Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. Last year Mr. Ferreira's company scored a $33-million investment of its own in one of the biggest deals of the year. Enlarge Image A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups 2 Mark Abramson for The Chronicle Huge advances in computing power at colleges have created a fertile ground for companies offering technology services, like the computer-learning group Knewton (above), where staff members recently gathered for a meeting. The scramble to make bets on a tech-infused college revolution has led to so many new companies that even Mr. Ferreira can't keep track. Udacity, Udemy, and University­Now all have plans to revolutionize online learning. There's the Coursebook, a young online-learning start-up. And Coursekit, a nascent challenger to Blackboard in the market for learning-management software. And Courseload, the Indiana-based digital-textbook enterprise. And CourseRank, the cl

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities (but not non-profits) would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. A week later, Shireman announced his impending departure. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than o

"Obama Proposes Education Technology Agency Modeled After DARPA by Jeffrey Mervis on 4 February 2011 The Obama Administration has proposed a new agency within the Department of Education that will fund the development of new education technologies and promote their use in the classroom. In an updated version of its 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, the White House announced today that the president's 2012 budget request will call for the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education (ARPA-ED). The name is a deliberate takeoff on the Sputnik-era DARPA within the Department of Defense that funded what became the Internet and the much newer Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) that hopes to lead the country into a clean-energy future. ARPA-ED will seek to correct what an Administration official calls the country's massive "underinvestment" in educational technologies that could improve student learning. "We know that information and communications technologies are having a transformative impact on other sectors. But that's not the case in K-12 education." The official cited studies showing that less than 0.1% of the $600 billion spent each year on elementary and secondary school education goes for research on how students learn. "There are a number of good ideas and promising early results about the use of education technology that have led the Administration to be interested in doing more in this area," the official noted. (See a special issue of Science from 2 January 2009 on education and technology.) The goal of ARPA-ED, according to the official, will be to "advance the state of the art and increase demand" for successful technologies that teachers and students can use, such as a digital tutor that can bring students and experts together to enhance learning. Federal agencies now fund only a relative handful of projects in this area, the official added, and most local districts don't have the money to purchase those found to be effec

"Why the Obama Administration Wants a Darpa for Education March 4, 2011, 11:59 am By Marc Parry The Big Brains at Darpa have dreamed up some pretty cool stuff over the years: GPS, mind-controlled robotic arms, the Internet. So could education benefit from its own version of the Pentagon-led research agency? The Obama administration thinks the answer is yes. Its proposed 2012 budget includes $90-million to kick off the effort, conceived as a way to support development of cutting-edge educational technologies. Why the need for a new agency? Education research and development is "underinvested," argues James H. Shelton III, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement in the U.S. Education Department. A new agency-its name would be "Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education"-would have more flexibility to identify specific problems and direct efforts to solve them, he says. Plus, it would be able to attract top outside talent to work on these projects. Mr. Shelton offered few specifics on what projects the new agency would support, but he did suggest that education officials want to build on work that's already been done by other agencies. He pointed to Darpa's work on digital tutors as one example. One of the big problems that has not yet been solved, Mr. Shelton says, is this: "How do you actually enable teachers to personalize instruction for students and access the resources that best match the needs and interests of those students?""

"July 10, 2011 A College Education for All, Free and Online By Kevin Carey All around the world, people have been waiting for someone like Shai Reshef to come along. Reshef is the founder and president of the University of the People, a tuition-free online institution that enrolled its first class of students in 2009. UoPeople strives to serve the vast numbers of students who have no access to traditional higher education. Some can't afford it, or they live in countries where there are simply no good colleges to attend. Others live in rural areas, or identify with a culture, an ethnicity, or a gender that is excluded from public services. UoPeople students pay an application fee of between $10 and $50 and must have a high-school diploma and be proficient in English. There are also small fees for grading final exams. Otherwise, it's free. The university takes advantage of the growing body of free, open-access resources available online. Reshef made his fortune building for-profit higher-education businesses during the rise of the Internet, and he noticed a new culture of collaboration developing among young people who grew up in a wired world. So UoPeople relies heavily on peer-to-peer learning that takes place within a highly structured curriculum developed in part by volunteers. The university plans to award associate and bachelor's degrees, and it is now seeking American accreditation. Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple-everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn. For most of humanity, this is the only viable way to get access to higher education. When the university polled students about why they had enrolled, the top answer was, "What other choice do I have?" Some observers have wondered how effective such an unorthodox learning model can be. But UoPeople's tw

I wonder how the University of the People will evolve compared to the fledgling Open Educational Resources University that is being founded by a few key institutions around the world. OERU has its business model roots in Web 2.0 as the foundation for collaboration. A group within OERU is also participating in Ray Schroeder's EduMOOC. For more info on OERU see http://wikieducator.org/images/c/c2/Report_OERU-Final-version.pdf

"January 1, 2012 Tenure's Dirty Little Secret Tenure's Dirty Little Secret 1 Tim Foley for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Milton Greenberg It seems that tenure is always in the news. Long an article of faith for most faculty members, tenure is being put on the defensive almost everywhere, including within the academy itself. During the past decade, the numbers of tenured and tenure-track professors have sharply declined from nearly one-half of the faculty to about one-third. Most courses in four-year colleges and universities as well as community colleges are now taught by contingent faculty, including part-time adjuncts, graduate students, and holders of full-time nontenure-track positions. Does anyone care? Tenure is rooted in the American Association of University Professors statement on academic freedom and tenure that for many faculty members has become tantamount to religious dogma, impervious to forces of change, regardless of source. The dogma is that the common good is served by the free pursuit of truth under the principles of academic freedom, buttressed by the lifetime job security of tenure. While an individual's tenure may be revoked for cause, this rarely used action is protected by extraordinary and lengthy procedural requirements equivalent to a trial. If tenure is so vital, why is it on the defensive and, in fact, seriously losing ground? Where is the public outrage? There is none outside the confines of higher education, and even there it is hardly universal. Three factors are in play. First, the large expansion of higher education in the United States during the past 50 years has stripped the academy of its mystery as a cloistered monastery. The curtain has been opened, revealing the meaning and consequences of the tenure system. As with any dogma, religious or secular, once its status as truth is questioned and its claims considered dubious, true believers are left with a leap of faith. Second, colleges-public and private-are firmly e

"The Real Challenge for Higher Education July 15, 2010 By Garrison Walters America, once the world's most educated nation, is fast losing ground. Although we are still second in overall education levels, we are much weaker -- 11th -- in the proportion of younger people with a college degree. In a world where knowledge increasingly drives economic competitiveness, this is a very serious problem. The issue is more than abstract economics, it's also a moral concern: Since 1970, the benefits of higher education have been very unequally apportioned, with the top income quartile profiting hugely and the bottom hardly moving at all (despite starting from a very low level). America's education problem has been apparent for 30 years or so, and there have been a lot of suggestions for making us competitive again. Ideas on the K-12 side include: better trained and motivated teachers, more and better early childhood programs, better prepared school leaders, improved curriculums, higher standards, financial incentives, better data systems, and more rigorous and frequent assessments. On the higher education side, proposals include: motivating professors and administrators with formulas that reward success rather than enrollment, more use of technology, more data, improved administration, and (at least for general education) more testing. And, of course, better funding is relentlessly advocated for the entire educational spectrum. All of these approaches have at least some potential to foster improvement. Some have already demonstrated benefits while some are being seriously oversold (more on that in a separate essay). My fundamental belief, though, is that even if one takes a very optimistic view of the achievable potential of each of these strategies and adds them together, the net result will be significant but insufficient improvement to allow us to catch up in educational levels. If our scope of action is limited to the ideas advanced so far, we will actually contin

"June 25 Selma Botman: University's changes real, and hardly random USM's academic reorganization serves students, galvanizes faculty and saves administrative costs. Reorganizations typically generate concerns and doubts, not to mention a lot of satirical workplace humor. In one Dilbert comic strip, the manager announces a new strategy. "Let me guess," says Dilbert, "you're going to randomly reorganize the department, just like last month." One course of action higher education cannot be accused of is random reorganization. At USM and elsewhere, academic models that made sense a generation ago -- or even a millennium ago -- are long overdue for serious reconsideration. Prompted by a tighter focus on student success and the harsh realities of a new economic climate, USM has spent much of the past year rethinking how its academic programs should be organized. In May, the university's trustees approved an academic reorganization that will transform our university in profound ways. The new plan will further distinguish and energize our academic core, while repositioning us for future growth and sustainability. Most importantly, it will enhance the educational experience for our students. Through a collaborative effort that actively engaged faculty in the process, six schools and colleges have been consolidated into three new colleges. USM's two other colleges, Lewiston-Auburn College and the University of Maine School of Law, are not structurally affected. The plan eliminates the positions of three deans and will lead to the centralization of other administrative services, saving some $1.3 million. FOR THE STUDENTS So how will this plan benefit students? Our reorganization plan, which will be implemented during the 2010-2011 academic year, groups academic disciplines in order to encourage the growth of exciting new opportunities for interdisciplinary studies. This will be an intensely creative moment in USM's academic history. Faculty across the university are

"August 11, 2010, 01:00 PM ET President Obama Needs a Plan to Control College Costs By Kevin Carey During his higher education speech earlier this week, President Obama talked at some length about college costs: It's good that the president is talking about this. But I can't help but notice that when he talked during the health care debate about the looming Medicare solvency crisis and bending down the long-term medical cost curve, he immediately followed with an actual plan to control health care costs. That plan did not consist of simply challenging doctors and hospital administrators to try harder. Obama understood that doctors and hospital administrators are by and large rational actors who respond to incentives created by the system in which they work. If you want them to make different choices, you have to change the system itself. Which is exactly what he did."

"Fix Nonprofit Higher Ed First October 11, 2010, 2:47 pm By Marc Bousquet Jesus asked his followers to address the whacking huge piece of lumber in their own eyes before performing optical surgery on others. And I can't think of a better case study of His wisdom than good old U.S. higher education, where the 5,000 nonprofits-many of them pushing what they perceive as Christian values-are engaging in high hypocrisy about for-profit education vendors. Sure, the for-profits are just as bad as they say. They fail to graduate students and the students they graduate are often un-, under- and mis-educated. The students go into debt to pay outrageous tuition for the attention of under-qualified faculty, and then fail to find the employment for which they were putatively prepared. And from all of this under-regulated misery and failure, the shareholders are racking up massive capital accumulation. The problem is that the for-profits did not invent any of this. All of these tactics-what I've called the tuition gold rush-were pioneered by the nonprofit sector. 1) We nonprofits have been teaching students with underqualified faculty, graduate students, and even undergraduates for the past 40 years (all while braying inanely about an "oversupply" of persons with doctorates). 2) We charge outrageous tuition for degrees which will not lead to employment, while putting students to work at super-exploitative wage discounts. 3) By overcharging students and underpaying faculty, we have been accumulating capital-not in shareholders' pockets, but capital nonetheless, in buildings and grounds, endowments, in tech infrastructure. We also spend down a lot of the dollars that an enterprise institution captures as profit and sends along to its shareholders. Sometimes those dollars are spent on valid public non-education goods. Just as often, though, they're blown by the million on administrator initiatives like big-time sports, social engineering, business ventu

"Hirings Rocket at For-Profits November 4, 2010 Surging enrollments at for-profit colleges have driven increases in staffing at those institutions, according to federal data released Wednesday. Between 2008 and 2009, the for-profit sector posted double-digit percentage gains in the numbers of total employees, full- and part-time faculty, and executive staff, the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics' "Employees in Postsecondary Institutions" annual survey revealed. Growth in the sector was such that for every two hires made in higher education during the past year, one was at a for-profit college. Meanwhile, employment in the overall higher education sector edged up 2 percent between 2008 and 2009. To a large extent, this growth trend reflects the fact that there are far fewer for-profit colleges and staff members to begin with, and any fluctuations are likely to appear large when expressed as a percentage. The number of employees at public institutions remains approximately 10 times that of the for-profit institutions. On the other hand, the trend also reflects soaring enrollments at the colleges, which experienced 21 percent growth between 2007 and 2008, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Strained state budgets and weak private endowments also were reflected in colleges' hiring patterns during the past year, as compared to the one before. Colleges across all sectors were far more likely to add part-time faculty than full-time professors or administrators. Hiring of part-time instructional staff, typically adjuncts, increased 7 percent between 2008 and 2009, while hiring of full-time instructors and administrators grew by 1 percent each. Nearly 6 out of every 10 employees added during the past year were part-time instructors."

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"Disruption, Delivery and Degrees February 9, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Many college professors and administrators shudder at comparisons between what they do and what, say, computer or automobile makers do. (And just watch how they bristle if you dare call higher education an "industry.") But in a new report, the man who examined how technology has "disrupted" and reshaped those and other manufacturing industries has turned his gaze to higher education, arguing that it faces peril if it does not change to meet the challenge. The report, "Disrupting College," was also the subject of a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for American Progress, which released the report along with the Innosight Institute. (A video recording of the event is available here.) Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, coined the term "disruptive innovation" in a series of books (among them The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution) that examined how technological changes altered existing markets for key products and services, usually by lowering prices or making them available to a different (and usually broader) audience. While Christensen's early work focused on manufacturing industries and commercial services like restaurants, he and his colleagues, in their more recent studies, have turned to key social enterprises such as K-12 education and health care. America's constellation of higher education institutions is ripe for such an analysis, Michael B. Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute and a co-author of the report, said during Tuesday's event. (In addition to Christensen and Horn, the other authors are Louis Soares of the Center for American Progress and Louis Caldera of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.) Traditional institutions have "done so much for our country for so many decades and have played such an illustrious part in the country's success," said Horn. And while th

"April 20, 2011 CUNY Faculty Fears Course-Transfer Proposal Could Jeopardize Its Say on Curricula By David Glenn The City University of New York is weighing a plan to simplify the 23-campus system's extraordinarily complex transfer landscape, but faculty members object to the plan, saying it would water down general-education requirements and take away campus control of curriculum. As the university's Board of Trustees prepares to vote on the plan at its June 27 meeting, more than two dozen faculty committees have passed resolutions condemning the proposal. "CUNY seems to be trying to solve an administrative problem by putting forward a radical curricular overhaul," said Scott D. Dexter, a professor of computer and information science at CUNY's Brooklyn College and the director of his campus's core curriculum, in an interview this week. "That's what has people deeply concerned." Mr. Dexter and others are also worried about a proposal to revise the university's bylaws, which also happens to be scheduled for a vote at the trustees' June meeting. That proposal includes dozens of mostly cosmetic revisions, but one in particular has drawn faculty activists' ire: A paragraph about the faculty's rights and responsibilities would be altered to declare that the faculty "shall be responsible for the formulation of policy recommendations" on matters of curricula and academic practice. To many faculty members, the term "recommendations" sounds like a demotion from a historic understanding that they, not administrators, have direct responsibility for shaping the university's curricula. In a letter sent on Tuesday to the American Association of University Professors, Glenn Petersen, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at CUNY's Baruch College, wrote that the new language "appears to many of us to be a pre-emptive strike against the faculty as retribution for having recently questioned CUNY Central over an issue of general-education transfer policies within

"July 1, 2011 As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States By Kelly Field Bismarck State College, a two-year institution located in the capital of North Dakota, offers something few colleges do: online degrees in power-plant technology. Utilities across the country send workers to the community college for specialized training in electric power, nuclear power, and other fields. "We're pretty darn unique," said Larry C. Skogen, the college's president. "I don't think we have any competition out there." Though other colleges offer similar programs on campus, "we deliver nationwide online," he said, with students in all 50 states. That could change soon. Under federal rules that take effect on July 1, Bismarck State will have to seek approval to operate in every state where it enrolls students, or forgo those students' federal aid. With some states charging thousands of dollars per application, the college is weighing whether it can afford to remain in states where the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits, in tuition terms. Though the college hasn't made any decisions yet, "the reality is that if we run into a state where we have few students and it's expensive [to get approval], it's probably not going to be cost-effective to continue," Mr. Skogen said. Such cost-benefit calculations are being conducted on campuses across the country, as college leaders struggle to make sense of a patchwork of state rules that were written in an era when "college" was synonymous with "campus" and online learning was in its infancy. Gregory Ferenbach, a lawyer who advises colleges on regulatory compliance, said he has heard from a "couple dozen" colleges, most of them nonprofits, that are considering withdrawing from some states because of the cost or burden of obtaining approval. Their decisions could have a significant effect on college access. If enough colleges steer clear of states with expensive approval processes, or s

"Wikipedia Aims Higher July 11, 2011 BOSTON - The United States' foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia. "If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it's good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' " Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia's overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship. Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia. The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe. When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative - an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy - it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enabl