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"AAUP Will Rethink Policies to Account for Colleges in Long-Term Decline March 24, 2011, 11:11 am The American Association of University Professors announced today that it was reviewing its policies on colleges' responses to financial crises in recognition that many institutions face long-term revenue declines. A statement issued by the group says its policies governing colleges' responses to "financial exigency" define that condition as an immediate financial crisis threatening an institution's survival, and fail to account for how many colleges, especially public ones, have been going through a slow bleeding process without facing imminent bankruptcy. An AAUP panel will consider how the group should respond when colleges lay off faculty members or close programs because of prolonged financial pressures that do not threaten their existence in the short term."

May 15, 2011 Crisis of Confidence Threatens Colleges By Karin Fischer The American higher-education system has long been seen as a leader in the world, but confidence in its future and its enduring value may be beginning to crack along economic lines, according to two major surveys of the American public and college presidents conducted this spring. Public anxiety over college costs is at an all-time high. And low-income college graduates or those burdened by student-loan debt are questioning the value of their degrees, or saying the cost of college has delayed other life decisions. Among college presidents, the rising price of college is not the only worry. They're concerned about growing international competition and declining student quality, with presidents from the least selective, and thus sometimes the least financially stable institutions, the most pessimistic. But perhaps the most troublesome finding from the surveys is this: More than a third of presidents think the industry they lead is heading in the wrong direction. Related Content It's More Than Just the Degree, Graduates Say Presidents Don't Agree on What Signifies Quality Most Presidents Prefer No Tenure for Majority of Faculty Commentary: College Presidents Are Too Complacent Data and Complete Results of the Surveys Without a change in course, presidents fear, American higher education's standing around the globe could erode. Although seven in 10 college chief executives rated the American system today as the best or one of the best in the world, barely half predicted that a decade from now the United States would be among the top globally. "We should be worried," said Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York system. "We are in a flat world. We are going to have to evolve." American higher education has never been a monolith, of course, but the findings of the survey of more than 1,000 presidents, conducted March 10 to April 25 by the Pew Research

"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn't quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree. Times have changed, he said. "It's not that college degrees aren't worthwhile," but the returns are diminished, he said. "After 2008, "you can't be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn't matter how many loans you took out." Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011). By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don't seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have. "They might not hand out A's on college campuses like they're candy," he said, "but we hand out B's like they are candy. You've got to really work today to get something below a B." The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. "By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first tw

June 19, 2011 The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure By Naomi Schaefer Riley In her new book, The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that faculty tenure is among the factors contributing to the decline of higher education in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the book. If colleges were to eliminate tenure tomorrow, they'd have to pay faculty higher salaries. That's what most economists-and common sense-will tell you. Lifetime job security is a perk, like health insurance or a company car. If you take it away, you'll have to compensate in another way to get the same quality of employees. Tenure means not having to worry about having to find new employment in middle age, and that means a lot to professors. As the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains, "In a lot of academia, once you're over 50 it's hard to get another job, even if you've done well." He compares it to being a computer programmer, where age seems to be a disadvantage no matter how talented you are. Taking an academic job without the promise of tenure is what Cowen calls "a massive risk." So there would have to be a lot of money on the front end to make up for it. In the long term, though, the costs might even out. Higher education would have a more sensible-looking labor market, in which colleges could ensure that all the faculty members were pulling their weight. This is particularly important for small colleges, says Bruce Johnstone, who has served as president of Buffalo State College and a vice president at the University of Pennsylvania. Large universities, in his experience, "tend to have ways of cushioning the existing departmental configurations a bit better than community colleges or small private colleges." Johnstone, who has also been a trustee at a small, independent college, says smaller institutions "need to add and subtract programs much faster and therefore need

"Prior-Learning Assessment Confers a Semester's Worth of Credits, Study Finds September 7, 2011, 4:36 pm Students who earned academic credit based on assessments of prior learning outside of college received an average of 17.6 credits, according to a research brief released on Wednesday by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. The brief, which draws on data for 62,475 adult students at 48 colleges and universities, described students who received credits for prior learning as being 2½ times as likely to graduate as those who did not earn such credits. Students typically earn prior-learning-assessment credits for on-the-job training, as well as work, volunteer, and military experience."

"April 2, 2011 Colleges Scramble to Avoid Violating Federal-Aid Limit For-profits' tactics to comply with 90/10 rule raise questions By Goldie Blumenstyk Corinthian Colleges Inc.'s decision this winter to raise tuition at dozens of its Everest, Heald, and WyoTech campuses by an average of 12 percent, knowing that most of its students would have to go even further into debt, had nothing to do with rising costs or any improvements it was making in the curricula. With many of its students already receiving the maximum in federal grants and loans, the company said it was raising its prices to create a financial gap that students would have to cover with private loans or other funds besides those from the federal student-aid programs. Corinthian's move is just one of the latest-and some say one of the most cynical-strategies that some for-profit colleges are using to avoid violating the so-called 90/10 rule, so they can remain eligible for the billions of dollars in federal student aid that have fueled their growth. The rule requires them to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from other sources. "They are making loans, just like the subprime lenders did, that they know their students will not be able to repay," said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success. Corinthian's decision to comply with the 90/10 rule in this manner, said Ms. Abernathy, even as it acknowledges that the company-sponsored loan program most of its students will use has a default rate of more than 50 percent, is "the height of cynicism." The 90/10 rule is also driving activities at other college companies. In recent months, Education Management Corporation, parent company of the Art Institutes, South University, and Brown Mackie College, announced it would increase its recruiting of foreign students. Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix created new colleges of "professional studies" so they could count more of their nontraditional-e

"March 27, 2011 Elite Colleges Fail to Gain More Students on Pell Grants By Beckie Supiano and Andrea Fuller During the past decade, the country's wealthiest and most elite colleges have faced heightened pressure to serve more low-income students. Many of the colleges responded by pouring millions of dollars into generous financial-aid policies and increasing their recruitment efforts. But those measures seem to have barely moved the needle. The share of undergraduates receiving federal Pell Grants, which go to financially needy students, at many of the nation's wealthiest institutions has remained relatively flat in the past five years, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the Education Department. Just under 15 percent of the undergradu­ates at the country's 50 wealthiest colleges received Pell Grants in 2008-9, the most recent year for which national data are available. That percentage hasn't changed much from 2004-5, around the time that elite institutions focused their attention on the issue. And Pell Grant students are still signifi­cantly less represented at the wealthiest colleges than they are at public and nonprofit four-year colleges nation­wide, where grant recipients accounted for roughly 26 percent of students in 2008-9. Individual colleges among the wealthiest have made gains in enrolling Pell Grant students, who generally come from families with annual incomes of less than $40,000. But others have lost ground. It may be that these elite colleges are simply competing with one another for a small group of low-income students rather than increasing the number willing to consider selective colleges, says Christopher N. Avery, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who is studying the college-selection process of students in Virginia. "The colleges are fishing in the same pool," he says. "The goal has to be expanding the pool of students who are applying, but that's very hard to do." Elite colleges ha

"April 17, 2011 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' By Robert Darnton Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial non-wisdom. Five stand out: 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain-"Super Thursday," last October 1-800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books-a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying. 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented. 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less di

"April 14, 2011 Business Educators Struggle to Put Students to Work By David Glenn Paul M. Mason does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says. Mr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves." A third of the business students at Radford U. don't engage with their coursework, in the estimation of one teaching assistant. "I understand teamwork is important," he says, "but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers." Surveys find that employers want to hire college graduates-business majors or not-who can write coherently, think creatively, and, like these students at the U. of Virginia, analyze quantitative data. Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major."

"Posted at 02:37 PM ET, 04/25/2011 Filling our 'mythic hero' vacuum, and starting with universities By Paul Light Ask Americans who they most admire these days, and they generally say "no one." Old-fashioned charismatic heroes have always been in short supply, but now they are almost completely gone as we search for someone-anyone-who will bring us out of the misery and uncertainty of economic collapse, natural disasters and tiny leaders such as the tea party's Michelle Bachmann. Apple's Steve Jobs is being pressed to move on, former Vice President Al Gore is missing in action from the global climate debate, Nobel Prize winner and micro-finance innovator Muhammad Yunus is under fire for predatory lending, and even Greg Mortenson, the celebrated author of Three Cups of Tea, has been pulled from his perch as failed mountain climber turned force for good. If the revolutions now roiling the Middle East are any indication, the exemplary leadership moments we do witness today are being driven more by crowds than the charismatic, great men celebrated in books and stories. So maybe it's time we change those stories. If only higher education would admit it. Leadership fellowships still mostly go to individuals, not teams; leadership programs are still siloed in separate schools; leadership is still mostly taught using the great-man theory; and university hierarchies are dominated by, well, individuals. Our higher education system will only play its role in revitalizing a culture of leaders if it first cures its own addiction to Type-A leadership. 'Leader' is becoming a plural term, as the Type-A mythic figure is increasingly replaced Type-B collective leadership and Type-C crowded-sourced action. Colleges and universities need more of this collective and crowd-sourced leadership themselves. They need integrated programs that span hardened, even sclerotic, academic disciplines; new curricula that emphasizes the role of teams; flat hierarchies; and i

"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 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

"The Self-Absorbed Higher-Education System October 6, 2011, 10:29 pm By Jeff Selingo American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I'm not quite sure how this status is determined-especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings-but we seem to have adopted the belief that the problems in the U.S. education system reside in elementary and secondary schools, not on college campuses. Perhaps it's just a sign of the times in which we live. Modesty, it seems, is out of style. In a thought-provoking talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, the New York Times columnist David Brooks maintained that we live in an era of "expanded conception of self." That attitude, he believes, results in the trends we have witnessed in recent years toward increased consumption, polarization, and risk. "We have moved from a culture of self-effacement to one of self-expansion," Brooks said. In some ways, the Brooks lecture was a fitting endnote to a conversation earlier in the day at the forum where I gathered with a dozen education, business, and think-tank leaders for a spirited discussion of the state of the American higher-ed system. After two hours of talking, there was no more agreement on how to improve the system than when we had walked into the room. Indeed, the diversity of constituencies represented in the room couldn't even settle on what the system should be doing. (That was despite the best efforts of the moderator, Clive Crook, who as a Brit admitted at the outset how confusing and complex the U.S. higher-ed system is.) Higher ed is feeling good about itself these days because it remains in demand. Why offer classes at more convenient times when you're getting a record number of applicants? Why hold the line on rising costs when students are willing to take on more debt? Why collect better job-placement data to provide to prospective students when they're