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"Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-Profit Colleges By TAMAR LEWIN Published: November 23, 2010 A new report on graduation rates at for-profit colleges by a nonprofit research and advocacy group charges that such colleges deliver "little more than crippling debt," citing federal data that suggests only 9 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor's degree students at the University of Phoenix, the nation's largest for-profit college, graduate within six years. The report, "Subprime Opportunity," by the Education Trust, found that in 2008, only 22 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor's degree students at for-profit colleges over all graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at private nonprofit colleges. Among Phoenix's online students, only 5 percent graduated within six years, and at the campuses in Cleveland and Wichita, Kan., only 4 percent graduated within six years. "For-profits proudly claim to be models of access in higher education because they willingly open their doors to disadvantaged, underprepared students." said José L. Cruz, a vice president for the trust. "But we must ask the question, 'Access to what?' " Since the first-time, full-time students tracked in the federal statistics are the most likely to graduate, the report said, these figures may actually overstate the graduation rates. "

September / October 2009 College for $99 a Month The next generation of online education could be great for students-and catastrophic for universities. by Kevin Carey Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor's degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn't going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual-hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought-she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk? Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed

"Examining For-Profits and Cost Structure January 10, 2011, 11:23 am By Peter Wood Is the for-profit sector of higher education worth preserving from the current onslaught of regulatory challenges coming from the Obama administration? In the first two parts of this series, I described those challenges and outlined a reason why we should resist the urge to drive the for-profit colleges and universities out of business. My answer is that we need them not for what they are now, but for what they are likely to become as the old models of not-for-profit higher education falter. In this third of four installments, I contrast the difficulty that the not-for-profit sector has with containing costs to the streamlined approach of the for-profit institutions. (1) Not-for-profit education's cost problem The "bubble" in higher education-the risk that the public will in significant numbers draw back from college because it perceives that a college education is likely not worth the investment of time and money-is a prognosis of tough times ahead for all of higher education. If the bubble bursts, however, it will be the not-for-profit sector that is hit hardest. There are several reasons for this, including the likelihood that public disaffection with mainstream higher education will mean an unwillingness on the part of legislatures and taxpayers to bail out the industry. The rhetoric of higher-education lobbying about the personal advantages of getting a college degree won't avail. Why should the public pay for a private good, especially one that increasingly looks self-indulgent and impractical for many students? Nor will the rhetoric that emphasizes that higher education spending promotes "national competitiveness" (or mutatis mutandis, prosperity in individual states) carry the political debate. Higher education promotes national or regional competitiveness when students learn internationally competitive skills, but not when they graduate in large numbers ma

"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."

"February 6, 2011 Fast-Growing U. of Phoenix Calculates a More Careful Course By Goldie Blumenstyk In the fall of 2009, after closing the books on yet another banner year of enrollment growth, and with its parent company's stock climbing toward a five-year high of $90 per share, the University of Phoenix began to question fundamental pieces of the very formula that had fueled its years of success. Even as its executives celebrated, recalls one, they were uneasy. A feeling was building "in the pit of everyone's stomach: That felt too good." From that "moment of truth," as that executive, Robert W. Wrubel now describes it, Phoenix quietly began what it calls a major change of direction. Out of the public eye, North America's largest private university not only put in motion an overhaul of what had come to be seen as its grow-at-any-cost admissions practices. It also ended a compensation schedule tied to enrollment, began a required orientation program for inexperienced students, and instituted a host of other reforms in marketing and nearly every other important facet of this 438,000-student institution. The moves, orchestrated from its headquarters here, and from corporate outposts like San Francisco, where the university has assembled a team of Silicon Valley veterans and computer scientists to create a cutting-edge electronic course platform, are part of a top-down campaign led by a team of a half-dozen executives, all of whom have joined its $5-billion parent company within the past four years. excited about an education. "We are investing in academics like no other higher-education company can do," says Joseph L. D'Amico, who as president of Apollo Group Inc. oversees the campaign it calls "Reinventing education, again." The goal, he says, "is to take our business to a new level." Last month Apollo provided The Chronicle a behind-the-scenes (but by no means unfettered) look at some of the new recruiting techniques, educational moves, and marketing tactics

"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

"Crowdsourced Book-Review Project Puts Critiques Online March 20, 2012, 6:18 pm By Nick DeSantis The traditional academic-publishing industry moves slowly, and scholarly book reviews can take a long time to get printed. So one group of students is trying to speed up the review process and make it more interactive by putting a crowdsourced book review online for anyone to critique. The reviewers are members of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory's scholars program, which is made up of undergraduates and graduate students. Their book of choice is Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White's Race After the Internet, a collection of essays published last October. Hastac scholars wrote reviews of the book's 14 chapters, and their contributions have been published on the Web for readers to evaluate and add their own takes. The project went live last week. "These are not just reviews existing on their own in a print journal," said Fiona Barnett, a doctoral candidate at Duke University who directs Hastac's scholars program. "They're active at the moment, with other students and other academics responding to them instantly." Ms. Barnett said the group split the review into chapters because each reviewer has different specialties and may not be an expert on the entire collection. Also, for many graduate students who have jobs and dissertations to worry about, "writing an entire book review is actually pretty daunting," she added. Some of the reviews are personal engagements with the text, and others are grounded in theory, Ms. Barnett said. It's not unprecedented for scholars to outsource reviews of their work to the masses-a University of California at Santa Cruz professor once put his book on an academic blog for commenters to critique while he published it through MIT Press. But this review is different, because Hastac's scholars organized the review, rather than Race After the Internet's editors. And unlike

WASHINGTON -- For-profit colleges should be leaders in measuring student learning and making the data public, said a panel of experts at the annual meeting of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, held here today. Federal scrutiny of higher education won't stop at for-profits, the speakers said, in a discussion that included a few surprising moments, such as praise for a community college and a nuanced compliment for federal regulations on "gainful employment." "We are moving toward some kind of general accountability," said Michael B. Goldstein, a lawyer who heads the higher education practice at the Washington law firm Dow Lohnes and who moderated the panel. "Something has to happen in terms of measuring value." Peter P. Smith agreed, and told the audience of for-profit college leaders that it would be a smart tactical move to stay a step ahead of the accountability push. "They're going to run you out of town anyway," said Smith, who is senior vice president of academic strategies and development for Kaplan Higher Education. "Get in front and make it look like a parade."

"January 22, 2012 States Push Even Further to Cut Spending on Colleges By Eric Kelderman For nearly four years, governors and state legislators have focused on little else in higher education but cutting budgets to deal with historic gaps in revenue. Now, with higher-education support at a 25-year low, lawmakers are considering some policy changes that have been off-limits in the past, such as consolidating campuses and eliminating governing boards. Such proposals reflect the reality that, in most states, money for higher education will be constrained for the foreseeable future. Systems in Georgia and New York have already taken the unusual step of combining campuses under a single president. Other states, such as Ohio, are talking about giving institutions more freedom from state regulations, although for college administrators there's a trade-off: They would get more flexibility but even less state money. On the agenda in many statehouses this year will be bills that would tie higher-education appropriations to the completion rates of students at public colleges. Such performance-based models, which have had a mixed record in recent decades, are again popular with lawmakers trying to squeeze the most out of every tax dollar and to reward colleges that are more efficient at producing graduates. Related Content State Support For Higher Education Falls 7.6% in 2012 Fiscal Year Calif. Governor Goes After For-Profits With Limits on Cal Grants Legislators aren't demanding that colleges be more cost-efficient just to reduce spending on higher education, says Travis J. Reindl, a higher-education researcher for the bipartisan National Governors Association. They also want to keep colleges affordable for students. "We'll still be talking about money, money, money," Mr. Reindl says of the legislative sessions ahead. "Governors are increasingly interested in how the money is being spent by higher education ... and how much of that money is going to come out of

"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

"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

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"Cracking Open the Scientific Process Timothy Fadek for The New York Times A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members. By THOMAS LIN Published: January 16, 2012 Recommend Twitter Linkedin comments (145) E-Mail Print Single Page Reprints Share The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. Science Times Podcast Subscribe This week: Opening science and doing it yourself, plus the malaria medicine of Chairman Mao. Podcast: Science Times Related Wordplay Blog: Open Science, Numberplay style! (January 16, 2012) When Breakthroughs Begin at Home (January 17, 2012) RSS Feed RSS Get Science News From The New York Times » Enlarge This Image Timothy Fadek for The New York Times LIKE, FOLLOW, COLLABORATE A staff meeting at ResearchGate. The networking site, modeled after Silicon Valley startups, houses 350,000 papers. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (145) » For centuries, this is how science has operated - through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only "if you're stuck with

"Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission? How Colleges Can Set Things Right, and Some That Do 1 By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus Tuition charges at both public and private colleges have more than doubled-in real dollars-compared with a generation ago. For most Americans, educating their offspring will be the largest financial outlay, after their home mortgage, they'll ever make. And if parents can't or won't pay, young people often find themselves burdened with staggering loans. Graduating with six figures' worth of debt is becoming increasingly common. So are colleges giving good value for those investments? What are families buying? What are individuals-and our society as a whole-gaining from higher education? Several years ago, we set out to answer those questions and began studying institutions and interviewing higher-education leaders, policy makers, and students across the country. Our conclusion: Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training-and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus-a $420-billion industry-immune from scrutiny and in need of reform. Here are some proposals that might begin to set things right:"

"UC online degree proposal rattles academics Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer San Francisco Chronicle July 12, 2010 04:00 AM aking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald's: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you're just as full. Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program. "We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done," said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort. But a number of skeptical faculty members and graduate student instructors fear that a cyber UC would deflate the university's five-star education into a fast-food equivalent, cheapening the brand. Similar complaints at the University of Illinois helped bring down that school's ambitious Global Campus program last fall after just two years. UC officials say theirs will be different. On Wednesday in San Francisco, UC's governing Board of Regents will hear about a pilot program of 25 to 40 courses to be developed after UC raises $6 million from private donors. The short-term goal is to take pressure off heavily enrolled general education classes like writing and math, Edley said. More for less Long term, the idea is to expand access to the university while saving money. Tuition for online and traditional courses would be the same. But with students able to take courses in their living rooms, the university envisions spending less on their education while increasing the number of tuition-paying students - helpful as state financial support drops. Savings estimates are "encouraging" but too preliminary to disclose, Edley said, noting that even if the pilot program succeeds, cyber UC is still several years away. Evidence

"Mission Creep in Higher Education By Stan Katz I have been following an effort begun by three outstanding academic psychologists to think about the relationship between ethics and accomplishment in professional lives. The scholars involved are Howard Gardner (Harvard School of Education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), and William Damon (Stanford School of Education). They call their effort the "Good Work Project," and it has already resulted in several books, including Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon's Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). A helpful descriptive paper can be found online here. Howard Gardner is currently editing a new volume of essays to be published in several months as Good Work: Theory and Practice. He has shared with me Bill Damon's piece "Mission Creep and Bad Work in Higher Places," which I think brilliantly exposes the tension that the Good Work Project is exploring between excellence and ethics, between professional accomplishments and professional goals. The title of this essay tells the reader where Damon is going. He argues that "mission creep" is capable of producing bad, rather than good, work, using two examples of professionalism gone astray. The first wayward profession is higher finance and the second is higher education. His account of "low times in high finance" is that the financial industry has abandoned its appropriate mission "to deploy capital so that enterprises can produce goods and services in a profitable manner." Over the past couple of decades the industry has "departed from its ethical moorings" by, among other things, producing new financial instruments (derivatives) that cannot be properly valued-and that their holders discovered had little value. The problem here Damon contends, is that the financial industry lost sight of its "traditional public mission" as its leaders "gambled away the investments that they were respons

"Reports Highlight Disparities in Graduation Rates Among White and Minority Students By Jennifer Gonzalez A pair of reports released on Monday by the Education Trust seek to reveal how disparate graduation rates are among white, black, and Hispanic students at hundreds of public and private universities, and call attention to individual institutions where the gaps are particularly large or small. Fifty-seven percent of all students who enroll in four-year, nonprofit colleges earn diplomas within six years, but the graduation rates for different groups of students vary vastly. On average, 60 percent of white students who start college have earned bachelor's degrees six years later. But only 49 percent of Hispanic students and 40 percent of black students do. The two reports, which deal separately with Hispanic and black students as compared to their white peers, seek to look beneath the averages, highlighting individual colleges that are doing well and also focusing on those that are missing the mark on graduation equity. The findings are based on several years of data from College Results Online, a Web-based tool developed by the Education Trust that allows comparisons of college graduation rates by race, ethnicity, and gender for four-year institutions across the country."

"Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's By GINA KOLATA In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer's disease in the human brain. Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease. The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. "The problem in the field was that you had many different scientists in many different universities doing their own research with their own patients and with their own methods," said Dr. Michael W. Weiner of the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs, who directs ADNI. "Different people using different methods on different subjects in different places were getting different results, which is not surprising. What was needed was to get everyone together and to get a common data set." But that would require a huge effort. No company could do it alone, and neither could individual researchers. The project would require 800 subjects, some with normal memories, some with memory impairment, some with Alzheimer's, who would be tested for possible biomarkers and followed for years to see whether thes

"Adult education for the 21st century Too many are unable to make the leap from community college to a four-year degree By Susan C. Aldridge July 6, 2010 I have had the pleasure of handing diplomas to some unusual people at commencement. Still, it was startling to see the child walk toward me. He was 9. He looked younger. He wasn't accepting the diploma for himself, of course. It was for his dad, on active duty in Iraq. He'd sent his son, living on a base in Germany, to get it for him. "Congratulations," I said. He and his dad deserved it. At University of Maryland University College (UMUC), our graduates are America's adult learners. Almost all work full time. Half are parents. Their diplomas often reflect the work, sacrifice - and triumph - of an entire family. The personal achievements of our students, though, are the exception rather than the rule. They highlight a national problem. UMUC graduates often begin studying at the "unsung heroes" of higher education: America's community colleges. But each year, thousands of community college students who want to earn a bachelor's degree - particularly those from modest-income or minority families - cannot continue. America's four-year colleges don't accommodate them. This is not just a tragedy for them. It is a tragedy for our nation. Researchers estimate that baby boomer retirements will soon leave our workforce 14 million shy of the number of four-year degree recipients we need. What stands in the way? First, cost. Students paying about $2,500 a year for community college tuition cannot always afford the $7,000 average for public universities, much less the $26,000 average for private institutions. And there are other obstacles. Four-year colleges and universities often reject credits from transfer students. They schedule courses at challenging times for students who work. Sometimes they cannot even provide enough parking spaces for people rushing from work to class. When it comes to higher educat

"Project Win-Win Project Win-Win involves 35 community colleges and colleges in six states-Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin-in finding former students, no longer enrolled anywhere and never awarded any degree, whose records qualify them for associate's degrees, and get those degrees awarded retroactively. Simultaneously, this effort will identify former students who are "academically short" of an associate's degree by no more than nine credits, find them, and seek to bring them back to complete their degree. Project Win-Win, undertaken in a partnership of IHEP and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, and funded by Lumina Foundation for Education, is a major expansion of a pilot program conducted in the fall and spring terms of 2009-10 in nine of the 35 institutions and under the sponsorship of the Education Trust. The pilot schools (six community colleges in Louisiana, New York, and Ohio and three four-year colleges in Louisiana that award associate's degrees) discovered that finding the students and awarding these degrees is neither a simple nor an instant matter. However, by the end of their seven-month pilot, these institutions had already awarded or certified for award nearly 600 associate's degrees, and had lined up almost 1,600 students who were short by nine or fewer credits, hence "potential" degree recipients. The pilot schools will continue in the expanded version of Project Win-Win for one year, by the end of which IHEP expects to see them award about 1,000 associate's degrees, and have at least 2,000 students in line to complete their degree in a timely manner. Projecting those numbers out across both U.S. community colleges and four-year colleges that award associate's degrees would yield, at a minimum, an expected 12 percent increase in the number of associate's degrees awarded. Adding in four-year colleges that do not award associate's degrees themselves but can target students who