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"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

"August 2, 2010 Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken. He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching. Hacker proposes numerous changes, including an end to the tenure system, in his book, Higher Education? "Tenure is lifetime employment security, in fact, into the grave" Hacker tells NPR's Tony Cox. The problem, as he sees it, is that the system "works havoc on young people," who must be incredibly cautious throughout their years in school as graduate students and young professors, "if they hope to get that gold ring." That's too high a cost, Hacker and his co-author, Claudia Dreifus, conclude. "Regretfully," Hacker says, "tenure is more of a liability than an asset." It's August, and in a few weeks, millions of teenagers will trek across town or across the country to their new college home for the next four years or more. A college degree can now cost more than a good-sized family home, by some estimates as much as a quarter million dollars. Andrew Hacker argues, in a new book, that too often, college is not worth the cost. Our system of higher education, he says, is broken. Andrew Hacker is the author of - the coauthor, make that - of "Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It.""

"MBS expands into online marketplace By Victoria Guida Oct 1, 2010 Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct, recently launched Xplana, an online student learning platform that helps students manage their academic lives through social networking, study groups and e-textbooks. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online resources have transformed the way students receive information. MBS Textbook Exchange, eying the exodus from print to digital, is evolving to keep up with the technological transformation. This summer, MBS launched an online social learning platform called Xplana that strives to connect Internet resources in a way that makes learning easier and more interactive for students. The company has since made the case that the new website is the way of the future on college campuses. "We began looking at the fact that learning was evolving in a lot of different ways," said Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct and Xplana (pronounced ex plah' nah). "The traditional print book has always been one of the primary sources of learning, with the teacher standing up in front of the classroom. The Internet kind of changed that whole process. You don't necessarily look in a book to find information." MBS, which leads the textbook industry in wholesale production, acquired Xplana last October as a strategic move to keep up with the times, said Rob Reynolds, founder of Xplana."

"American academic leaders are casting a wary eye on developments in higher education in the rest of the world. Will the Bologna Process give Europe an edge? Will the development of research universities in countries outside the West stop the best talent from coming to the United States? What does it mean when American colleges and universities open up campuses thousands of miles away from their home base? Ben Wildavsky argues that these and many other changes are indeed significant and are bringing about a "globalization" of higher education. But while some observers fear these developments could hurt American higher education, Wildavsky argues that the changes have the potential to be a win-win for all involved (and that these and other forms of globalization are now inevitable). He makes his case in a new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton University Press). Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, answered questions about the themes of the book."

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability By Julie Thompson Klein AAC&U is pleased to copublish an important new book by Julie Thompson Klein, Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability. With a foreword by AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider, the book provides a systematic approach to interdisciplinarity on campus, grounded in a conceptual framework, and also presents a portfolio of pragmatic strategies. Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures gives administrators and faculty the tools they need to craft persuasive arguments, make informed decisions anchored in the literature, and devise changes in policy and procedures that will foster successful and sustainable interdisciplinary research and education.

"January 9, 2011 State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts Money-saving effort at 2-year colleges faces vexing problems By Martha Ann Overland It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra. Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30? Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?" So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month. The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be

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

"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

"Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming January 23, 2012, 4:42 pm By Richard Vedder The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith's StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments. A little economics explains why this is so. In the first week of beginning economics courses, professors usually make this fundamental point: If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes. Resources (dollars) are scarce, and individuals want to make the best use of them. They "maximize their utility" by shifting away from high-priced good or service A to lower-priced good B. With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes-the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at communicating, disciplined, etc., is by presenting a bachelor's degree diploma. College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status. As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers? Employers like the current system, because the huge (often over $100,000) cost of demonstrating competency is borne by the student, not by them. Employers seemingly have little incentive to look for alternative certification. That is why reformers like me cannot get employer organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take alternative certification seriously. But if companies can find good employees with high-school diplomas who have dem

" MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates December 19, 2011 - 4:28am The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online -- today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT. MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning. The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online. An FAQ from MIT offers more details on the new program. While MIT has been widely praised for OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open" educational movement has shifted to programs like the Khan Academy (through which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and an initiative at Stanford University that makes courses available -- courses for which some German universities are providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in OpenCourseWare. 35 Disqus Like Dislike Login Add New Comment Image Real-time updating is enabled. (Pause) Showing 1 comment william czander In 1997, Peter Drucker made a profound prediction he predicted that in 30 years the mortar and brick university campuses would be driven out of existence by their inexorable tuition, He did not predict the financi

"Online course start-ups offer virtually free college By Jon Marcus, Published: January 21 An emerging group of entrepreneurs with influential backing is seeking to lower the cost of higher education from as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year to nearly nothing. These new arrivals are harnessing the Internet to offer online courses, which isn't new. But their classes are free, or almost free. Most traditional universities have refused to award academic credit for such online studies. Now the start-ups are discovering a way around that monopoly, by inventing credentials that "graduates" can take directly to employers instead of university degrees. "If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous," said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor. org, a nonprofit organization based in the District. Established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor, it offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors. Another nonprofit initiative is Peer-to-Peer University, based in California. Known as P2PU, it offers free online courses and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Web browser. A third is University of the People, also based in California, which offers more than 40 online courses. It charges students a one-time $10 to $50 application fee. Among its backers is the Clinton Global Initiative. The content these providers supply comes from top universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University and the University of Michigan. Those are among about 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement. The universities aim to widen access to course content for prospective students and others. At MIT, a pioneer of open courseware, half of incoming freshmen report that they've looked at MIT online courses and a third say it influenced their decision to go the

The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, $19.95, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, March 2010, ISBN-10: 0674035305, ISBN-13: 978-0674035300, pp. 496. Mass education is what set the United States apart from all other nations starting in the 19th Century and extending through much of the 20th century, as the authors explain in this award-winning book. Rather than educating only the elite who could pay for it, America educated more people for more years at no charge. As the U.S. turned out even more educated people than needed to meet the demands of technology, its wages, productivity and income equality increased, according to Drs. Goldin and Katz, both Harvard University economics professors. Gains from this expanding economic growth became more or less equally distributed across society. In the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, the country began losing what it cast as the race between education and technology. In the meantime, other countries had begun educating more of their own people. Students of some nations began exceeding U.S. high school and college graduation rates, as well as outscoring American students on standardized exams. "Rising inequality, lagging productivity for a prolonged period, and a rather non-stellar educational report card have led many to question the qualities that once made America the envy of all and a beacon for the world's people," the authors write. As they note, "the supply of educated Americans slowed considerably" after 1980. Technology raced ahead of educational gains in the United States. The authors expand on the reasons for these gaps, analyze trends in education and economics that are at the root of the problem and examine some solutions. As the bottom line, to fix the problems and regain our competitive edge in the world, the authors suggest that the U.S. re-examine assumptions about education and turn out more people with analytical, direct-service an

"Outsourced Ed: Colleges Hire Companies to Build Their Online Courses Michael Tricoli, a manager at a medical-device company who has a young daughter, wanted an M.B.A. He got one online from Northeastern U., which outsourced much of his college experience to a private company. By Marc Parry Michael Tricoli was a middle manager looking for a leg up in his career, so he got an online M.B.A. from Northeastern University. Well, not only from Northeastern. Much of his college experience was outsourced to a private company. The company, Embanet, put up millions to start the online business program. Its developers helped build the courses. Its staff talked Mr. Tricoli through the application. It even pays-and, in rare cases, refers for possible hiring-the assistants who help teach students. In exchange, Embanet gets what Northeastern's business dean calls "a sizable piece" of the tuition revenue. He won't say how much. But Embanet's chief executive says its share can swell to a whopping 85 percent. As more colleges dip their toes into the booming online-education business, they're increasingly taking those steps hand-in-hand with companies like Embanet. For nonprofit universities trying to compete in an online market aggressively targeted by for-profit colleges, the partnerships can rapidly bring in many students and millions of dollars in new revenue. That's becoming irresistible to an increasingly prominent set of clients. George Washington University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, to pick just three, all work with online-service companies. But the new breed of online collaboration can tread into delicate academic territory, blurring the lines between college and corporation. Derek C. Bok, a former president of Harvard University and author of a book on the commercialization of academe, questions companies' encroachment into teaching. He worries that bottom-line thinking will drive decisions about how colleges deliver courses.

"While an undergraduate at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark., Caitlin Getchell juggled 18 credit hours each semester. In an attempt to lighten her workload during the school year and still enjoy her summer vacation, Getchell turned to an online class one summer. Luckily for her, the American government class she selected mostly contained information she already knew, and she breezed through it. No research papers were required, and open book tests were allowed; there was also regular posting on a message board by students. But, Getchell says, if the class had been something different, she might not have done as well. "If it had been a subject I didn't know much about - Calculus or Chemistry for example - I think I would have really struggled," she says. Getchell, who received a bachelor's degree in history in 2007, adds that she was glad she took the class online. And she's not alone in finding the benefits of online learning irresistible. Enrollment in online courses is growing rapidly, and several universities are even offering degrees strictly online. In fall 2008, 4.6 million students at degree-granting higher institutions took at least one class online, a nearly 17 percent increase over fall 2007. Online enrollment accounted for 25 percent of total enrollment for fall 2007, according to the Sloan Consortium, which has conducted a survey of online education in the U.S. every year since 2002."

Editorial from the book DIY U: Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. She cites 4 trends: 1. 80/20 rule 2. Great Unbundling 3. Techno-hybridixzation 4. Personal Learning Networks and Paths

"Peter P. Smith's career in and out of higher education has not followed the straight and narrow. Amid forays into politics (as a member of Congress and lieutenant governor of Vermont) and international affairs (at UNESCO), Smith has been a higher education innovator, helping to found the statewide Community College of Vermont in 1970 and serving for 10 years as founding president of California State University's Monterey Bay campus, beginning in 1995. In those jobs and his current one, as senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, Smith has pushed existing colleges and universities to better serve the adults and other students who have been least well served by traditional higher education. In his new book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), he argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. "

"Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched-and very sunny-forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history."

"Ranking the Rankings August 23, 2010, 9:01 am By Richard Kahlenberg If it's back to school, it must be time for the publication of college rankings. In recent days, U.S. News & World Report released its much-discussed rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University declared its ranking of world universities. As my Innovations Blog colleague Richard Vedder noted recently, Forbes has its own rankings to compete with U.S. News, and Vedder (who helped Forbes come up with its methodology) argues that Forbes's is better-that is, ranks higher. My good friend Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at U.S. News, discusses the proliferation of rankings in his fascinating new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Wildavsky devotes a lengthy chapter to global rankings and compares and contrasts the two main international rankings-the Shanghai rankings, which look primarily at science research (counting factors such as the number of alumni and faculty who have Nobel Prizes and citations in science journals) with those of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which heavily weights academic peer evaluations. Despite their fundamental differences, Wildavsky notes, in 2008, the top 10 in the two lists had seven overlapping institutions. My own favorite in the rankings game is The Washington Monthly, which today released the 2010 rankings of "What Can Colleges Do for the Country." While other guides "help students and parents decide how to spend their tuition dollars wisely," the Monthly says its goal is "to tell citizens and policy makers which colleges [are] spending their tax dollars wisely." The Monthly ranks colleges and universities based on whether they promote social mobility; research, and service. As I've noted elsewhere, one of the intriguing findings of the Monthly's social mobility ranking is that public universities systems where affirmative action by race has bee

"Ditching a Textbook: An Update January 10, 2011, 11:00 am By Amy Cavender Back in July, I wrote about an experiment I was planning in my two Political Issues sections. I'd opted to try this for a number of reasons: (1) I was dissatisfied with the standard readers available, as they tend to present issues in binary fashion, and real-world issues are seldom that simple. (2) I wanted to be able to take up much more recent issues than I could if I relied on textbooks (it takes too long for things to get into print). (3) I wanted students to help determine the topics for the course, and to develop their skills in locating good sources to help them develop their thinking on issues of interest to them. (4) I wanted to reduce costs for students. So, last semester, I used only one primary textbook: Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (the writing-intensive section also made use of Muriel G. Harris' Prentice Hall Reference Guide). I've yet to find a good substitute for that particular book; it frames the underlying questions of politics nicely, and I wanted my students to have that background as they thought about contemporary issues. For the contemporary issues themselves, though, I started off by selecting a few myself (e.g., technology and privacy, technology and civic discourse, immigration), and showing students the kinds of resources they might be able to find. Then, for the latter part of the course, they chose the issues, found sources, and shared them in the class Zotero library. Working in teams or as individuals (depending on which section they were in), they were then responsible for running a class session and assigning readings for that session. So, how did it work out? Well, I've got some tweaking to do. In the future, I need to provide more guidance on evaluating and using sources (bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of students in Political Issues are first-years). To accomplish that I may need to drop some of

"January 30, 2011 Absent Students Want to Attend Traditional Classes via Webcam Professors already welcome their guest speakers using this same technology New Question for Professors: Should Students Be Allowed to Attend Classes Via Webcam? 1 Paul Jones takes frequent advantage of Skype videoconferencing to invite guest speakers to his mass-communications classes at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among them are (below) Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard U.'s Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford U.; and Howard Rheingold, author of several books on virtual communities. By Jeffrey R. Young It was just 30 minutes before class when Thomas Nelson Laird, an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington, got the e-mail from a student: "I can't make it to class. Can you beam me in by Webcam?" "I thought, I don't know if I can do that," the professor says. He looked at the clock and thought about the time it would take to rig up a link via Skype or some other video-chat system. He had used the technology before, though, so he figured, Why not? Professors across the country are facing similar questions. Webcams are ubiquitous, and students are accustomed to using popular services like Skype to make what are essentially video phone calls to friends and family. Recognizing the trend, this month Skype unveiled a service for educators to trade tips and tricks, called "Skype in the classroom." Professors also frequently bring in guest speakers using the technology, letting students interact with experts they otherwise would only read about in textbooks."