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Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"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

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

No Time to Waste A publication of the SREB 4 Imperatives for States: 1. Set statewide priority and direction, with specific goals, for increasing the numbers of degrees and certificates - including raising accountability for system and institutional leaders and setting measures to assess credential completion, among other actions. 2. Increase access and enrollment in postsecondary education even more, by improving college affordability, students' college readiness, and drawing more adults to postsecondary study. 3. Increase the numbers of credentials earned by students in all colleges and universities through targeted institutional actions- building campus cultures that make completion the first priority and institutionalizing a series of actions that guide students more directly to a credential. 4. Increase productivity and cost-efficiency in degree completion ─ by introducing strategies that reduce excess credits, streamline college-transfer systems, and expect timely degree completion at lower costs.

"Fixing the Broken Financing Model October 4, 2010 By Darryl G. Greer and Michael W. Klein In the title of a recent paper, David Breneman, a regarded higher education economist, asks: "Is the Business Model of Higher Education Broken?" While he objectively weighs the pros and cons of his question, we answer emphatically, yes! Put simply, the way in which America finances public colleges and universities, which serve over 70 percent of college students nationally, is severely and irreparably broken and needs to be changed. Without a new model, public higher education will fail its principal purpose of providing broad college opportunity, especially to low- and middle-income students and an emerging population of new Americans. Moreover, without a new funding rationale that has transparency and predictability for all funding partners, these colleges will lose the public trust - a critical element in sustaining the American democratic experience through education. Public colleges can achieve the dual goals of public and private benefits only by demonstrating equity and fairness regarding who goes to college; legitimacy for who pays and how; and responsibility for how colleges account for educational outcomes and sustaining the public trust. The solution as we see it should include a new public service corporation model that creates private partnerships; produces new revenue to replace lost public financing; protects and enhances the core educational enterprise; and, thereby, generates greater transparency, accountability and public trust that will support a sustained investment in public colleges. The Problem There is widespread evidence, in addition to opinion, that the longstanding model for financing public colleges that has seemed to work so well in many states for decades, now seems, even with an expected economic recovery, to need radical change. (See the soon-to-be-published "A New Model of Financing Public Colleges and Universities," in On the H

"December 12, 2010 Student Learning: Measure or Perish By Kevin Carey For the past three months, The Chronicle's reporters have been writing a series of articles collectively titled Measuring Stick, describing the consequences of a higher-education system that refuses to consistently measure how much students learn. From maddening credit-transfer policies and barely regulated for-profit colleges to a widespread neglect of teaching, the articles show that without information about learning, many of the most intractable problems facing higher education today will go unsolved. Failing to fill the learning-information deficit will have many consequences: * The currency of exchange in higher education will continue to suffer from abrupt and unpredictable devaluation. Students trying to assemble course credits from multiple institutions into a single degree-that is, most students-frequently have their credits discounted for no good reason. That occurs not only when students transfer between the two- and four-year sectors, or when the institutions involved have divergent educational philosophies. A student trying to transfer credits from an introductory technical-math course at Bronx Community College to other colleges within the City University of New York system, for example, would be flatly denied by five institutions and given only elective credit by three others. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by contrast, would award the student credit for an introductory modern-math course acceptable for transfer by every CUNY campus, including Bronx Community College-except that BCC would translate that course into trigonometry and college algebra, not technical math. Students who emerge from this bureaucratic labyrinth should be awarded credit in Kafka studies for their trouble. Credit devaluation, which wastes enormous amounts of time, money, and credentialed learning every year, is rooted in mistrust. Because colleges don't know what students in

"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."

"December 13, 2010 Higher-Education Groups Lay Out Strategies to Reach Obama's College-Completion Goal By Eric Kelderman President Obama's ambitious goal for the nation to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020 can be reached, says a new report by three higher-education organizations. But getting there, the groups say, will require a commitment to action by federal, state, and institutional leaders, and not just the arcane discussions of process that have so far dominated the response to the 2020 goal. "The collective effort to strengthen higher-education performance has yet to materialize," says the report, "Strengthening College Opportunity and Performance," which was produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability; the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "Over the last year, instead of vigorous debate about strategies for increasing educational attainment," the report says, "we saw technical arguments among a few think tanks and foundations about how goals are set." The groups lay out a series of recommended policies and actions that should be taken to put the country on course to meet President Obama's objective. The federal government, the groups say, needs to define explicit goals for all states and make sure that policies and regulations contribute to meeting goals rather than inhibiting them. For example, the kinds of data that the government collects and reports are not helpful for determining how well states and institutions are really performing in higher education, the report says. States must have a full understanding of how many more degrees colleges should be producing, make sure that the colleges within their borders have clearly defined roles, and overhaul appropriations policies to make sure that institutions that will enroll the most students are getting an adequate amount of money a

'Academically Adrift' January 18, 2011 If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press. The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations -- and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other "higher level" skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging: * 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college. * 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college. * Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later -- but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning. "How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much," write the authors, Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. For many undergraduates, they write, "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent."

How do we facilitate--both structurally and culturally--opportunities for creativity in developing opportunities for profound transformation of the work of colleges and universities?

"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

"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

Kids don't put Harvard stickers on their rear windshields, parents do. But for how long? These schools have much to recommend them: impressive students, organic dining halls, presidential alumni. To maintain their reputations, however, elite colleges have long relied on limiting access-Harvard's class of 2015 is about 1,700 students, Yale's is 1,300-and that may be coming to an end. Revolutionaries outside the ivy walls are hammering their way not onto campus but straight into class. Enlarge Image CloseAlamy Elite schools have long relied on limiting access-but for how long? .It's a thrilling collegiate coup. Last fall, a couple of hundred Stanford students registered for Sebastian Thrun's class on artificial intelligence. He offered the course free online, too, through his new company Udacity, and 160,000 students signed up. For the written assignments and exams, both groups got identical questions-and 210 students got a perfect overall score. They all came from the online group. So if you bluffed your way into the Ivy League with plumped-up credentials or an essay edited by somebody else, it's time to start breaking a sweat. "I like to compare it to film," Mr. Thrun told me at a coffee shop between Stanford and Mountain View, Calif., where his day job is running Google X, the company's experimental lab. "Before film there was theater-small casting companies reaching 300 people at a time. Then celluloid was invented, and you could record something and replicate it. A good movie wouldn't reach 300 but 3,000, and soon 300,000 and soon three million. That changed the economics." It is education's time to change now. At the high-school level, interactive study sites are increasingly ingenious: Look at Piazza, Blackboard and Quizlet, founded by a 17-year-old. TED-Ed just launched a channel on You Tube, with three- to 10-minute lessons for kids. YouTube's EDU Portal has been viewed 22 billion times. Khan Academy, a favorite of Bill Gates

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year.

Those innocent-seeming brochures imploring students to find their passions and express themselves may be helping to widen the socioeconomic achievement gap, a new study finds. A team of researchers led by Northwestern University assistant professor Nicole M. Stephens argues that American academic institutions expect a level of independence that is uncomfortable for many first-generation college students, who researchers say are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds that emphasize collaboration and interdependence. "They experience more of a culture shock," Stephens said. "The experiences and norms can be different than what they're used to." By making small changes in how expectations are presented to students and how classes are taught, the researchers said, colleges can help level the playing field for first-generation students. The study will appear in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

A think piece by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand about how to think about change.

"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago."