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"September 6, 2010, 10:30 AM ET The Olive Garden Theory of Higher Education By David Glenn Should colleges and universities find "innovative ways to skimp on quality"? That provocation was made the other day by Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress. He believes the American system of higher education could learn lessons from certain middlebrow suburban restaurant chains. The argument runs like this: The Olive Garden and its ilk might not deserve any culinary awards, but their menus are reasonably ambitious and their food is reliably okay. (Many of Yglesias's commenters dispute that last point, but for purposes of this discussion let's stipulate that The Olive Garden's food is Not Bad. If you can't buy that, then mentally substitute whatever other suburban chain you secretly like.) Through standardization and economies of scale, Yglesisas says, chains like The Olive Garden have found ways to sell respectable fascimiles of ethnic cuisines at low-to-moderate prices. Yglesias believes the world would be better off if institutions of higher education (and health-care providers, but that's a different conversation) had stronger incentives to provide value, in the Olive Garden sense: a consistently decent product at a price low enough that it's accessible to a large swath of the public. College educations are so valuable, Yglesias argues, that broadening access to even a less-than-top-quality version would improve public welfare."

Innovative system for grading that encourages collaboration and a high degree of creativity on the part of students.

"Fixing Higher Ed August 24, 2010 By Henry F. Fradella The press and the blogosphere have devoted significant coverage recently to a report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that predicted that the United States is on "collision course with the future." The report estimated that within a mere eight years, the nation will suffer a shortfall of at least 3 million workers with college degrees and 4.7 million workers with postsecondary certificates. The authors of the report concluded that to meet the challenges of a global economy in which 59 to 63 percent of domestic jobs require education beyond the high-school level, America's colleges and universities "need to increase the number of degrees they confer by 10 percent annually, a tall order." Although numerous commentators have responded to the report by echoing its call for increased access to higher education, it seems to me that few have focused on a key term in the report's call to "develop reforms that result in both cost-efficient and high quality postsecondary education." Producing millions more baccalaureate-educated workers will do nothing to address the competitiveness of the U.S. workforce if those degrees are not high quality ones. Sadly, it is pretty clear that far too many college degrees aren't worth the paper on which they are printed. In 2006, the Spellings Commission reported disturbing data that more than 60 percent of college graduates were not proficient in prose, document, and quantitative literacy. In other words, significantly more than half of college degree holders in the United States lack the "critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces." Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, cited these findings in his recent Huffington Post essay, "The Failure of American Higher Education." He shared stories about recent college graduates, many from prestigious universitie

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink, Part 2 January 7, 2011, 11:27 am By Peter Wood For several years prior to 2010, it was boom times for for-profit colleges and universities. Their enrollments soared, their profitability went through the roof, and investors rushed to get in on a good thing. The market capitalization of the for-profit sector of higher education shot up to dizzying heights. Much of the growth was due to the efficient way in which for-profit colleges and universities signed up students for federally guaranteed student loans. As a whole, the sector didn't much concern itself with the academic preparation of its prospective students. Federal loan eligibility was the key to admission. Beginning in 2009, the Obama administration's Department of Education began to float ideas for increased regulation of the for-profits, but in spring 2010, it seemed to decide enough was enough and began an all-out regulatory assault on the pro-profit sector that continues to this day. The assault spilled over to Congress as well. On December 8, for example, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Tom Harkin (D) issued a scathing report, Benefiting Whom? For-Profit Education Companies and the Growth of Military Education Benefits, that portrayed the for-profit sector as ruthlessly exploiting federal programs intended to help veterans. The report, based on an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office, turned out to be error-ridden with virtually all of the errors prejudicial to the for-profits, but that hasn't slowed the effort to rein them in. When the regulatory assault began, analysts predicted big drops in enrollment; stock prices plummeted; and some foresaw an industry that would be driven to the wall. In my last blog I summarized what happened. How much or how little should the travails of the for-profit sector of higher education matter to those of us concerned with the general future of American scholarsh

"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

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

"January 30, 2011 'Facebook of Science' Seeks to Reshape Peer Review By Colin Macilwain Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot. "Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed," recalls the scientific publisher. "They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable." Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications-there are now about 200 of them-to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million. Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call "the Facebook of science" and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers."

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

"The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning By Kevin Carey In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed. Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved. Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize." Then, the Education and Labor Departments decided to do something highly uncharacteristic of large federal bureaucracies: They began to talk. To one another. Constructively. What they devised could change higher education for huge numbers of students, many of whom will never attend a community college at all. The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials-videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more-available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER's. The open-resource movement has

"If Engineers Were to Rethink Higher Ed's Future September 27, 2011, 10:27 pm By Jeffrey Selingo Atlanta - Walk into a college president's office these days, and you'll probably find a degree hanging on the wall from one of three academic disciplines: education, social sciences, or the humanities and fine arts. Some 70 percent of college leaders completed their studies in one of those fields, according to the American Council on Education. You're unlikely to discover many engineering degrees. Just 2 percent of college presidents are engineers. Yet, when we think of solving complex problems, we normally turn to engineers to help us figure out solutions. And higher education right now is facing some tough issues: rising costs; low completion rates; and delivery systems, curricula, and teaching methods that show their age. So what if engineers tackled those problems using their reasoning skills and tested various solutions through simulations? Perhaps then we would truly design a university of the future. That's the basic idea behind Georgia Tech's new Center for 21st Century Universities. The center is officially described as a "living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education," but its director, Rich DeMillo, describes it in terms we can all understand: higher education's version of the Silicon Valley "garage." DeMillo knows that concept well, having come from Hewlett-Packard, where he was chief technology officer (he's also a former Georgia Tech dean). Applying the garage mentality to innovation in higher ed is an intriguing concept, and as DeMillo described it to me over breakfast on Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus on Tuesday, I realized how few college leaders adopt its principles. Take, for example, a university's strategic plan. Such documents come and go with presidents, and the proposals in every new one are rarely tested in small ways before leaders try to scale them across the campus. After all, presidents have l

At the U. of North Texas at Dallas, 'disruptive innovation' raises hopes and fears The University of North Texas at Dallas was conceived 10 years ago as a public institution along tried-and-true lines-a comprehensive metropolitan university meant to serve a diverse student population and to improve the economic outlook of a part of the city that prosperity has left behind.

As the private sector works faster and more boldly to churn out next-generation technology and embrace cutting-edge practices, the U.S. Department of Education and its partner federal agencies are ramping up their efforts to bring more spark and innovation into elementary and secondary schools.

Salman Khan, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School, was working as a hedge fund manager when he began posting videos on YouTube six years ago to tutor young family members in math. That led to the 2008 creation of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that has built a free, online collection of thousands of digital lessons (nearly 3,000 of them created by Mr. Khan himself) and exercises in subjects ranging from algebra to microeconomics. Education Week Staff Writer Lesli A. Maxwell recently interviewed Mr. Kahn about the evolution of the academy and its potential for changing K-12 education.

This is the season when many high school seniors are applying to and awaiting decisions from colleges and universities. It's an exciting time for those of us in higher education. We are reminded that learning is a lifelong pursuit. We are energized by the ideas and ambitions of our students. While we are excited about the prospects of a new freshman class, the economic downturn of the last three years has exposed and amplified our society's skepticism about the value of higher education. Yes, people still want to go to college, but there are growing concerns about student debt and unemployment after graduation. Students worry about their return on investment. Institutional leaders worry about hiring and retaining effective faculty and administrators, and about the constant cost of maintaining physical and technological infrastructures. Like the auto and newspaper industries, American higher education needs to innovate and reinvent itself if it's going to survive, thrive, and recapture its earlier glory. Industries that do not recognize the need for transition-or that do not manage that transition with agility-are likely to fail.

"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. "

"A highly engaged set of respondents that included 895 technology stakeholders and critics participated in the online, opt-in survey. In this canvassing of a diverse number of experts, 72% agreed with the statement: "By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.""

With James Surowiecki, we discuss crowdsourcing theory and explore how companies of the future might harness new technology to mine the collective wisdom of the crowd - tapping into new levels of ideation and innovation, intelligent prediction and solution-finding schemas.

"Higher education is a $400 billion industry fueled by taxpayer money. One of the fastest-growing--and most controversial--sectors of the industry is the for-profit colleges and universities. Unlike traditional colleges that raise money from wealthy alumni and other donors, many for-profit schools sell shares to investors on Wall Street. But what are students getting out of the deal? Critics say a worthless degree and a mountain of debt. Proponents insist they're innovators, widening access to education. FRONTLINE follows the money to uncover how for-profit universities are transforming the way we think about college in America. "

College tuitions are rising. Seat space-especially in community colleges-is often scarce. University endowments are shrinking. State institutions are facing enormous cuts in state funding. While colleges have fewer resources, they are admitting students who present greater challenges. Increasing numbers of students arrive on campus without the preparation to do college-level work. An estimated 42 percent of students at public two-year institutions and 28 percent of all students nationally take at least one remedial class. Yet at too many universities, classes are taught in much the same way as they were 50-or even 500-years ago. Students crowd into lecture halls to hear long uninterrupted lectures. Later, they discuss the course material in smaller sections taught by faculty or graduate assistants. Some institutions, however, are finding new ways to teach all students. A new Education Sector report, The Course of Innovation: Using Technology to Transform Higher Education, highlights the ways that colleges and universities are using technology to simultaneously improve student learning and reduce skyrocketing higher education costs.

"ST. PAUL, MINN. -- Pockets of experimentation and potential change are cropping up all over the place in higher education. Here, it's the OpenCourseWare movement. There, colleges are adopting "just in time" remediation. And over here, some states are changing funding formulas to reward institutions for graduating students rather than merely enrolling them. But what do the individual innovations amount to? Do they point the way to the sort of transformative change that, given the likelihood of constrained budgets going forward, is probably necessary if higher education is to not only sustain the current level of postsecondary attainment in the country, but increase it in the way many policy experts believe is needed? Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Community Colleges' Unfunded Mandate May 17, 2010 * The Accountability/Improvement Paradox April 30, 2010 * Looking Before They Leap April 27, 2010 * Retention, From Beginning to End April 26, 2010 * What the Pledge Means April 21, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement Even longtime advocates of higher education appear to be coming around to the conclusion that the status quo won't suffice. But acknowledging that fact is a far cry from identifying a framework that might lead to such a transformed future. It was in recognition of the latter goal that an unusually diverse group of college administrators and professors, higher education analysts, state officials, and others gathered here last week to talk about how to use data to provoke change and improve performance in higher education"