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"Speeding Toward a Slowdown? November 16, 2010 Online college enrollments grew by 21 percent to 5.6 million last fall, the biggest percentage increase in several years, according to a report released today by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group. At the same time, the authors say online growth might begin to slow down in the near future, as the biggest drivers of enrollment growth face budget challenges and stricter recruitment oversight from the federal government. Nearly one million more students took an online course in fall 2009 than in the previous year, according to the new survey, which drew responses from 2,583 academic leaders at both nonprofit and for-profit institutions across the country. That is the biggest numerical increase in the eight-year history of the report, and the largest proportional increase (21.1 percent) since 2005. Online enrollments have grown at more than nine times the rate of general enrollment since 2002. Almost a third of all college students in the country take at least one course online. The conventional wisdom has been that the economic crisis has spurred at least some of that growth, as adults looking to increase their job prospects have gone back to school for a new degree. Three-quarters of the institutions surveyed said the recession drove interest in their online programs. In the year since Sloan administered its survey, there has been more talk of online enrollment growth as a strategy for making up for shrinking state allocations at public university systems - especially in places like California, where some think a massive online expansion could lift the state university system out of financial ruin, and Minnesota, where possible Republican presidential challenger Gov. Tim Pawlenty has made the idea of less-expensive online public higher education one of his talking points. But Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and co-author of the new Sloan survey, says that shrinkin

"The Great College-Degree Scam December 9, 2010, 2:32 pm By Richard Vedder With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits. Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor's degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend). How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word "increase." Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin-to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time. To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the

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

"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

Press Release from the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area. The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation. "Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support." Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of tha

"Searching For Better Research Habits September 29, 2010 NEW YORK CITY -- Should colleges teach students how to be better Googlers? Educators who see the popular search engine as antithetical to good research might cringe at the thought of endorsing it to students. But they might not cringe nearly as hard as did attendees of the 2010 Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference when Andrew Asher showed them what happens when students do not learn how to use Google properly. "Students do not have adequate information literacy skills when they come to college, and this goes for even high-achieving students," said Asher, the lead research anthropologist at the Enthographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, which recently studied the search habits of more than 600 Illinois students spanning a range of institutions and demographic groups. "And they're not getting adequate training as they're going through the curriculum," he said. Asher moved swiftly through a few slides featuring excerpts from interviews with students, each eliciting both chuckles and gasps from the audience of librarians and technologists. "I'm just trusting Google to know what are the good resources," responded one sophomore biology student. "Of all the students that I interviewed, not a single one of them could give an adequate conceptual definition of how Google returns results," said Asher. Not even those "who should know better," like computer science students. The word "magic" came up a lot, he noted. Asher pulled quotes from other students evidencing how the expectations and ignorances bred by habitual, unthinking use of Google had affected how students use other search engines, such as those built into the scholarly archive JSTOR. The students in the ERIAL sample seemed oblivious to the logic of search or how to generate or parse search results with much patience or intelligence. "I just throw up whatever I want into the search box and

"All the President's Profs December 22, 2010 Calling them Mr. Jefferson's Justice League is somehow irresistible. Perhaps that's because the University of Virginia's Faculty Budget Advisory Committee resembles a gathering of superheroes, where brainiacs of varied disciplines combine their powers to confront a common enemy. Granted, the villain - deteriorating university resources - is not as sexy as, say, Lex Luthor. And the scholarly powers of endowed chairs are hardly gamma rays. At the same time, there's a sense Virginia has responded to a difficult economic environment in part by convening an astute assembly of professors on a campus founded 191 years ago by Thomas Jefferson. The 13-member crew, whose membership is weighted toward those with some business or finance acumen, is charged to serve as an informal advisory group to Teresa A. Sullivan, the university's recently minted president. But Sullivan says the committee is also designed to bring transparency to the institution's often-mystifying budgeting process, connecting the university's administrators with a diverse pool of faculty. "It seemed to me a shame these two groups of smart people hadn't sat down with each other before," she says. Unlike a standard faculty budget task force, the advisory committee isn't necessarily engaged with a particular issue, such as where the university should cut or invest. Instead, it is grappling with more fundamental high-level questions, such as whether the university operates with sufficient liquidity - or cash on hand - to pay its bills should there be another huge economic plummet. Another point of distinction for the budget committee is its make-up. Like most university-wide committees, the group includes professors across a range of disciplines. At the same time, Sullivan clearly sought a number of faculty with business orientations, and committee members were charged to "draw on on their own expertise in financial matters to prov

"Technology and the Completion Agenda November 9, 2010 The White House, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Call them the Three Tenors of the completion agenda. In one of his first speeches as president, Barack Obama emphasized the need for a higher rate of postsecondary completion. Lumina had already been investing in projects designed to get more Americans into college and out with a degree. And Gates has, in recent years, made college completion as basic to the legacy of its eponymous benefactor as, well, BASIC. (Others have since echoed the call.) Now, the technology section is joining the band - and may be holding the instruments that could make the whole song a hit: data analytics. "This has been building for a while," says Donald Norris, president and founder of Strategic Initiatives, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in "transformative change" in higher ed and elsewhere, which has lately taken a strong interest in analytics. But only now, Norris says, as institutions grapple with the challenge of enrolling more students and increasing success with fewer resources, has the subject of data analytics - and the tools that technology vendors have been developing to wield those data - emerged at the forefront of conversations about technology in education. Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly. "

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"iPhone App Raises Questions About Who Owns Student Inventions January 31, 2011, 5:56 pm By Tushar Rae An iPhone app designed by a team of students for a contest at the University of Missouri at Columbia has helped lead the institution to rewrite its intellectual-property policies. Members of the student competition, hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, had been informed that the university might assert a partial or complete claim to the products that the students were creating. That led some students to drop out, said Anthony Brown, then an undergraduate in the department of journalism. Mr. Brown and his team, made up of fellow students Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang, and Peng Zhuang, decided to stay in, despite their concerns. When they won the competition with an app called NearBuy, the students decided to contact the university to assert their ownership and to ask the university to waive any intent to assert ownership. They argued that student inventions, even if fostered to some degree by faculty mentors, stood apart from the work done by faculty members using university resources."

"Biology Professors Use Cloud Computing to Reach Students January 28, 2011, 2:00 pm By Tushar Rae To help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. The tool, called Pop!World, provides a visual way to map evolution. It's the work of Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering; Jessica Poulin, a research assistant professor in the department of biological sciences; and Katharina Dittmar, an assistant professor of biological sciences. Cloud computing allows for different levels of network resources to be devoted to Pop!World based on the number of students using it, Ms. Ramaurthy says. The addition of Pop!World, which will serve as a lab component, is part of a redevelopment of the freshman biology curriculum that aims both to address attrition and to add mathematical rigor to the program, Ms. Poulin says. The hope is that it will visually engage students. "Teaching from a text gets boring to them," says Ms. Ramaurthy. Though Pop!World has been used for only one semester on the campus, which is part of the State University of New York, Ms. Poulin says she already sees the effects. On a survey of students who were retaking freshman biology during the fall semester, and thus had experienced the course with and without Pop!World, positive reviews of Pop!World, she says, were "off the charts.""

"January 13, 2011 Scientists Fault Universities as Favoring Research Over Teaching By Paul Basken The United States' educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines. Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles. "It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system." A group of researchers, led by two biology professors, Diane K. O'Dowd of the University of California at Irvine and Richard M. Losick of Harvard University, made a similar point in a commentary in Science. Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'" they wrote. Those faculty members raise the issue at a time of growing anxiety for universities and their research enterprises. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this month, after party leaders promised during last year's election campaign to cut nondiscretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. That is likely to mean deep budget cuts at the federal science-financing agencies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest nonmilitary provider of research money to universities, could see its budget fall 9 percent below its anticipated 2011 level of $31.3-billion. And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Tho

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"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?""

"April 5, 2011 Governing Boards Turn to Technology to Reinvent the University By Jack Stripling Gathered for a national conference on college trusteeship here on Tuesday morning, board members from across the country said they are looking for cybersolutions to solve some of the most vexing problems their colleges face. If there was a recurring theme at the three-day conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, it was that a major rethinking of instruction through broader use of online learning is the only real hope for reinventing the business of higher education. Mark G. Yudof, who knows a thing or two about confronting diminished resources, suggested on Monday that it's a mistake to believe that small-scale changes in purchasing agreements or reduced course offerings will rescue the University of California system, where Mr. Yudof is president. Instead, colleges will need to aggressively alter the way they deliver courses, relying more heavily on online instruction, he said. It is a "myth" in higher education that "we can cut our way into survival," Mr. Yudof said. Enter Carol A. Twigg, who offered an alternative here on Tuesday. As president and chief executive of the National Center for Academic Transformation, Ms. Twigg has argued for more than a decade that, when used effectively, technology can both improve student achievement and reduce costs. "This is not rocket science," she said during a presentation. The center has redesigned courses on more than 100 college campuses, and Ms. Twigg points toward a body of evidence suggesting that course sections can be scaled up to serve many more students without sacrificing quality. While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg sa

"Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System October 13, 2011, 10:25 am By Josh Fischman One of the world's biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new-and free-learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country. Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle. "Anytime Pearson and Google are used in the same sentence, it's going to get people's attention," says Don Smithmier, chief executive and founder of Sophia, another community-based learning system that is backed by Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University. "I believe the world will be shifting away from a classic LMS approach defined by the institution. Openness and social education is a very powerful idea." Though nobody expects Pearson to take over the marketplace-Blackboard, Moodle and a few others had over 80 percent of it last year, according to the Campus Computing Survey, and Blackboard officials argue that OpenClass can't integrate with university systems the way their product

Can You Hear Me Now? August 19, 2010 That is the logic Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cell phones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours. Under the program, professors are offered a state-of-the-art smartphone and a Sprint data plan that includes the most sophisticated wireless Internet coverage. It is part of a several-tier effort by Georgia Gwinnett - a public, four-year, noncompetitive-admissions college founded in 2005 - to defy the historically low retention rates typical of colleges that set such a modest bar for admission (Georgia Gwinnett admits any Georgia high school graduate). And so far, they say, it is working. The retention rate for returning sophomores at Georgia Gwinnett stands at 75 percent. That is about double the average rate for noncompetitive-admissions colleges in Georgia, according to Tom Mundie, dean of the school of science and technology at Georgia Gwinnett, and on par with many public institutions that have competitive admissions. In engagement surveys, Mundie says, students have reported "feeling that faculty care about and are accessible to them." These plaudits and retention numbers are not driven solely by invitations to call or text professors and expect a reasonably swift response, Mundie says. Other aspects of the college's retention effort probably contribute as well, including small class sizes and a mentoring program that arranges for professors to advise students on academic, career, and personal matters. But professors and administrators at the college seem to believe there is a substantial correlation between the cell phone program and the young institution's impressive retention numbers -- enough that the college, which has grown its student body and faculty by leaps and bounds since its founding five years ago, is preparing to spend $350,000 on faculty cell phones and data

Gardner Campbell of Baylor examining technology literacy from different vantage points. Argues that everyone needs to be a visual artist. Reflects the frustrations of faculty at learning new technologies.

Here is a Sept '09 resource from JISC in Scotland that reports data from employer needs for graduates with digital literacies http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bpllidav1.pdf

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.

Private Gains, Public Stagnation March 7, 2011 The median base salary increase for faculty members in 2010-11 was 1.1 percent, with increases of 0.0 percent at four-year public institutions and 2.0 percent at private institutions, according to a report being released today by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. For public institutions, this is the second year in a row where the median increase is no increase at all. The median increase for faculty members at private institutions last year was 0.1 percent, so that sector is seeing a real rebound this year. In 2008-9, private institutions also outpaced publics in the size of the median increase in faculty salaries -- 4.0 percent to 3.5 percent.