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"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.""

A Marriage Made in Indiana July 14, 2010 Just about everywhere you turn, state leaders are searching for a way to use online education to expand the reach of their public higher education systems at a time of diminished resources. The approaches vary: In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has heralded a future of "iCollege," while in Pennsylvania, the state college system envisions using distance learning to help its campuses sustain their offerings by sharing courses in underenrolled programs. California's community college system turned to a for-profit provider, Kaplan University, to work around its budget-related enrollment restrictions. And a grand experiment to create a fully online branch of the University of Illinois, meanwhile, crashed and burned last fall. Like those and other peers, Indiana's leaders have increasingly recognized that the state cannot thrive economically if it does not bolster college completion, particularly among adults (aged 29-49) who have historically been underrepresented in the state's seven public four-year universities. But they recognize that doing so at a time of (temporarily, if not permanently) diminished resources isn't easy -- and that online education is no panacea because, done right, it isn't cheap."

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

"Holding Presidents Accountable for Learning September 23, 2010 In an uncommon strategy to improve graduation and retention rates, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia summoned the presidents of its 35 colleges and universities, one by one, to account for problems at their institutions and present three-year plans outlining how they hope to boost the measures of student success. The systemwide challenge was issued earlier this year by Willis J. Potts, Jr., the straight-talking chairman of the Board of Regents and retired paper industry executive. "We have a funding system here in Georgia that financially rewards institutions based on [enrollment] growth," Potts said. "Having been in manufacturing, I know the factor that needs to be studied is what kind of finished product is coming out the other end. Less than 60 percent of the students in our system graduate within a six-year period. I know of no other process that would achieve 60 percent [success] and go out and brag about it." Reflecting on this, Potts said, he and his colleagues were driven to find out what was holding the system's institutions back. So they went straight to the top - at each institution."

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"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

"How Will Students Communicate? January 6, 2011 Thus spake Zuckerberg: "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg's prognostication was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style. Meanwhile, learning-management platforms - notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions - have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework. All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard medium connecting colleges with their students. If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, institutionally provided student e-mail accounts will probably diminish in popularity over the next few years, campus technologists say, and that could force colleges to rethink the most reliable ways to stay in touch with their students. At the same time, several technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed say that e-mail is unlikely to disappear, if only because it remains the most suitable medium for the sort of official communications routinely sent to students from non-peer, non-professor sources."

"New Job With an Old Friend November 2, 2010 While collecting a $115,000 paycheck from Arkansas State University, the former president of the state system hopes to strengthen relations between the university and a controversial online education company that now employs him, according to documents released Monday. Leslie Wyatt, who resigned as system head in July and now has faculty status, works as a consultant for Academic Partnerships, LLC, formerly known as Higher Ed Holdings, university documents state. Additionally, he serves as president and chairman of the American University System, a nonprofit association affiliated with the company, according to a cached version of the organization's website. Amid mounting concern over potential conflicts of interest, the nonprofit group removed the only mention of Wyatt's name on the site. Wyatt's work with Academic Partnerships has given additional fodder to critics, who have questioned how the company secured a lucrative contract without the input of any non-administrative faculty. As with the University of Toledo, where faculty rancor over Higher Ed Holdings derailed a deal in the works, some at Arkansas have questioned whether academic quality suffers when a university partners with a company known for providing inexpensive degrees on a massive scale. "

"July 1, 2011 As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States By Kelly Field Bismarck State College, a two-year institution located in the capital of North Dakota, offers something few colleges do: online degrees in power-plant technology. Utilities across the country send workers to the community college for specialized training in electric power, nuclear power, and other fields. "We're pretty darn unique," said Larry C. Skogen, the college's president. "I don't think we have any competition out there." Though other colleges offer similar programs on campus, "we deliver nationwide online," he said, with students in all 50 states. That could change soon. Under federal rules that take effect on July 1, Bismarck State will have to seek approval to operate in every state where it enrolls students, or forgo those students' federal aid. With some states charging thousands of dollars per application, the college is weighing whether it can afford to remain in states where the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits, in tuition terms. Though the college hasn't made any decisions yet, "the reality is that if we run into a state where we have few students and it's expensive [to get approval], it's probably not going to be cost-effective to continue," Mr. Skogen said. Such cost-benefit calculations are being conducted on campuses across the country, as college leaders struggle to make sense of a patchwork of state rules that were written in an era when "college" was synonymous with "campus" and online learning was in its infancy. Gregory Ferenbach, a lawyer who advises colleges on regulatory compliance, said he has heard from a "couple dozen" colleges, most of them nonprofits, that are considering withdrawing from some states because of the cost or burden of obtaining approval. Their decisions could have a significant effect on college access. If enough colleges steer clear of states with expensive approval processes, or s

"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

"University Ventures Letter Volume II, #2 Announcing University Ventures Thirty years ago America was an economic basket case. The official unemployment rate in 1982 exceeded 10%, but apples-to-apples unemployment (counting it the way we do today) was over 16%. Inflation was north of 6% and the prime interest rate reached 21.5% in June 1982. Things weren't much better in the UK where deindustrialization had resulted in unemployment over 20% in many regions, and where the 'workshop of the world' became a net importer of goods for the first time ever. It's always darkest before the dawn. So few recognized we were on the verge of a revolution in information technology that would drive productivity increases across almost all industries and create new ones over the next two decades. If there's any consensus at all in today's debate about how to rekindle economic growth, it's the importance of education, and particularly higher education. We need more educated workers to innovate and increase productivity. Not coincidentally, the largest industry that has not seen much in the way of productivity improvements since 1982 is education. All but a handful of the 170 million students currently enrolled at tertiary institutions around the world are learning the way their parents and grandparents learned (often learning virtually the same curriculum). The 'sage on a stage' model remains unchanged, and the well over $1 trillion in annual spending on higher education continues to be directed to the same functions. And so the stage (if not the sage) is set for the world to focus on higher education as it never has before, and for dramatic changes in programs, delivery models, costs and learning outcomes. While the private sector will play a key role in this next revolution, it cannot succeed alone. Traditional universities and colleges - public and private -- will be the crucibles of change, in partnership with entrepreneurs and companies. The

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

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"Microsoft Research Unveils Online Observatory of NASA Images of Mars By Jeff Young The crowd-science trend has reached Mars. Students and amateur scientists can now explore the Red Planet online, using software released today by Microsoft Resarch based on NASA images. Though many of the images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are already available on the space agency's Web site, Microsoft has now loaded them into its WorldWide Telescope interface, which creates a way for users to easily pan around the images to see them in context, and presents them in higher resolution than previously available online. "You can actually see rover tracks on the Martian surface," said Dan Fay, director of earth, energy, and environment for Microsoft Research, in an interview. The WorldWide Telescope software is free but only runs on Microsoft's Windows operating system. A Web interface of the system is available, but the Mars images are not yet available there. The company's research division teamed up with astronomers to build the Web-based telescope to experiment with better ways to manage and analyze large data sets (so the company can improve its Bing search engine and its software). Meanwhile, some professors and schoolteachers use the Web telescope in their classrooms, and anyone online is encouraged to scour the images to find unique features of Mars that professional researchers might have missed."

Here is a real example of a red balloon-like $25,000 prize offered by the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge contest that was awarded to a Second Life learning environment featuring Mars at the Defense GameTech 2010 conference. The award went to the Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge that could incorporate Nasa images. It remains to be seen how technologies such as Worldwide Telescope can mash up into Virtual Environments. A worthy applied R&D topic for an academic DARPA group. This site has a Slidecast with audio narration explaining the project. http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2010/01/mars-expedition-strategy-challenge.html

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

"August 11, 2010, 01:00 PM ET President Obama Needs a Plan to Control College Costs By Kevin Carey During his higher education speech earlier this week, President Obama talked at some length about college costs: It's good that the president is talking about this. But I can't help but notice that when he talked during the health care debate about the looming Medicare solvency crisis and bending down the long-term medical cost curve, he immediately followed with an actual plan to control health care costs. That plan did not consist of simply challenging doctors and hospital administrators to try harder. Obama understood that doctors and hospital administrators are by and large rational actors who respond to incentives created by the system in which they work. If you want them to make different choices, you have to change the system itself. Which is exactly what he did."

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.

"Systemic Changes in Higher Education * Articles Abstract: A power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?"

"October 6, 2010 How to Help Students Complete a Degree on Time By Jennifer Gonzalez Speakers at a conference that opened here (Baltimore) on Wednesday discussed policies and practices that states and colleges are using or considering to help more students complete an undergraduate degree or credential in a timely way. The conference, "Time to Completion: How States and Systems Are Tackling the Time Dilemma," was organized by two nonprofit organizations, Jobs for the Future and the Southern Regional Education Board, whose goals include broadening college access and making higher education more affordable. At the opening of the two-day event on Wednesday, officials with the Southern Regional Educational Board said they planned to start tracking the length of time it takes students in the organization's 16 member states to earn credits toward graduation. Officials with Jobs for the Future announced new online tools the group is putting together to help institutions, system officers, and policy makers better understand different aspects of time-to-completion issues."

"October 31, 2010 Tomorrow's College The classroom of the future features face-to-face, online, and hybrid learning. And the future is here. Jennifer Black isn't a fan of technology. Until college, she didn't know much about online classes. If the stereotypical online student is a career-minded adult working full time, she's the opposite-a dorm-dwelling, ballet-dancing, sorority-joining 20-year-old who throws herself into campus life here at the University of Central Florida. Yet in the past year, the junior hospitality major has taken classes online, face to face, and in a blended format featuring elements of both. This isn't unusual: More than half of the university's 56,000 students will take an online or blended class this year, and nearly 2,700 are taking all three modes at once. As online education goes mainstream, it's no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a "traditional" student at places like Central Florida, one of the country's largest public universities. And UCF's story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too? Signs suggest yes. The University System of Maryland now requires undergraduates to take 12 credits in alternative learning modes, including online. Texas has proposed a similar rule. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is pushing to have 25 percent of credits earned online by 2015. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pointing to UCF as a model, has made blended learning a cornerstone of its new $20-million education-technology grant program."