"The current state of student learning in American colleges and universities leaves much to be desired. To be sure, the evidence about whether students are learning is fragmentary, imperfect, and discouraging. Most distressing are the results of the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey and the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which show that average literacy levels among adults with bachelor's degrees have declined over time. That's on top of the fact that the overall level is low: On average, four-year college graduates have only an "intermediate" level of literacy, meaning that they are capable of doing only "moderately challenging literacy activities." Further, data collected from the National Survey of America's College Students-which used the literacy survey-show that "20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees-and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees-have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.""

"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."

"Transforming Course Design is a process to improve student learning while simultaneously addressing the issue of instructional costs. Faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions describe the steps they took to redesign their course structures to meet these goals, and the impact on their students and on their own perspectives on instruction. [more on Course Redesign] "

"Gov. Mitch Daniels called on Indiana's colleges and universities to give Hoosiers the chance to push "fast-forward" on their college careers with the option of earning a bachelor's degree in just three years. Only two schools in Indiana -- Ball State University and Manchester College -- offer such an accelerated degree program, and relatively few students take advantage of it. But cutting out one-fourth of school could save some students up to $25,000."

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

Professor: System has failed...I have failed. Kaplan Ad

"A different kind of university for a different kind of future" Kaplan University ad Kaplan University is dedicated to helping anyone with talent develop it. It's why we're a different kind of university. It's how we're rewriting the rules of education to put an end to wasted talent. Our campaign is a rallying cry for all people with talent. It's an invitation to join the conversation about America's educational system. It's our time to say ... it's your time. To view the TV commercials and print ads, click the images below."

"The Problem of Learning in the Post-Course Era by Randy Bass"

"To address these changes, the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT, http://www.caudit.edu.au/), the U.S.-based EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/), the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), and the Netherlands' SURFfoundation (http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/) undertook a collaborative visioning of the future of higher education. Although information technology is the focus of all four of these associations, the resulting white paper (from which this article is drawn) explores higher education overall, not just information technology.2 The value of information technology lies in the activities it supports, which span virtually every college and university system for managing finances, learning, research, security, sustainability, and more. IT professionals thus need to understand the larger issues faced by their institutions: the drivers of change and the enablers, themes, and questions for the future."

"But Obama's health care and student loan victories overshadowed the collapse of another key domestic priority: helping more students graduate from college. Because of a last-minute-and maddeningly illogical-political development, the Obama administration allowed negotiators of the reconciliation bill to strip out a smart, progressive package of reforms that could have helped millions of low- and moderate-income students earn college degrees."

"They say that everything's relative, and this is certainly true in politics. Normally, the President signing a bill eliminating $87-billion in corporate student-loan welfare would be a huge deal. But when it happens in the same legislation that overhauls the entire American health-care system, people take less notice. And the successful student-loan reform, in turn, overshadowed the collapse of the Obama Administration's college-graduation agenda. That's the subject of an article I wrote for this week's New Republic."

"Middlebury College has been known for years for immersion-based language instruction and liberal arts education. So when the college announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a for-profit company to build an online language program aimed at middle- and high-school students, it raised some eyebrows. The program, to be called Middlebury Interactive Languages, will open this summer with initial courses in Spanish and French. Middlebury professors and faculty at the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy - the college's highly touted summer program - will develop the online courses. They will be taught online by Middlebury professors , instructors affiliated with the Monterey Institute, and graduates of the language academy, according to Michael E. Geisler, vice president for language schools at Middlebury and director of the new program"

"CHICAGO -- If you closed your eyes and listened to the various highlighted speakers at the Higher Learning Commission's annual meeting here this week, you might have thought that Margaret Spellings and her outcomes-focused colleagues were still running the U.S. Education Department. Virtually all of the national higher education leaders who spoke to the country's largest accrediting group sent a version of the same message: The federal government is dead serious about holding colleges and universities accountable for their performance, and can be counted on to impose undesirable requirements if higher education officials don't make meaningful changes themselves. "

By Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U "Gemma and Eliana Singer are big iPhone fans. They love to explore the latest games, flip through photos, and watch YouTube videos while waiting at a restaurant, having their hair done, or between ballet and French lessons. But the Manhattan twins don't yet have their own phones, which is good, since they probably wouldn't be able to manage the monthly data plan: In November, they turned 3. When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: "They loved to push the buttons and see it light up." The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g. They sing along with the Old MacDonald app too, where they can move a bug-eyed cartoon sheep or rooster inside a corral, and they borrow Mom's tablet computer and photo-editing software for a 21st-century version of finger painting. "They just don't have that barrier that technology is hard or that they can't figure it out," Singer says. Gemma and Eliana belong to a generation that has never known a world without ubiquitous handheld and networked technology. American children now spend 7.5 hours a day absorbing and creating media -- as much time as they spend in school. Even more remarkably, they multitask across screens to cram 11 hours of content into those 7.5 hours. More and more of these activities are happening on smartphones equipped with audio, video, SMS, and hundreds of thousands of apps."

"Apparently, there's a company that employs people in India with graduate degrees to grade papers for American professors. For twelve bucks a paper, they'll give not just a letter grade, but comments. The idea is to free up faculty to focus on instruction (or, more accurately, research), rather than grading. It also saves the university money, since outsourcing the grading allows you to run classes at much larger sizes. From the comments to the article, you'd think that this had never been done before. You'd think that professors have always done their own grading, and that the grading was a form of deep examination of each student's soul, resulting in unparalleled insight and bonding. Um, no. And I have the scantron invoice to prove it."

"Financial crises cause public colleges to do funny things. Driven by enrollment limits, Bristol Community College in Massachusetts and Penn Foster University have come to an agreement allowing community college students to pay more to take Bristol classes delivered by Penn Foster. This deal comes upon the heels of the California Community College system announcing a deal that lets its students matriculate to Kaplan University, instead of the capacity-constrained California State University System, at a tuition level significantly steeper than Cal State's though less expensive than Kaplan's. Also in California, the College of the Sequoias, like many other colleges, is dipping into its rainy day fund and increasing class sizes while keeping tuition the same for now and likely higher in the future. At Bristol and through Kaplan, students pay more for the same. At College of the Sequoias, they pay the same for less."

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether.

"A Bottom-Line Approach That Looks Beyond the Bottom Line For several years, a cadre of some of the savviest executives in higher education have been practically begging university administrators and trustees for the chance to advise them on a "strategic finance" approach to restructuring and planning. Until recently, they had a tough time getting college leaders even to set aside the time for a presentation on the topic-a free one at that. When you're preoccupied with the immediate demands for budget slashing, or perhaps still hoping that the state cutbacks and declines in donations are just another cyclical bump in the road, it is certainly understandable that you might duck a major reconsideration of the university's very financing model and mission. But with stimulus money drying up and signs of a full recovery still distant, the case for thoughtful reinvention becomes more compelling. Ellen Earle Chaffee, a former college president who heads up a Lumina Foundation for Education-backed project on strategic finance for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, says she is seeing more colleges "facing the monster" of their financial challenges. "People understand that we all need to get a grip here and figure out what we're going to do," Ms. Chaffee says. She spoke from her home in North Dakota last week, fresh from a meeting of college trustees where several more boards had signed up for the workshop. Simply put, strategic finance is an approach to planning and budgeting that involves rigorously identifying the full expenses of programs to gain a complete picture of their costs-including indirect costs (like utilities and marketing) that are rarely quantified to that scale. With that information, an institution or system can better identify where costs might be out of line and where to invest to take advantage of new opportunities, untapped demand, and, in the best tradition of the academic mission, societal need. Large public i

"Six years ago, there were almost three times as many students enrolled in private nonprofit colleges as there were at for-profit institutions. By 2008-9, that ratio had slipped to about 2 to 1. That is just one of many indicators, in data released by the U.S. Education Department Tuesday, of the boom in the sector of higher education alternatively called for-profit/private sector/corporate. The report from the National Center for Education Statistics, "Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2008; Graduation Rates, 2002 and 2005 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2008," also provides an initial peek (from a point relatively early in the recession) at how the continuing economic downturn has begun to reshape the enrollment and financial picture of higher education. "