Red Balloon Resources

"Attrition Among Chief Academic Officers Threatens Strategic Plans Turnover of Chief Academic Officers Threatens Strategic Plans 1 By Tim Mann The high turnover rate of chief academic officers is a disturbing but little-known fact in higher education today. Frequent turnover can hurt institutional planning and a college's capacity to achieve its strategic goals, especially during these times of economic strain and calls for change within the academy. The role of the CAO, or provost, varies based on a college's identity and how the president defines the job. But the chief academic officer almost always plays a vital role in shaping and executing the strategic plan, leading the design and refinement of academic programs, and recruiting and retaining faculty members. It takes several years to carry out major planning initiatives associated with institutional strategy, curriculum design, and the faculty. Without stable and effective CAO leadership, making progress toward institutional goals is extremely challenging, if not impossible."

"June 13, 2010, 08:00 PM ET Pennsylvania's 14-Campus State System to Explore Shared Degrees Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education is considering pilot distance-learning, collaborative-degree programs across its 14 campuses in fields that are underenrolled on individual campuses, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. System leaders will present a plan to the faculty union on Monday that is expected to recommend such "shared programs" in areas like physics and foreign languages. Karen Ball, the system's vice chancellor for external relations, said officials would not identify the specific programs in the proposal before the faculty briefing."

"June 13, 2010 To Regulate For-Profit Colleges, Focus on What Matters By Alan Contreras As Robert M. Shireman, former deputy under secretary of education, departs for California following his efforts to strengthen regulation of for-profit colleges, those institutions have increased their already significant pressure to make sure that business as usual is not disrupted by new federal rules. Particularly at issue has been the "gainful employment" proposal, which would require for-profits to tie students' borrowing for college to their future earnings. The process by which for-profit colleges are making the case against such regulations is at once professionally necessary (if you are a for-profit institution) and mildly unseemly (if you are truly interested in helping students). For the past 11 years, I have regulated for-profit colleges for a state government. My office regulates other kinds of higher-education institutions, too, but these days most of the programs we approve are at for-profits. For that reason I have seen most of the problems that arise in the for-profit sector and have some thoughts as to how the federal government can accomplish its worthy goal of ensuring that students don't waste federal aid, get jobs in fields that interest them, and instantly become taxpayers."

"June 11, 2010 Bill Clinton Offers Encouragement to For-Profit Sector By Jennifer Gonzalez Former President Bill Clinton encouraged a large group gathered here for a luncheon at the annual Career College Association Convention to continue their work reaching out to poor students even though they get attacked for it. He praised the for-profit-college sector and told its leaders not to be discouraged. "Everybody needs a chance to live their dreams," he said, to loud applause. "Anything you can do to develop human potential is important." Mr. Clinton made those remarks during a question and answer period after giving the keynote speech at the close of the association's three-day convention on Friday. Over 1,000 people came to the luncheon to hear him speak. In his speech titled "Embracing Our Humanity" he described the world as unstable, inequitable, and unsustainable. However, he said, there is reason to be optimistic­-and education has a lot to do with that."

"For-Profit Colleges Are Projected to Sharply Increase Their Share of Adult Students By Kelly Truong For-profit universities will have 42 percent of the adult-undergraduate market by 2019, nearly doubling their current share, according to a new study by the consulting company Eduventures. Last year approximately one-quarter of all adult undergraduates were enrolled at for-profit universities. The study projects that, in the next 10 years, for-profit institutions will increase their share of the adult market by 14 percentage points."

"Veterans Use New GI Bill Largely at For-Profit and 2-Year Colleges Veterans Use Benefits of New GI Bill Largely at For-Profit and Community Colleges Thomas Slusser for The Chronicle For-profit colleges and community colleges were the most popular choices of students who used benefits from the Post-9/11 GI Bill this past academic year, the first in which the aid was available. The attendance patterns were largely similar to those of students who recently used aid under the previous version of the GI Bill.

"Burning Out, and Fading Away June 10, 2010 WASHINGTON -- College faculty aren't any more burned out than the rest of the U.S. workforce on average, but the struggles of the untenured on the tenure track are the most pronounced, according to a survey presented at an American Association of University Professors conference here Wednesday. In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman's University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts. Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe's most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as "a living hell." "

"Does the Messenger Matter? July 15, 2010 WASHINGTON - Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) began what many foes of for-profit higher education consider long-overdue Congressional scrutiny of the sector here late last month with a hearing questioning the business model, student value proposition and role of federal funding at for-profit colleges. But some of the loudest shouting surrounding Harkin's inquiry as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is not about any of those substantive issues. Rather, it's about Harkin's decision to include Steven Eisman -- an investor who has bet that higher education stocks will tumble in the coming months -- on the panel of witnesses at the hearing and in the senator's attempts to line up support for a stringent examination of for-profit higher education. In a statement, Harkin said he has relied on Eisman because "he is a well respected analyst with a track record of making unpopular, but correct, observations about American industries." Either directly or indirectly, Eisman and other short sellers -- people who make investments betting that a certain stock price will fall -- have been lobbying Congress and U.S. Department of Education officials for months, seeking out greater regulation while not necessarily being being transparent about their financial interests. Some are also said to be behind news stories and whistleblower lawsuits against the sector with the idea that bad publicity -- and tougher federal regulation -- will drive down higher education stock prices and help short sellers rake in profits."

"The Real Challenge for Higher Education July 15, 2010 By Garrison Walters America, once the world's most educated nation, is fast losing ground. Although we are still second in overall education levels, we are much weaker -- 11th -- in the proportion of younger people with a college degree. In a world where knowledge increasingly drives economic competitiveness, this is a very serious problem. The issue is more than abstract economics, it's also a moral concern: Since 1970, the benefits of higher education have been very unequally apportioned, with the top income quartile profiting hugely and the bottom hardly moving at all (despite starting from a very low level). America's education problem has been apparent for 30 years or so, and there have been a lot of suggestions for making us competitive again. Ideas on the K-12 side include: better trained and motivated teachers, more and better early childhood programs, better prepared school leaders, improved curriculums, higher standards, financial incentives, better data systems, and more rigorous and frequent assessments. On the higher education side, proposals include: motivating professors and administrators with formulas that reward success rather than enrollment, more use of technology, more data, improved administration, and (at least for general education) more testing. And, of course, better funding is relentlessly advocated for the entire educational spectrum. All of these approaches have at least some potential to foster improvement. Some have already demonstrated benefits while some are being seriously oversold (more on that in a separate essay). My fundamental belief, though, is that even if one takes a very optimistic view of the achievable potential of each of these strategies and adds them together, the net result will be significant but insufficient improvement to allow us to catch up in educational levels. If our scope of action is limited to the ideas advanced so far, we will actually contin

"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.""

"'Gaps Are Not Inevitable' August 10, 2010 It's well-established by now that African American and Latino students graduate college at lower rates than do their white and Asian peers, so it follows pretty naturally that many individual colleges would have lower graduation rates for those groups than for white students, too. But in two new reports that the Education Trust released Monday, the advocacy group tries to hammer home the idea that big gaps in the academic performance of minority and white students are not an inevitability. It does so, starkly, by using its College Results Online database to compare the graduation rates of black and Latino students with their white peers at individual institutions, showing widely varying outcomes at colleges and universities with comparably prepared and composed student bodies. The University of California at Riverside has about 14,700 students, about 25 percent of whom are Hispanic, and an average SAT score of 1040; about 12 percent of California State University at Chico's 14,600 students are Latino, and the institution's average SAT is 1025. Yet Latino students who entered Riverside from 2000 to 2002 graduated at a rate of 63.4 percent over six years, 1 percentage point better than its white students, while 41.5 percent of Chico's Hispanic students do, compared to 57.5 percent of white students there.

"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."

"Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's By GINA KOLATA In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer's disease in the human brain. Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease. The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. "The problem in the field was that you had many different scientists in many different universities doing their own research with their own patients and with their own methods," said Dr. Michael W. Weiner of the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs, who directs ADNI. "Different people using different methods on different subjects in different places were getting different results, which is not surprising. What was needed was to get everyone together and to get a common data set." But that would require a huge effort. No company could do it alone, and neither could individual researchers. The project would require 800 subjects, some with normal memories, some with memory impairment, some with Alzheimer's, who would be tested for possible biomarkers and followed for years to see whether thes

"Colleges and the Governors' Races August 5, 2010 With state budget shortfalls likely to hit $180 billion in 2011, the incoming governors -- a potentially record-size pool of brand-new state chiefs -- will have a lot to take on when they take office in January. Jobs and the economy have dwarfed all other campaign issues, and higher education -- despite its link to economic development -- is unlikely to be a focal point in this year's elections. "Political candidates are grappling with more immediate solutions for job creation opportunities," says Dan Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. "I think we'll see some [newly elected] governors bringing higher education to the top of their political agendas, but right now it's simply not at the top of the list." Four years ago, higher education was one of the top issues in several gubernatorial races. But the economy crashed 13 months after the election, and the recession descended across most of the country, forcing governors to slash funding -- much of it from higher education. According to the most recent State Higher Education Finance report, state funding for higher education fell $2.8 billion in the 2009 fiscal year as a result of the recession. Federal stimulus funds worth $2.3 billion partially offset the costs, but state funding fell another $2.7 billion in 2010 and is likely to continue to fall"

"Congress's 'Secret Shopper' August 3, 2010 WASHINGTON -- A government report detailing the findings of an undercover investigation of for-profit colleges' recruiting tactics reveals admissions and financial aid officers engaged in unethical and sometimes illegal practices, all in the interest of persuading students to enroll and obtain federal financial aid. The report, along with an accompanying video of undercover footage, is the culmination of a three-month effort by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative wing, to determine whether and to what degree for-profit colleges are engaging in "fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise questionable marketing practices." A copy of the report is available here."

"Published Online: July 23, 2010 Education Inventors Get Boost Under New Programs By The Associated Press Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org. Read more FREE content! Article Tools * PrintPrinter-Friendly * EmailEmail Article * ReprintReprints * CommentsComments * * * Bookmark and Share * Article tools sponsored by: WILL Interactive -- Socially relevant, fully interactive video games for teens -- Advertisement Philadelphia A movement is under way to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms. An educator at the University of Pennsylvania wants to create one of the nation's only business incubators dedicated to education entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of Education is also getting into the act with a $650 million fund to boost education innovation. "Here's this (market) that is huge, that is really important, that needs innovation, and there's just nothing out there to sort of foster it," said Doug Lynch, vice dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Let's create a Silicon Valley around education.""

"Reports Highlight Disparities in Graduation Rates Among White and Minority Students By Jennifer Gonzalez A pair of reports released on Monday by the Education Trust seek to reveal how disparate graduation rates are among white, black, and Hispanic students at hundreds of public and private universities, and call attention to individual institutions where the gaps are particularly large or small. Fifty-seven percent of all students who enroll in four-year, nonprofit colleges earn diplomas within six years, but the graduation rates for different groups of students vary vastly. On average, 60 percent of white students who start college have earned bachelor's degrees six years later. But only 49 percent of Hispanic students and 40 percent of black students do. The two reports, which deal separately with Hispanic and black students as compared to their white peers, seek to look beneath the averages, highlighting individual colleges that are doing well and also focusing on those that are missing the mark on graduation equity. The findings are based on several years of data from College Results Online, a Web-based tool developed by the Education Trust that allows comparisons of college graduation rates by race, ethnicity, and gender for four-year institutions across the country."

"Mass Video Courses May Free Up Professors for More Personalized Teaching By Marc Parry New York University plans to join the growing movement to publish academic material online as free, open courseware. But in addition to giving away content-something other colleges have done-NYU plans a more ambitious experiment. The university wants to explore ways to reprogram the roles of professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction. This fall NYU will start publishing free online videos for every lecture in as many as 10 courses. They include classes on New York City history, the biology of the human body, introductory sociology, and statistics. Previous open-courseware projects tended to be text-based, with content like syllabi and lecture notes. NYU's site would expand the online library of academic videos available to the general public. What's more unusual, though, is the vision to build souped-up versions of the material for NYU students only. Freed from the copyright restrictions of publishing on the open Web, these video courses would have live links to sources discussed by professors in passing, as well as pop-up definitions and interactive quizzes."

"July 22, 2010 How Social Networking Helps Teaching (and Worries Some Professors) By Jeffrey R. Young San Jose, Calif. Professors crowded into conference rooms here this week to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in their classrooms, though some attendees raised privacy issues related to the hypersocial technologies. About 750 professors and administrators attended the conference on "Emerging Technologies for Online Learning," run jointly by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with technology, and two other educational software and resource providers."