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"MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? December 19, 2011 - 3:36pm By Audrey Watters A big announcement from MIT today: the university is launching a new online learning initiative, MITx, one that will allow non-enrolled students to take online courses and receive certification if they successfully complete them. MIT has long been known for being on the leading edge of higher education experimentation, most notably with MIT OpenCourseware. The decision by MIT faculty to make all of their course materials freely and openly available online is now a decade old, and some 100 million people have downloaded and accessed that content. But even with a catalog that boasts over 2,000 courses, MIT OCW has always been just that: courseware. All the syllabi, handouts, and quizzes, but no interaction with professors, no interaction with fellow learners, no grades, no college credit. MITx will act as a middle tier, of sorts, something between the traditional, on-campus experience of formally enrolled MIT students and the open and informal learning opportunities afforded by open courseware. But "this is not MIT light," insists Provost L. Rafael Reif. What MITx is is still very much under construction. The first class should be available in the spring of 2012, and it's not clear what course(s) will be offered (although it's a probably a safe bet that it's a science or engineering class). MIT describes MITx as a self-paced course, one with "interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication." While the course itself will be free (and the custom-created course materials will be openly licensed, as with all MIT courses), students who wish to be graded will be able to pay for certification. There's no indication yet of what that fee will be. Nor is it clear how assessment for MITx will work -- will all students take quizzes and submit homework or just those who are paying for certification? Will students have access to instructors? If so, how?

"MITx: 3 Cheers and 3 Questions December 19, 2011 - 8:00pm By Joshua Kim MITx is very big news. For a great overview of MIT's plans, check out Audrey Watters' excellent writeup MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? The MIT student paper The Tech also has a great article. The MIT press release and accompanying FAQ also go into detail about MITx. 3 Cheers and 3 Questions for MITx: Cheer 1 - Leadership: All of us in higher ed should take a moment to recognize and commend MIT for the institutions continued bold leadership in higher education and the open education movement. The wonderful thing about higher ed is that when one institution innovates it grows the pie for all of us - we all benefit. Cheer 2 - Risk Taking: What I love most about MITx is MIT leaders' willingness to learn as they go. Rather than endlessly talk about the next innovation that will make it possible to offer high quality postsecondary education to large numbers of people at affordable prices, MIT is actually doing something. I have no doubt that the MITx model will change and morph over time, but the only way to figure this out is to run lots of experiments and be willing to fail, learn, and evolve. Cheer 3 - Recruiting: A program like MITx raises my opinion of MIT as a parent (my kids launch in 2015 and 2017), potential donor and even a potential employee. The market for higher ed talent is worldwide, and the best people are motivated by mission and culture. MITx is a clear stake in the ground about MIT's values. Question 1 - Platform?: From what I understand from the articles, MITx will run on a new platform that MIT is developing on its own, and that will be made open source. Is this a totally new platform? Are existing open source LMS platforms like Sakai or Moodle utilized at all? What platforms will be utilized for course videos? Again, a new platform, or an existing open source lecture capture and video management platform like OpenCast? Question 2 - Partnersh

" MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates December 19, 2011 - 4:28am The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online -- today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT. MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning. The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online. An FAQ from MIT offers more details on the new program. While MIT has been widely praised for OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open" educational movement has shifted to programs like the Khan Academy (through which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and an initiative at Stanford University that makes courses available -- courses for which some German universities are providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in OpenCourseWare. 35 Disqus Like Dislike Login Add New Comment Image Real-time updating is enabled. (Pause) Showing 1 comment william czander In 1997, Peter Drucker made a profound prediction he predicted that in 30 years the mortar and brick university campuses would be driven out of existence by their inexorable tuition, He did not predict the financi

During one of the most tumultuous periods of higher education transformation, some of the individuals most responsible for governing universities appear content to sit back and let others call the plays, a new report finds. In "Still On The Sidelines," released Wednesday by Public Agenda, a New York-based nonprofit research organization, researchers -- through a series of anonymous interviews with 39 trustees -- concluded that the majority of board members believe their role is to select and support good institutional leaders, rather than to directly question university administrators and initiate reforms, even as they recognize that higher education faces unprecedented challenges. "We are a policy board," the report quoted one anonymous chairman of a two-year public college board as saying. "We don't get involved in the day-to-day operations. Our president comes to us with different proposals and ideas, which we discuss and, if appropriate, approve or deny." "I think the primary ideas have to come from your executive with support from your trustees, and with ideas coming from the trustees," another community college board chairman said. "Frankly, I can't think of too many ideas that have come from the trustees that were not first proposed by the administration." At a time when many in higher education are questioning whether traditional models of financing a university and educating students need to be revamped, the Public Agenda report indicates that most trustees are not willing to broach such issues on campus or engage in the wider debate. The report's findings also raise questions about the breakdown of responsibility between institutional administrators and governing boards, as well as how involved trustees should be in managing the daily operations of campus and shaping an institution's strategic vision. The major division that emerges from the report involves who is responsible for the problems facing higher educati

WASHINGTON -- For-profit colleges should be leaders in measuring student learning and making the data public, said a panel of experts at the annual meeting of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, held here today. Federal scrutiny of higher education won't stop at for-profits, the speakers said, in a discussion that included a few surprising moments, such as praise for a community college and a nuanced compliment for federal regulations on "gainful employment." "We are moving toward some kind of general accountability," said Michael B. Goldstein, a lawyer who heads the higher education practice at the Washington law firm Dow Lohnes and who moderated the panel. "Something has to happen in terms of measuring value." Peter P. Smith agreed, and told the audience of for-profit college leaders that it would be a smart tactical move to stay a step ahead of the accountability push. "They're going to run you out of town anyway," said Smith, who is senior vice president of academic strategies and development for Kaplan Higher Education. "Get in front and make it look like a parade."

YouTube can be used as a valuable teaching tool in the classroom, but while it is chockfull of educational content and useful knowledge - it is also filled to the brim with distracting videos. Cute kittens, people "failing", music videos, cartoon series, and more - content that distracts kids from using YouTube as a learning channel. Fortunately Google recognized this problem and has launched a solution called YouTube for Schools. YouTube for Schools is a network setting that school administrators can turn on to grant access only to the educational content from YouTube EDU. This means videos from over 600 of YouTube's education partners like the Smithsonian, TED, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile. In addition to limiting access to specific videos, Google has also worked together with teachers to put together over 300 playlists broken out by subject and by grade level. Sounds like a great idea for teachers who have trouble keeping their kids focused in the classroom.

"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

"The Self-Absorbed Higher-Education System October 6, 2011, 10:29 pm By Jeff Selingo American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I'm not quite sure how this status is determined-especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings-but we seem to have adopted the belief that the problems in the U.S. education system reside in elementary and secondary schools, not on college campuses. Perhaps it's just a sign of the times in which we live. Modesty, it seems, is out of style. In a thought-provoking talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, the New York Times columnist David Brooks maintained that we live in an era of "expanded conception of self." That attitude, he believes, results in the trends we have witnessed in recent years toward increased consumption, polarization, and risk. "We have moved from a culture of self-effacement to one of self-expansion," Brooks said. In some ways, the Brooks lecture was a fitting endnote to a conversation earlier in the day at the forum where I gathered with a dozen education, business, and think-tank leaders for a spirited discussion of the state of the American higher-ed system. After two hours of talking, there was no more agreement on how to improve the system than when we had walked into the room. Indeed, the diversity of constituencies represented in the room couldn't even settle on what the system should be doing. (That was despite the best efforts of the moderator, Clive Crook, who as a Brit admitted at the outset how confusing and complex the U.S. higher-ed system is.) Higher ed is feeling good about itself these days because it remains in demand. Why offer classes at more convenient times when you're getting a record number of applicants? Why hold the line on rising costs when students are willing to take on more debt? Why collect better job-placement data to provide to prospective students when they're

"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

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

"January 8, 2012 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 1 Photo illustration by Bob McGrath for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain-intentionally so-to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of "Master of Algebra" or other "Challenge Patches." Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project. MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university's free course materials. But the b

"Wikipedia Aims Higher July 11, 2011 BOSTON - The United States' foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia. "If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it's good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' " Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia's overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship. Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia. The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe. When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative - an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy - it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enabl

"Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus July 8, 2011, 5:43 pm By Jeff Young Google Plus LogoGoogle Plus, the social-networking platform, is so new that most Internet users are not yet able to see it-an invitation is required while the service is in its test phase. But some professors who have tried it say they already see possible uses for teaching and research if the service catches on. The new Google service, announced last week, is similar in many ways to Facebook. It provides a way to share updates, photos, and recommendations with friends and colleagues. One key difference is that Google Plus makes it easier to share information with isolated subgroups of contacts, rather than sending all updates to every online "friend." Facebook's default approach-sharing with everyone in your personal network-has created a dilemma for professors whose students want to be their online friends. Often the students inadvertently share their party pictures and other private material with their instructors on Facebook, giving some faculty members the feeling that they have crossed too far into students' personal space. Professors have also accidentally shared comments with students that they meant only for fellow instructors. Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab a

Washington Post Change.org emerges as influential advocate on issues from bullying to bank fees By Ylan Q. Mui, Published: January 23 Ben Rattray knows that revolution does not always happen spontaneously. The 31-year-old entrepreneur rattles off a list of populist actions over the past year: the consumer revolts against Bank of America's and Verizon's unpopular fees, a drive to enlist the San Francisco Giants to speak out against anti-gay bullying, a petition forcing the South African government to address the rape of lesbians. Each campaign won thousands of supporters, inflamed public opinion, and drew the ire of corporate executives and political leaders. But these were not impromptu rebellions that chanced upon success. They were carefully nurtured by Rattray's fledgling company, a social media site called Change.org that has emerged as one of the most influential channels for activism in the country. "We're in the business of amplifying," Rattray said in an interview. "We're trying to change the balance of power between individuals and large organizations." Rattray said his firm is profitable and hopes to bring in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue within a few years. It makes money by running campaigns for advocacy groups such as Amnesty International in exchange for a fee. Ordinary users can create an online petition for free. The company, which has headquarters in the District and in San Francisco, has exploded over the past year, growing from a staff of 20 to about 100, with offices around the world. Though originally conceived as a nonprofit, Change.org is now part of an emerging group of "social benefit corporations," such as Patagonia, that seek to both make money and do good. Fueling Change.org's rise is the wave of global unrest that has given birth to other viral movements such as Occupy Wall Street. But Rattray calls these movements "radically under- optimized." They have no leaders and no coordinated mi

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c

"April 20, 2011 CUNY Faculty Fears Course-Transfer Proposal Could Jeopardize Its Say on Curricula By David Glenn The City University of New York is weighing a plan to simplify the 23-campus system's extraordinarily complex transfer landscape, but faculty members object to the plan, saying it would water down general-education requirements and take away campus control of curriculum. As the university's Board of Trustees prepares to vote on the plan at its June 27 meeting, more than two dozen faculty committees have passed resolutions condemning the proposal. "CUNY seems to be trying to solve an administrative problem by putting forward a radical curricular overhaul," said Scott D. Dexter, a professor of computer and information science at CUNY's Brooklyn College and the director of his campus's core curriculum, in an interview this week. "That's what has people deeply concerned." Mr. Dexter and others are also worried about a proposal to revise the university's bylaws, which also happens to be scheduled for a vote at the trustees' June meeting. That proposal includes dozens of mostly cosmetic revisions, but one in particular has drawn faculty activists' ire: A paragraph about the faculty's rights and responsibilities would be altered to declare that the faculty "shall be responsible for the formulation of policy recommendations" on matters of curricula and academic practice. To many faculty members, the term "recommendations" sounds like a demotion from a historic understanding that they, not administrators, have direct responsibility for shaping the university's curricula. In a letter sent on Tuesday to the American Association of University Professors, Glenn Petersen, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at CUNY's Baruch College, wrote that the new language "appears to many of us to be a pre-emptive strike against the faculty as retribution for having recently questioned CUNY Central over an issue of general-education transfer policies within

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning. Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education. In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop. "It really requires someone to be doubly expert," Mr. Wieman said. As sometimes happens in some disciplines and departments, a few people develop deeper knowledge of pedagogy. These doubly expert faculty members, he said, can show colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching the discipline.

A venture capitalist panel at SXSW interactive conference has discussed the future of education technology. The panelists, Mitch Kapor, Phillip Bronner and Rob Hutter claimed to have a broad vision of investing that looked for technology to be more than just successful but that also created social value.

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"April 14, 2011 Business Educators Struggle to Put Students to Work By David Glenn Paul M. Mason does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says. Mr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves." A third of the business students at Radford U. don't engage with their coursework, in the estimation of one teaching assistant. "I understand teamwork is important," he says, "but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers." Surveys find that employers want to hire college graduates-business majors or not-who can write coherently, think creatively, and, like these students at the U. of Virginia, analyze quantitative data. Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major."