Red Balloon Resources

"Needed: More Olive Gardens Olive Garden Restaurant 1 Chuck Salter's Fast Company article "Why America is Addicted to Olive Garden" neither explains why America is addicted to Olive Garden nor even establishes that American is, in fact, addicted to Olive Garden. It is, however, a really excellent profile of the company, Darden, that owns Olive Garden along with a few other restaurant chains. To throw a couple of bold claims out there that probably nobody agrees with, brands, chains, standardization, and replication are some of the most underrated economic phenomena and single-establishment retail businesses among the most overrated. There's an association between multiple-establishment restaurants and low quality, but I think that if you take a broad view you'll see that this is both a contingent phenomenon and a waning trend. Darden's own Capitol Grille chain is excellent and Olive Garden is better than you care to admit. Besides which, all the legitimately first-rate chefs are branding and franchising these days, they're mostly just a bit hesitant to get entirely above-board about what they're doing."

"September 6, 2010, 10:30 AM ET The Olive Garden Theory of Higher Education By David Glenn Should colleges and universities find "innovative ways to skimp on quality"? That provocation was made the other day by Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress. He believes the American system of higher education could learn lessons from certain middlebrow suburban restaurant chains. The argument runs like this: The Olive Garden and its ilk might not deserve any culinary awards, but their menus are reasonably ambitious and their food is reliably okay. (Many of Yglesias's commenters dispute that last point, but for purposes of this discussion let's stipulate that The Olive Garden's food is Not Bad. If you can't buy that, then mentally substitute whatever other suburban chain you secretly like.) Through standardization and economies of scale, Yglesisas says, chains like The Olive Garden have found ways to sell respectable fascimiles of ethnic cuisines at low-to-moderate prices. Yglesias believes the world would be better off if institutions of higher education (and health-care providers, but that's a different conversation) had stronger incentives to provide value, in the Olive Garden sense: a consistently decent product at a price low enough that it's accessible to a large swath of the public. College educations are so valuable, Yglesias argues, that broadening access to even a less-than-top-quality version would improve public welfare."

"Lumina Documents State and Local Role in Completion Agenda It may seem a daunting, if not impossible, task to get the United States to the widely heralded goal of a nearly 50 percent increase in the college attainment of its citizens -- but the Lumina Foundation for Education aims, in a new report, to break the job down into smaller pieces to show that it is attainable. In the report, published today, Lumina goes beyond reiterating its arguments for why the "big goal" it has set is essential for the United States economy and for individuals alike, though the study does that, too. But in providing state-by-state (and even county-by-county) data on how many graduates a particular area would need to produce if the national target is to be met, Lumina seeks to break the job down into practical, tangible goals. Even at that level, the data show just how far the country has to go, Lumina says: "If the current rate of increase remains, less than 47 percent of Americans will hold a two- or four-year degree by 2025. Economic experts say this is far below the level that can keep the nation competitive in the global, knowledge-based economy.""

"Blood, sweat, and tiers By Kevin Cullen Globe Columnist / September 14, 2010 There were two stories about local colleges in the paper recently that spoke an undeniable truth and hit a real nerve. One was about how UMass Amherst is a "second-tier'' state school struggling to attract top students after years of budget cuts and apathy on Beacon Hill. The other was about how Harvard's endowment now exceeds $27 billion, which is approximately the GDP of Costa Rica. First, the truth: If you want your school to have enough capital, it's better to rely on rich alumni than craven politicians. Now, about that nerve. When some people read "second-tier,'' they think second-rate. The UMass story, perfectly factual, was exquisitely timed. On the day that thousands of UMass students moved onto campus, a front-page story in the Globe announced that "UMass Amherst remains firmly lodged among the nation's second-tier state schools.'' Now, some might view that as a slap in the face. Most people I know who went to UMass would take the slap and say, "Is that all you got?''"

"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

"September 19, 2010 A Measure of Education Is Put to the Test Results of national exam will go public in 2012 By David Glenn You have 90 minutes to complete this test. Here is your scenario: You are the assistant to a provost who wants to measure the quality of your university's general-education program. Your boss is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a national test that asks students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize evidence and write persuasively. The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges. Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests. At some colleges, its use has helped spark sweeping changes in instruction and curriculum. And soon, many more of the scores will be made public. But skeptics say the test is too detached from the substantive knowledge that students are actually expected to acquire. Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance."

"Commonality Across Countries September 16, 2010 PARIS -- Concisely summarizing the themes of any conference is difficult; doing so for a meeting where the 30 main speakers hailed from 15 countries and gathered to talk about a topic as broad as where higher education is headed around the planet seems a fool's errand. And yet the striking thing about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's biennial higher education conference that ended here Wednesday was that, despite the vast differences in how higher education institutions are operated and funded and governed from country to country, there was enormous commonality in the issues and problems they're facing, the questions their governments are asking of them, and how their leaders are responding."

"'A World Changed Utterly' September 14, 2010 PARIS -- "We must identify ways to achieve higher quality and better outcomes at a time of increased demand and declining resources." Statements like that will sound familiar to anyone who has spent more than a half hour at virtually any higher education meeting in the United States since 2008 (or, failing that, who has read Inside Higher Ed's coverage of such meetings), as the global recession stifled if not strangled many state economies, and by extension the country's. While the statement above could have been uttered by just about any of the American higher education leaders who are attending the general conference here this week of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Institutional Management in Higher Education program, it wasn't. It came from Richard Yelland, who heads OECD's Education Management and Infrastructure Division, and is the convener of the meeting. He was describing the conference's theme, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less," by which the organization is referring both to what Yelland called the "most synchronized recession in OECD countries in over half a century" and trends -- such as government pushes to expand access to higher education and dramatically changing technological capabilities -- that the historic downturn is in many cases exacerbating. "

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

"While an undergraduate at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark., Caitlin Getchell juggled 18 credit hours each semester. In an attempt to lighten her workload during the school year and still enjoy her summer vacation, Getchell turned to an online class one summer. Luckily for her, the American government class she selected mostly contained information she already knew, and she breezed through it. No research papers were required, and open book tests were allowed; there was also regular posting on a message board by students. But, Getchell says, if the class had been something different, she might not have done as well. "If it had been a subject I didn't know much about - Calculus or Chemistry for example - I think I would have really struggled," she says. Getchell, who received a bachelor's degree in history in 2007, adds that she was glad she took the class online. And she's not alone in finding the benefits of online learning irresistible. Enrollment in online courses is growing rapidly, and several universities are even offering degrees strictly online. In fall 2008, 4.6 million students at degree-granting higher institutions took at least one class online, a nearly 17 percent increase over fall 2007. Online enrollment accounted for 25 percent of total enrollment for fall 2007, according to the Sloan Consortium, which has conducted a survey of online education in the U.S. every year since 2002."

"September 5, 2010 Why Teaching Is Not Priority No. 1 By Robin Wilson With lavish recreation centers and sophisticated research laboratories, life on college campuses is drastically different from what it was 100 years ago. But one thing has stayed virtually the same: classroom teaching. Professors still design lessons, pick out the readings, and decide how to test-in many cases, in the same way they always have. In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don't deliver. Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know. And as the Obama administration packs more money into student aid, it wants more evidence of educational quality. But a roadblock may emerge: faculty culture. Not because professors care little about quality or students-indeed, many care deeply-but because of what colleges tell them is important. "Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning," says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.""

"August 17, 2010, 06:00 PM ET Elite Institutions and Low-Income Students: A Story of Dismal Failure By Diane Auer Jones The hypocrisy in higher education is sometimes just astounding. I read Richard Kahlenberg's blog yesterday about the admirable efforts on the part of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to increase graduation rates among low income students who attend these institutions. In fact, Mr. Kahlenberg goes as far as to suggest that other universities should learn some valuable lessons from these institutions. Give me a break. Of course I applaud efforts to help those less fortunate succeed, but the idea that we should celebrate two highly selective, well-funded, elite universities that require even MORE funding to develop special programs to serve such a small, hand-picked population of students who, in the end, enjoy only slightly improved outcomes (at best), seems a bit outrageous to me. Instead, I would suggest that the stories of Wash U and UNC provide additional evidence to support what some of us have known for quite some time (and that academic researchers have concluded over and over again), which is that educating low income students requires a lot more than talented faculty and a rigorous curriculum - it requires a great deal of additional money at a time when there is precious little of that to go around."

"Killing the Lecture With Technology, Part II By Marc Parry Earlier this month, The Chronicle wrote about New York University's attempt to reprogram the roles of some professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction. The article prompted other professors to share similar examples of strategies they've used to shift class time away from lectures. Here are three of their stories: * David B. Miller, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, spent 400 hours producing 90 videos for a large undergraduate animal-behavior course. The content, which includes narrated film clips and animations, is available as streaming video on password-protected servers and not to the public due to copyright issues. The idea is to substitute the online lectures for one of the course's biweekly class sessions. The remaining meeting is devoted to additional content, discussion, and questions. Honors students also gather face-to-face for an extra hour of discussion each week, which is recorded and turned into a podcast. The format works: "Almost half the class earned A's (I do not curve grades), and for the first time that I can recall, nobody failed the course," writes Mr. Miller, who is pictured above. Here's a video explaining his methods."

This talk addresses the ways in which education focuses narrowly on ways ot thinking and does not promote the creative thinking that we need for the future. You will enjoy the humor also.

This really lays down a challenge to define what education is about and what it is for. Very thought provoking.

"Has the Conversation Changed? August 9, 2010 WASHINGTON -- Leaders in for-profit higher education have historically tried to deflect criticism of the institutions by pointing to a few misbehaving "bad actors" who aggressively recruit unqualified students, keep them enrolled for as long as possible while burying them in debt and, if students stick it out long enough, award them worthless degrees. But the events of last week -- most notably the findings of the Government Accountability Office's undercover investigation of recruiting at for-profit colleges that included inducements to commit fraud at four institutions, and the highly critical Senate hearing at which the findings were aired -- challenged the validity of that argument and put advocates of the sector on the defensive in a way that they have not been for years. The developments emboldened critics, saying that the week's events prove what they've been saying about the systemic nature of the sector's problems. And the developments prompted a perceptible, if subtle, shift in the rhetoric of for-profit college leaders and a set of self-imposed actions that, while derided by skeptics as little more than damage control, reflected a recognition by the institutions that their previous protestations may no longer suffice. "It's not us, it's them, so don't penalize the whole sector" has become "it's us, but it's not really that bad, and we're trying to fix it -- so don't use a heavy hand in regulating or legislating against us." Based on the tack taken by Congressional Democrats in recent weeks, following on the Obama administration's aggressive regulatory approach this winter and spring, many observers seem to think that wish may be wishful thinking at this point. With the GAO's findings suggesting that evidence of for-profit recruiters encouraging students to commit fraud was fairly widespread and that questionable or misleading practices were identified at all 15 for-profit colleges that investigators visite

"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.

"Not Just a Foot in the Door August 12, 2010 When the first community colleges sought permission to offer four-year degrees, they generally said that it would only be one or two programs - nothing dramatic. But in Florida, where the community college baccalaureate movement is strongest, community colleges now offer more than 100 four-year degrees, and the figure could be about to jump significantly. Though a handful of Florida community colleges had won approval to offer select four-year degrees around 2001, the rest of the state took hold of the idea in 2008, when Gov. Charlie Crist signed a controversial bill rebranding the state's community college system so that its institutions could more readily offer baccalaureate degrees. The four-year degrees authorized were those in disciplines such as nursing and education, where local four-year institutions could not meet the high demand, and in the career-specific concentrations of the applied sciences. Despite strict state rules keeping the growth of these community college baccalaureate degrees in check, ensuring that they would not adversely affect existing associate degree programs or compete in an unhealthy way with nearby offerings at four-year institutions, some critics remained concerned about the move. As it turned out, growth proved rapid. In 2008, 10 of the state's 28 community colleges offered 70 baccalaureate degrees. Now, 18 community colleges offer 111 four-year degrees. Most of the degrees are still in nursing and education; however, growth in the variety of applied science programs has introduced a range of concentrations, from homeland security to fire science management; from interior design to international business. With 24 baccalaureate degrees to choose from, St. Petersburg College offers the most of any community college in the state."

"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