Red Balloon Resources

"Average College Debt Rose to $24,000 in 2009 By TAMAR LEWIN Published: October 21, 2010 College seniors who graduated in 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student loan debt, up 6 percent from 2008, according to an annual report from the Project on Student Debt. Related Comment Post a Comment in The Choice Blog The increase is similar to those of the past four years, the report said, despite the recession, probably because members of the class of 2009 took out most of their debt before the economic downturn began. "This consistent growth in debt over the last few years really adds up," said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, the research and advocacy group that operates the debt project. "It's important to remember that the experts all agree that if you're going to borrow, you should take out federal loans first, because federal student loans come with far more repayment options and borrower protections than other types of loans." "

Is College Worth the Investment? An analysis of Return on Investment (ROI)

"Explaining Gaps in Readiness for College-Level Math: The Role of High School Courses Issue/Topic: Curriculum--Mathematics; High School--College Readiness; Postsecondary Participation--Access Author(s): Long, Mark; Iatarola, Patrice; Conger, Dylan Organization(s): Evans School, University of Washington; Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Florida State University; Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University Publication: Education Finance and Policy Season: Winter 2009 Background: Despite substantial increases in high school graduation requirements, almost one-third of US college freshmen are unprepared for college-level math. Students who are low income, Hispanic and black are least likely to be prepared for college-level coursework, and females are slightly less likely to be ready than males. Little of the prior research in this area has focused on the contribution of high school courses to demographic and socioeconomic gaps in secondary and postsecondary success. Purpose: To estimate how much of the racial, socioeconomical and gender gaps in high school and postsecondary outcomes are determined by the courses that students take while in high school. Findings/Results: Less than half of the black and poor students and just over half of the Hispanic students in the sample were prepared for college-level math - far below the readiness rates for whites, Asian and nonpoor students. 1. The courses students take in high school contribute significantly to their college readiness, with the largest gains occurring at Algebra 2 (the minimum level of math required to graduate even with a college preparatory diploma in Florida is Algebra 1). 2. The slight male advantage in college math readiness is not explained by course-taking differentials because female students already take more advanced math courses than males. This finding is consistent with other work on gender disparities. 3. The results suggest

"Speeding Toward a Slowdown? November 16, 2010 Online college enrollments grew by 21 percent to 5.6 million last fall, the biggest percentage increase in several years, according to a report released today by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group. At the same time, the authors say online growth might begin to slow down in the near future, as the biggest drivers of enrollment growth face budget challenges and stricter recruitment oversight from the federal government. Nearly one million more students took an online course in fall 2009 than in the previous year, according to the new survey, which drew responses from 2,583 academic leaders at both nonprofit and for-profit institutions across the country. That is the biggest numerical increase in the eight-year history of the report, and the largest proportional increase (21.1 percent) since 2005. Online enrollments have grown at more than nine times the rate of general enrollment since 2002. Almost a third of all college students in the country take at least one course online. The conventional wisdom has been that the economic crisis has spurred at least some of that growth, as adults looking to increase their job prospects have gone back to school for a new degree. Three-quarters of the institutions surveyed said the recession drove interest in their online programs. In the year since Sloan administered its survey, there has been more talk of online enrollment growth as a strategy for making up for shrinking state allocations at public university systems - especially in places like California, where some think a massive online expansion could lift the state university system out of financial ruin, and Minnesota, where possible Republican presidential challenger Gov. Tim Pawlenty has made the idea of less-expensive online public higher education one of his talking points. But Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and co-author of the new Sloan survey, says that shrinkin

"Special Report A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 2) December 16, 2010 Advising and Tutoring There are two basic ways that students can seek outside assistance. For administrative or customer service questions, they can contact their course adviser; for questions related to the actual course material, they have the allotted 10 hours of SmarThinking tutoring (minus five minutes per session for "processing"). I found that my course adviser -- who (along with Burck Smith and StraighterLine generally) had no knowledge of this article until after I finished the class -- was available and willing to assist me; I e-mailed him at least a half dozen times as I went through the course, and in each case he wrote back within a day, and often sooner (his replies tended to be very brief but -- more often than not -- helpful). The tutoring arrangement is less convenient. For those unfamiliar with the service, SmarThinking tutoring takes place in a sort of chat session; the interface is a large white browser window into which students can type questions and their tutors can type responses. My questions showed up in large red letters, while my tutor's replies were in large blue ones. This was helpful for distinguishing between my words and those of my tutor, although the format of the chat session is such that our words often overlapped and became illegible. When one "page" of type is filled up, the chat session opens a new, blank page, and my tutor and I frustrated one another - and wasted time - by inadvertently moving back and forth between pages. Special Report Inside Higher Ed's Serena Golden took StraighterLine's Economics 101 course this year. This article recounts her experiences and what they reveal about the much-discussed curricular experiment. Tutors have no access to the course materials or any of the work that students have done, so each question must be explained in the absence of any context - and unlike at a university tutoring center, where this m

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) December 16, 2010 'It Should Be Fine' Perhaps all of the back-and-forth about StraighterLine - the news stories, the blog posts, the assorted incidents of backlash, the endless tug-of-war over who awards credit for what - might be boiled down to two essential questions: Are StraighterLine's courses truly more or less equivalent to the courses that many college students are already taking? And, more broadly, at what point does any educational experience - specifically, in StraighterLine's case, an introductory-level general education class - become worthy of college credit? The former question addresses the level on which Burck Smith would like for his brainchild to be evaluated; the latter is an issue that he actively seeks to avoid. In a long series of emails over the course of several weeks, as well as one 90-minute telephone interview, Smith repeatedly and expressly urged me to "make sure to compare our courses to other colleges' general education courses with whatever evaluation standards they use rather than what they say they do or wish they did." "…[E]veryone else is doing the same thing," Smith said, "but they're allowed to be accredited and approved and sort of part of the club." If one accepts Smith's terms of debate, it is difficult to argue with him. Surely accredited institutions offer plenty of courses that are not of the utmost quality. And colleges and universities do turn a profit on many large, introductory-level courses - particularly courses that are taught by low-paid temporary instructors, or broadcast online to vast numbers of students - and that profit is used, as Carey's Washington Monthly article puts it, "to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else." How colleges pay their classical Chinese poetry experts is not Smith's concern; on the contrary, he views himself as something of a consumers' adv

September / October 2009 College for $99 a Month The next generation of online education could be great for students-and catastrophic for universities. by Kevin Carey Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor's degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn't going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual-hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought-she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk? Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed

"Online Learning in the Virginia Community College System By: Shanna Smith Jaggars & Di Xu - September 2010. In January 2001, the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) released a distance learning strategic plan that endorsed taking a student-centered approach to online learning as well as providing support services to promote faculty development and student success. The current study was commissioned by VCCS to investigate student outcomes for the 2004 student cohort by examining: (1) patterns of online course taking among Virginia community college students; (2) college-ready and underprepared students' retention and performance in online versus face-to-face courses; and (3) subsequent educational outcomes for underprepared and college-ready students who participate in online learning. Results indicate that nearly half of Virginia community college students enrolled in an online course across the period of study, with online enrollments increasing dramatically over four years. However, few students enrolled in an entirely online curriculum in a given term, even by the time the study concluded in 2008. In general, students with stronger academic preparation were more likely to enroll in online courses. Regardless of their initial level of preparation, however, students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution. Additional analyses with a new cohort of students entering in 2008 were consistent with the results of the 2004 cohort."

"Colleges to Confront Deep Cutbacks In states where new governors pledge no new taxes, higher-education budgets will suffer Higher Education Faces Deep Cuts Where New Governors Pledge No New Taxes Brian E. Sandoval of Nevada, like some other newly elected Republican governors, pledged to cut spending but hold down taxes despite an enormous budget shortfall. By Eric Kelderman The budget situation in Nevada is so dire that lawmakers there could cut more than twice the amount they spent on higher education last year and still not fill the state's projected $1.2-billion shortfall. Despite the gap, which equals nearly a third of the state's spending, the incoming governor, Brian E. Sandoval, a Republican, has pledged that he will not raise taxes to put the state's budget back into the black. Mr. Sandoval is one of a dozen Republicans who were swept into governors' offices in November promising to hold the line on taxes and rein in state spending. Half of those states-Maine, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin-face shortfalls so large that they nearly equal or even surpass the entire amount the state spends on higher education."

"The Measuring Stick Finale: A Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up. Skeptic: Listen. I do focus on my students. I assess their learning every week. It's called grading. I get the feeling that the dea

"Half of Money Lent to Students at For-Profits Will End Up in Default, Government Predicts December 22, 2010, 1:09 pm The U.S. Education Department expects nearly half of the money lent to students attending for-profit colleges to enter default over a 20-year period, according to an estimate published on Tuesday. More broadly, the department projects that 16 percent of the dollars lent to all college students who entered repayment in 2008 will go into default. The department will use the estimates for budgetary purposes. The estimate echoes the findings of a Chronicle analysis last summer, which found that one out of five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 had gone into default, and that the default rate reached 40 percent for loans made to students at for-profit colleges."

"The Great College-Degree Scam December 9, 2010, 2:32 pm By Richard Vedder With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits. Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor's degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend). How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word "increase." Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin-to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time. To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the

"Americans Blame Students and Parents for Poor Graduation Rates, Poll Finds December 9, 2010, 11:33 am Students and their parents are mostly to blame for poor college-graduation rates, according to a poll released today by the Associated Press and Stanford University. When asked about graduation rates at public four-year colleges, seven in 10 respondents to the survey said students shouldered either a great deal or a lot of responsibility for the rates, and 45 percent felt that way about parents. Other people involved in higher education got a pass. From 25 percent to 32 percent of those polled blamed college administrators, professors, teachers, unions, state education officials, and federal education officials."

"December 9, 2010 Key Senator Raises Concerns About Veterans Benefits Flowing to For-Profit Colleges By Kelly Field Washington After veterans and service members, for-profit colleges may be the biggest beneficiaries of the 2008 update to the GI Bill, according to a new report from the Senate education committee. In the first year the law was in effect, for-profits received $640-million, or 36 percent, of the $1.75-billion in total benefits paid by the Veterans Affairs Department, even though those institutions enroll fewer than 10 percent of all students in the United States. Sen. Tom Harkin, the committee's chairman, says those facts underscore the need for stricter federal oversight over for-profit colleges. In recent months, Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, has held a series of high-profile hearings criticizing for-profits for their high costs, aggressive recruiting tactics, and heavy dependence on taxpayer support. "I want to make sure these veterans are getting the education we promised them and that taxpayers know that their money is adequately safeguarded," he said Thursday in a conference call with reporters. But lobbyists for for-profit colleges say the disproportionate share of GI Bill benefits the institutions receive is a testament to the sector's dedication to educating service members and veterans."

"For-profit schools reel as rules affect enrollment By Tali Arbel and Janna Herron AP Business Writers / October 14, 2010 NEW YORK-The nation's largest for-profit college says it will take a big hit to enrollment -- and its bottom line -- as it tightens admission practices. The move comes as the government ramps up regulation of an industry which critics say preys on lower-income students and leaves them with hefty debt loads and meager job prospects. The number of lower-income students enrolled at for-profit colleges has surged in the past few years. Big advertising budgets drew those trying to bolster their resumes as a hedge against high unemployment. But critics claim the schools are not helping students find better jobs and say enrollment counselors sign up many who are unprepared for higher education. When they drop out, they are still stuck paying back their student loans. Defaults on student loans have been rising, sticking taxpayers with the bills. So the government has proposed regulations that could limit schools' access to federal financial aid if graduates' debt levels are too high or too few students repay loans. Amid intense scrutiny of the industry, Apollo Group Inc. said Wednesday it will provide new students with a free three-week trial program to see if they are ready for its University of Phoenix curriculums -- weeding out those at risk of leaving school before earning degrees. And it will no longer pay its counselors bonuses based on how many students they enroll."

Schools may collaborate more on degrees By Janese Silvey Columbia Daily Tribune Tuesday, October 5, 2010 A statewide charge for public colleges to review degree offerings is just a large-scale version of what institutions already do, a University of Missouri System administrator said. The Missouri Department of Higher Education is asking public colleges and universities to submit reports this month showing which degree programs are only graduating a handful of students annually, shining a spotlight on areas where schools could collaborate and be more efficient. There are dozens of examples of where Missouri colleges and universities have already teamed up, said Steve Graham, vice president of academic affairs for the UM System. MU partners with Missouri State University to provide a master's degree in library and information science, for instance, and with Missouri Southern State University to offer a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. "In doctoral programs that are small, it makes a lot of sense to collaborate," MU Provost Brian Foster said. "Certainly we're interested in doing that." Talk of the degree program review is already generating new ideas, Graham said. An association of chief academic officers from public colleges and universities, for instance, is considering how to redistribute faculty and programs and come up with new ways to provide common, high-demand courses."

August 22, 2010 A Reset for Higher Education By Joni E. Finney Many of us have seen trouble coming for a long, long, time. Did we really believe that endowment growth, state support, and tuition dollars could or would provide an unchecked revenue stream, tempered only by short downturns in the economy, followed by fairly quick recoveries? Did we really believe that we could expand administrative structures and shortchange instruction, but still maintain quality institutions? Did we think that poor completion rates and the achievement gaps between whites and minority groups could be solved only with more money? Did we honestly believe that expensive amenities and increased financial aid for upper-middle-class and wealthy students could be sustained? Of course not. To understand what needs to be done now-a "reset" in higher education-we need to first understand the changes pressuring our enterprise: deficits, demographics, and demand. States' structural deficits, or the gap that occurs when states fail to tax new types of economic activity, have been documented for years. A previously good economy permitted states to postpone those problems, but now, state leaders must revise their tax structures to generate more revenue. The most optimistic economic projections say the recession may end in 2013. Even then, states will be hard-pressed to return to the status quo in terms of appropriations. IN THE RIGHT COLUMN: Charts and Graphics on Finance BROWSE THE ALMANAC: More Statistics and State-by-State Profiles Many in higher education lament states' "disinvestment." The problem is much more complex. States have been reliable partners in financing higher education. While enrollments grew, state support also grew, by 24 percent from 2005 to 2008, followed by a decline of 1.7 percent from 2008 to 2010. At the same time, the federal government spent $6.6-billion in 2009-10 under the stimulus bill for states, an amount that increases to $23-billion once federal

"Ranking the Rankings August 23, 2010, 9:01 am By Richard Kahlenberg If it's back to school, it must be time for the publication of college rankings. In recent days, U.S. News & World Report released its much-discussed rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University declared its ranking of world universities. As my Innovations Blog colleague Richard Vedder noted recently, Forbes has its own rankings to compete with U.S. News, and Vedder (who helped Forbes come up with its methodology) argues that Forbes's is better-that is, ranks higher. My good friend Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at U.S. News, discusses the proliferation of rankings in his fascinating new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Wildavsky devotes a lengthy chapter to global rankings and compares and contrasts the two main international rankings-the Shanghai rankings, which look primarily at science research (counting factors such as the number of alumni and faculty who have Nobel Prizes and citations in science journals) with those of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which heavily weights academic peer evaluations. Despite their fundamental differences, Wildavsky notes, in 2008, the top 10 in the two lists had seven overlapping institutions. My own favorite in the rankings game is The Washington Monthly, which today released the 2010 rankings of "What Can Colleges Do for the Country." While other guides "help students and parents decide how to spend their tuition dollars wisely," the Monthly says its goal is "to tell citizens and policy makers which colleges [are] spending their tax dollars wisely." The Monthly ranks colleges and universities based on whether they promote social mobility; research, and service. As I've noted elsewhere, one of the intriguing findings of the Monthly's social mobility ranking is that public universities systems where affirmative action by race has bee

"Fixing Higher Ed August 24, 2010 By Henry F. Fradella The press and the blogosphere have devoted significant coverage recently to a report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that predicted that the United States is on "collision course with the future." The report estimated that within a mere eight years, the nation will suffer a shortfall of at least 3 million workers with college degrees and 4.7 million workers with postsecondary certificates. The authors of the report concluded that to meet the challenges of a global economy in which 59 to 63 percent of domestic jobs require education beyond the high-school level, America's colleges and universities "need to increase the number of degrees they confer by 10 percent annually, a tall order." Although numerous commentators have responded to the report by echoing its call for increased access to higher education, it seems to me that few have focused on a key term in the report's call to "develop reforms that result in both cost-efficient and high quality postsecondary education." Producing millions more baccalaureate-educated workers will do nothing to address the competitiveness of the U.S. workforce if those degrees are not high quality ones. Sadly, it is pretty clear that far too many college degrees aren't worth the paper on which they are printed. In 2006, the Spellings Commission reported disturbing data that more than 60 percent of college graduates were not proficient in prose, document, and quantitative literacy. In other words, significantly more than half of college degree holders in the United States lack the "critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces." Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, cited these findings in his recent Huffington Post essay, "The Failure of American Higher Education." He shared stories about recent college graduates, many from prestigious universitie

"October 11, 2010 New Initiative Will Advance the Best Uses of Technology to Improve College Readiness and Completion Multi-year "challenge" grant competition will identify and fund most promising innovations EDUCAUSE Marge Gammon Phone: +1.303.816.7431 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Phone: +1.206.709.3400 Email: media@gatesfoundation.org SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a collaborative, multi-year initiative, which aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology. The program will provide grants to organizations and innovators to expand promising technology tools to more students, teachers, and schools. It is led by nonprofit EDUCAUSE, which works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. Next Generation Learning Challenges released the first of a series of RFPs today to solicit funding proposals for technology applications that can improve postsecondary education. This round of funding will total up to $20 million, including grants that range from $250,000 to $750,000. Applicants with top-rated proposals will receive funds to expand their programs and demonstrate effectiveness in serving larger numbers of students. Proposals are due November 19, 2010; winners are expected to be announced by March 31, 2011. "American education has been the best in the world, but we're falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "We're living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed." Next Generation Learning Challenges invites proposals from technologists and institutions within the education community, but also innovators and entrepreneurs outside the traditional educa