Red Balloon Resources

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

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

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

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

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

Great description of the new digital generation and the problems of an old model of education

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

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

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

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

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

Most colleges want to do more with less. The University of Southern Maine had to. The institution has been facing dual crises: a deficit and a six-year graduation rate of 34 percent for first-time, full-time students, compared with 56 percent nationally. "We're hemorrhaging students each year," said Selma Botman, president of Southern Maine. So the university took a hard look at support for its almost 8,000 undergraduates. "We found that we had lots of stuff, but not much of it was coordinated in any way," said Susan M. Campbell, associate vice president for academic affairs. She led a major reorganization. On its three campuses, the university eliminated offices of academic advising, career services, and early student success, and laid off 21 employees. At the same time, it created a student-success center on each campus, in Gorham, Lewiston, and Portland, rehiring 11 people to run the one-stop shops. "The question was, Can we achieve savings through an integrated model?" Ms. Campbell said. The short answer: yes. The university has saved almost $370,000 in base salaries over all. But that move had another price: six age-discrimination complaints, still pending, from former employees who were not rehired.

"Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out-often awkwardly-nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback. Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback." That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia."

"the Princeton University Policy Research Institute for the Region co-sponsored a forum on state-supported higher education with the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. I attended, along with one other Princeton faculty colleague (though others may have escaped my notice), but most of the audience was composed of officials of New Jersey's state colleges. The topic was "How to Fix a Broken System: Funding Public Higher Education and Making it More Productive." The speakers and panelists were well chosen and quite helpful. They included Rich Novak (Association of Governing Boards), John Cavanaugh (chancellor, Pennsylvania State system), Dennis Jones (president, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems), David Carter (chancellor, Connecticut State University system), Jane Wellman (Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability), and the presidents or chancellors of three of New Jersey's best state colleges. The focus was on the plight of the public four-year colleges of New Jersey, although the speakers made clear the extent to which our state problems mirrored those of most other states. The picture that was drawn for us Friday was not pretty, and it is not likely that we will see a prettier picture for many years. Everyone agreed that the next few years will be worse than the past couple of years-the federal stimulus money will be spent, state budget deficits will continue to grow, the easiest savings from cost-cutting will have already been taken."

"American academic leaders are casting a wary eye on developments in higher education in the rest of the world. Will the Bologna Process give Europe an edge? Will the development of research universities in countries outside the West stop the best talent from coming to the United States? What does it mean when American colleges and universities open up campuses thousands of miles away from their home base? Ben Wildavsky argues that these and many other changes are indeed significant and are bringing about a "globalization" of higher education. But while some observers fear these developments could hurt American higher education, Wildavsky argues that the changes have the potential to be a win-win for all involved (and that these and other forms of globalization are now inevitable). He makes his case in a new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton University Press). Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, answered questions about the themes of the book."

"Peter P. Smith's career in and out of higher education has not followed the straight and narrow. Amid forays into politics (as a member of Congress and lieutenant governor of Vermont) and international affairs (at UNESCO), Smith has been a higher education innovator, helping to found the statewide Community College of Vermont in 1970 and serving for 10 years as founding president of California State University's Monterey Bay campus, beginning in 1995. In those jobs and his current one, as senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, Smith has pushed existing colleges and universities to better serve the adults and other students who have been least well served by traditional higher education. In his new book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), he argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. "

"Here's the pitch: "Can you really GO TO COLLEGE for LESS THAN the cost of your monthly CELL PHONE BILL? The point we're trying to make is that taking general education, required college courses just became A LOT more affordable." How affordable? $99 for a course. And if you take the courses offered by StraighterLine -- in composition, economics, algebra, pre-calculus, and accounting -- you don't need to worry that the company isn't itself a college. StraighterLine has partnerships with five colleges that will award credit for the courses. Three are for-profit institutions and one is a nontraditional state university for adult students. But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas."

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated? Some higher-ed futurists think so. Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida if she wants. Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions - including for-profit ones - has gained traction in some circles."

Bill Graves writes about the "Learning Assurance Commons" (LAC). It draws on his recent monograph (published online in conjunction with the "future-of-higher-education" Jan./Feb. 2010 EDUCAUSE Review). The paper proposes a construct that he now call the "learning assurance commons" (LAC). The paper describes more clearly what the LAC is and how it might become a means to balance rights and responsibilities among education providers and their external investors - students, families, donors, employers, and governments. A key leverage point for such rebalancing would be government vouchers earned by students. The vouchers would flow to students who earn them via assessments and then to the education providers who, along with those students, have agreed to a set of accountability protocols governed by the LAC. The paper extends the idea of the interoperability of the technologies used in education to the interoperability of inter-institution educational processes, such as transfer of credits.