Red Balloon Resources

Press Release from the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area. The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation. "Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support." Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of tha

"For Many, College Isn't Worth It January 20, 2011 By Richard Vedder In this space last Friday, Anthony Carnevale strongly and lengthily argued that "college is still worth it." He implicitly criticized those, including me, who rely on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data showing that the number of college graduates exceeds the number of available jobs that require a college degree. While he says many things, he has two main points. First, "There's just one problem with the official BLS statistics: they're wrong." Second, he notes that "the most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data which show employers across the country pay a 'wage premium' for college graduates…." I will argue that the BLS data are, in fact, pretty good, and that while Carnevale is factually correct about the earnings data, his interpretation of it is, at the minimum, misleading. Moreover, I will further argue that what is involved here is a classic application of what economists over the age of 50 call "Say's Law" (i.e., the theory suggesting that supply creates its own demand; economists under 50 are largely ignorant of it because they have no knowledge of the evolution of their own discipline, reflecting the general abandonment of thorough teaching of the history of economic thought). Furthermore, I will argue that diplomas are a highly expensive and inefficient screening device used by employers who are afraid to test potential employee skills owing to a most unfortunate Supreme Court decision and related legislation. Finally, I will assert that Carnevale and others who argue "college has a high payoff" are comparing apples with oranges -- i.e., they are making totally inappropriate comparisons that lead to skewed conclusions. An even-handed interpretation of the data is that college is "worth it" for some significant number of young people, but is a far more problematic investment for others. The call by President O

"The Invisible Computer Lab January 20, 2011 In the future, campus computer labs will be invisible, personal computers will be shapeshifters, and colleges will have to spend much less to make sure students have access to the software they need for certain courses. This according to technology officials at several colleges that have recently deployed "virtual computing labs" - Web-based hubs where students can go to use sophisticated programs from their personal computers without having to buy and install expensive software, or slog to a campus lab and pray for a vacant workstation. Essentially, the virtual "lab" is a protocol that takes programs running on college hardware and beams the images via the Web to any computer desktop, where students can create and save work as though the programs were running on their own hard drives. Since the performance of the software does not depend on the processing power of the computer - only on the strength of the Internet connection - even students with relatively clunky machines can use advanced software without difficulty, campus technologists say. And with many courses requiring that students do work in number-crunching programs such as Mathematica, or editing software from Adobe, or even basic tools such as the Microsoft Office suite, virtual computing labs could be a windfall for students who prefer to work from their own desks and cannot afford to purchase the software, which can cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. "Imagine you're a student and you say, 'I want my computer to look like this and [do] this particular piece of work,' and it does," says Art Vandenberg, a technologist at Georgia State University, which is moving its own virtual lab out of the beta phase this spring. "It's that magical." Described this way, virtual computing labs might seem a bit sci-fi - Vandenberg invoked Star Trek when discussing the technology with Inside Higher Ed, and the protean powers

"January 19, 2011 For Some Colleges, the Road to Growth Is to Go Hybrid By Goldie Blumenstyk Keiser University's announcement last week that it would convert from profit to nonprofit status is a reminder that ownership status doesn't necessarily define a college. Some for-profits operate like nonprofits and "there are nonprofits that look just like for-profits," says Arthur Keiser, the university's co-founder. Even more than that, the conversion is a reminder of the fluidity of the sector and the variety of new ownership models now popping up on the higher-education landscape. They include models like Ivy Bridge College, an online, associate-degree division of Tiffin University that is majority owned by private investors now operating under Tiffin's accreditation, Middlebury College's new language company created in partnership with a publicly traded technology company called K12, and the TCS Education System, an entrepreneurial consortium of both for-profit and nonprofit divisions that was formed last year by the fast-growing Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The sector hasn't yet hit the point at which it's hard to tell the for-profit colleges from the nonprofit ones without looking at their tax returns, but that day may not be all that far off. All of those arrangements are "part of the cutting edge" says Bernard Luskin, a longtime college administrator who is now working with the nonprofit Touro University to rebuild its online-education programs. (Touro sold its online division, TUI, to private-equity investors in 2007.) Public financing and philanthropic support are getting tighter and tighter, Mr. Luskin notes, and "that makes it pretty hard to grow" without these kinds of alternatives."

"Is Education a Public Good or a Private Good? January 18, 2011, 10:02 am By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson Advocates for more generous support of students frequently bemoan what they perceive as a social shift from viewing higher education as a "public good" to viewing it as a "private good." What they mean is that the public gets benefits from people going to college and should not be transferring responsibility for the costs of education to students themselves. This conversation would be more constructive if its terms were more clearly defined and its categories less starkly delineated. The concept of public goods is central to economic analysis of the role of government in the allocation of resources. Public goods are defined by two characteristics: 1) Non-excludability: It is not possible to exclude non-payers from consuming the good. 2) Non-rivalry in consumption: Additional people consuming the good do not diminish the benefit to others. National defense and mosquito control are standard examples of public goods. The military cannot exclude from protection individuals who fail to pay their taxes. If the neighborhood is sprayed for mosquitoes, everyone in the area will benefit, whether or not they have paid. Moreover, I am no less safe if you are also protected by our army and get no additional mosquito bites just because you are also free from the pests. Not many goods are perfect public goods. Some have one characteristic or the other. It is difficult to impose tolls on city streets (the streets are for the most part non-excludable), but traffic congestion is obviously a problem (rivalry). On the other hand, it is easy to prevent people who do not pay from entering a half-empty concert hall (excludable) but their presence (assuming they are well-behaved) would not diminish the enjoyment of those who are listening (non-rival). Higher education is not a pure public good. It is clearly possible to exclude people who do not pay. What people who

'Academically Adrift' January 18, 2011 If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press. The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations -- and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other "higher level" skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging: * 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college. * 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college. * Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later -- but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning. "How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much," write the authors, Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. For many undergraduates, they write, "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent."

"Measuring College-Teacher Quality January 13, 2011, 10:40 am By Kevin Carey David Glenn's Chronicle article on using course sequence grades to estimate teacher quality in higher education illustrates a crucial flaw in the way education researchers often think about the role of evidence in education practice. The article cites a recent study of Calculus grades in the Air Force Academy. All students there are required to take Calculus I and II. They're randomly assigned to instructors who use the same syllabus. Students all take the same final, which is collectively graded by a pool of instructors. These unusual circumstances control for many external factors that might otherwise complicate an analysis of teacher quality. The researchers found that students taught by permanent faculty got worse grades in Calculus I than students taught by short-term faculty. But the pattern reversed when those students went on to Calculus II-those taught by full-time faculty earned better grades in the more advanced course, suggesting that short-term faculty might have been "teaching to the test" at the expense of deeper conceptual understanding. Students taught by full-time faculty were also more likely to enroll in upper-level math in their junior and senior years. In addition, the study found that student course evaluations were positively correlated with grades in Calculus I but negatively correlated with grades in Calculus II."

"January 13, 2011 Scientists Fault Universities as Favoring Research Over Teaching By Paul Basken The United States' educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines. Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles. "It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system." A group of researchers, led by two biology professors, Diane K. O'Dowd of the University of California at Irvine and Richard M. Losick of Harvard University, made a similar point in a commentary in Science. Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'" they wrote. Those faculty members raise the issue at a time of growing anxiety for universities and their research enterprises. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this month, after party leaders promised during last year's election campaign to cut nondiscretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. That is likely to mean deep budget cuts at the federal science-financing agencies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest nonmilitary provider of research money to universities, could see its budget fall 9 percent below its anticipated 2011 level of $31.3-billion. And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Tho

January 18, 2011 'Trust Us' Won't Cut It Anymore By Kevin Carey "Trust us." That's the only answer colleges ever provide when asked how much their students learn. Sure, they acknowledge, it's hard for students to find out what material individual courses will cover. So most students choose their courses based on a paragraph in the catalog and whatever secondhand information they can gather. No, there's isn't an independent evaluation process. No standardized tests, no external audits, no publicly available learning evidence of any kind. Yes, there's been grade inflation. A-minus is the new C. Granted, faculty have every incentive to neglect their teaching duties while chasing tenure-if they're lucky enough to be in the chase at all. Meanwhile the steady adjunctification of the professoriate proceeds. Still, "trust us," they say: Everyone who walks across our graduation stage has completed a rigorous course of study. We don't need to systematically evaluate student learning. Indeed, that would violate the academic freedom of our highly trained faculty, each of whom embodies the proud scholarly traditions of this venerable institution. Now we know that those are lies."

"January 18, 2011 Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa Drawing on survey responses, transcript data, and results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized test taken by students in their first semester and at the end of their second year), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. Here is an excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), their new book based on those findings. "With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants," Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. "We ask, 'How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?' With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, 'Is it safe to eat here?'" Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described

"January 18, 2011 New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps By David Glenn A book released today makes a damning indictment of the American higher-education system: For many students, it says, four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in their ability to synthesize knowledge and put complex ideas on paper. The stark message from the authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) is that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college (see excerpt). The book is already drawing its share of critics, who say the analysis falls short in its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods. "We didn't know what to expect when we began this study," said Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University who is one of the book's two authors. "We didn't walk into this with any axes to grind. But now that we've seen the data, we're very concerned about American higher education and the extent to which undergraduate learning seems to have been neglected." In the new book, Mr. Arum and his co-author-Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia-report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005. The scholars do not name those 24 institutions, but they say they are geographically and institutionally representative of the full range of American higher education. The sample includes large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and historically black and Hispanic-serving colleges and universities."

""Old" Habits Meet a "New" Normal By Kristin Conklin January 16, 2011 11:07 pm EST Despite a slight rise in state revenues, the 2011 budget cycle is likely to be the most difficult yet of the states' ongoing fiscal crisis. That's because budget shortfalls are epic - $60 billion in budget shortfalls this year and another $50 billion in 2012. Whereas most state revenues will rebound to peak levels by 2013, revenue recovery is not likely in nine states until 2014. The National Association of State Budget Officers' A New Funding Paradigm for Higher Education says that while a slight rise in revenues will "mitigate the funding squeeze, the environment for state higher education support might be permanently and unalterably different from the past." What an understatement. Average annual spending growth is projected to be a weak 3 to 4 percent for the next 10-20 years. How governors navigate these "new normal" budget conditions will have a profound impact on the nation's economic future. An economic recovery cannot be achieved through cuts alone. Shrinking state budgets must be refocused to grow the economy. Higher education will be front and center in any growth strategy. According to estimates from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, if the U.S. could muster the capacity to better match skills with today's jobs, unemployment would be at 6.5 percent instead of 9.6 percent. That represents millions of good-paying jobs that lead to economic growth."

"As Wikipedia Turns 10, It Focuses on Ways to Improve Student Learning January 14, 2011, 6:48 pm By Tushar Rae As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an "open educational resource platform" that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom. Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia's parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning. "We don't want them to cite Wikipedia," he said of students. "What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better." Mr. Dunican recently visited Louisiana State University, whose "communication across the curriculum" effort seeks to generate teaching tools and content, and then take those to professors in various disciplines who might be interested in using them. "One of the things we are doing at LSU is looking at how we can institutionalize the curriculum around Wikipedia," Mr. Dunican said. For the 2010-11 academic year, Wikimedia also launched the national Public Policy Initiative to recruit professors who would like their students to add content to the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia as part of the curriculum. The project focused on improving and increasing the content in the area of public policy and developing a model for using Wikipedia as a teaching tool. "We have some very good results this last semester," Mr. Dunican said. "We have shown that it is possible to include Wikipedia in the classroom to engage students in the learning process.""

"January 16, 2011 Financial Outlook Is Brighter for Some Colleges, but Still Negative for Most By Scott Carlson Moody's Investors Service says the outlook for a relatively small number of well-managed, diversified colleges looks stable in 2011, an upgrade from the negative forecasts that the credit-rating agency has given higher education over the past couple of years. In its latest outlook report, however, Moody's maintains a negative outlook for the majority of higher-education institutions, which it says are too dependent on tuition, auxiliary income, and state support. The Moody's report, "2011 Outlook for U.S. Higher Education," which will be available from the company to its subscribers this week, highlights a widening gap between have and have-not colleges. "This outlook speaks to the fact that the strong continue to get stronger," said Kimberly Tuby, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody's who is the author of the report. Institutions that already have large, well-established research programs and strong philanthropic support are pulling through the economic downturn relatively well, she said. The strongest institutions are in top demand and have fingers in a number of business lines. Meanwhile, the weakest institutions-which draw students from a regional base and lack diversity in business lines-could still be endangered. Those institutions are generally small or mid-sized and do not have a robust fund-raising capacity. "We could see some of those merging or being absorbed by larger institutions, or even going out of business," Ms. Tuby said. The report points to three "critical credit factors" that drive the 2011 outlook for colleges: * "Weakened prospects for net tuition growth" because of a market preference for low-cost or high-reputation competitors. * "Differing degrees of pressure on nontuition revenues," such as philanthropy or research money. * A "need for stronger management of operating costs, balance-sheet risks, a

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"January 11, 2011, 7:05 am By Peter Wood Does American higher education need a robust for-profit sector? What are the benefits of preserving it? In the last of this four-part series on the current regulatory assault on for-profit colleges and universities, I argue that for-profit higher education adds a vital element of versatility to our system. The for-profit sector right now provides some examples of egregious misbehavior. The companies that are engaged in mischief need to be reined in, but we should do that in a manner that preserves the very real potential of this sector to serve the public good. Reprise At the end of part 3 of this series, I quoted one of the more eloquent defenders of for-profit higher education, Diane Auer Jones. She makes the case that the for-profits, such as her employer, Career Education Corporation, fill an important gap by offering a college education to students whose academic records and financial situations are likely to prevent them from attending (or completing) a mainstream college. Jones acknowledges the student-loan debt problem (and high default rates) but counters that (1) the public costs of for-profits are actually lower on a per student basis than the nonprofits, once all the hidden subsides are added to the non-profit side of the ledger; and (2) the real problem with excessive student-loan debt arises from Congressional rules that allow individuals to take out federal loans to cover all sorts of expenses (phones, cars, day care) beyond tuition, room, and board. That's one way to defend the for-profit sector. Or more precisely, the for-profit sub-sector that focuses on serving the "under-served." But it is not the argument I make here. The for-profit universities have identified a very lucrative market niche in going after these left-behind students, but it is a niche that lasts only so long as there are large amounts of loose federal dollars available through our student-loan system for individuals who have a co

"Ditching a Textbook: An Update January 10, 2011, 11:00 am By Amy Cavender Back in July, I wrote about an experiment I was planning in my two Political Issues sections. I'd opted to try this for a number of reasons: (1) I was dissatisfied with the standard readers available, as they tend to present issues in binary fashion, and real-world issues are seldom that simple. (2) I wanted to be able to take up much more recent issues than I could if I relied on textbooks (it takes too long for things to get into print). (3) I wanted students to help determine the topics for the course, and to develop their skills in locating good sources to help them develop their thinking on issues of interest to them. (4) I wanted to reduce costs for students. So, last semester, I used only one primary textbook: Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (the writing-intensive section also made use of Muriel G. Harris' Prentice Hall Reference Guide). I've yet to find a good substitute for that particular book; it frames the underlying questions of politics nicely, and I wanted my students to have that background as they thought about contemporary issues. For the contemporary issues themselves, though, I started off by selecting a few myself (e.g., technology and privacy, technology and civic discourse, immigration), and showing students the kinds of resources they might be able to find. Then, for the latter part of the course, they chose the issues, found sources, and shared them in the class Zotero library. Working in teams or as individuals (depending on which section they were in), they were then responsible for running a class session and assigning readings for that session. So, how did it work out? Well, I've got some tweaking to do. In the future, I need to provide more guidance on evaluating and using sources (bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of students in Political Issues are first-years). To accomplish that I may need to drop some of

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink, Part 2 January 7, 2011, 11:27 am By Peter Wood For several years prior to 2010, it was boom times for for-profit colleges and universities. Their enrollments soared, their profitability went through the roof, and investors rushed to get in on a good thing. The market capitalization of the for-profit sector of higher education shot up to dizzying heights. Much of the growth was due to the efficient way in which for-profit colleges and universities signed up students for federally guaranteed student loans. As a whole, the sector didn't much concern itself with the academic preparation of its prospective students. Federal loan eligibility was the key to admission. Beginning in 2009, the Obama administration's Department of Education began to float ideas for increased regulation of the for-profits, but in spring 2010, it seemed to decide enough was enough and began an all-out regulatory assault on the pro-profit sector that continues to this day. The assault spilled over to Congress as well. On December 8, for example, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Tom Harkin (D) issued a scathing report, Benefiting Whom? For-Profit Education Companies and the Growth of Military Education Benefits, that portrayed the for-profit sector as ruthlessly exploiting federal programs intended to help veterans. The report, based on an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office, turned out to be error-ridden with virtually all of the errors prejudicial to the for-profits, but that hasn't slowed the effort to rein them in. When the regulatory assault began, analysts predicted big drops in enrollment; stock prices plummeted; and some foresaw an industry that would be driven to the wall. In my last blog I summarized what happened. How much or how little should the travails of the for-profit sector of higher education matter to those of us concerned with the general future of American scholarsh

"Examining For-Profits and Cost Structure January 10, 2011, 11:23 am By Peter Wood Is the for-profit sector of higher education worth preserving from the current onslaught of regulatory challenges coming from the Obama administration? In the first two parts of this series, I described those challenges and outlined a reason why we should resist the urge to drive the for-profit colleges and universities out of business. My answer is that we need them not for what they are now, but for what they are likely to become as the old models of not-for-profit higher education falter. In this third of four installments, I contrast the difficulty that the not-for-profit sector has with containing costs to the streamlined approach of the for-profit institutions. (1) Not-for-profit education's cost problem The "bubble" in higher education-the risk that the public will in significant numbers draw back from college because it perceives that a college education is likely not worth the investment of time and money-is a prognosis of tough times ahead for all of higher education. If the bubble bursts, however, it will be the not-for-profit sector that is hit hardest. There are several reasons for this, including the likelihood that public disaffection with mainstream higher education will mean an unwillingness on the part of legislatures and taxpayers to bail out the industry. The rhetoric of higher-education lobbying about the personal advantages of getting a college degree won't avail. Why should the public pay for a private good, especially one that increasingly looks self-indulgent and impractical for many students? Nor will the rhetoric that emphasizes that higher education spending promotes "national competitiveness" (or mutatis mutandis, prosperity in individual states) carry the political debate. Higher education promotes national or regional competitiveness when students learn internationally competitive skills, but not when they graduate in large numbers ma

"Beating the 'Not Invented Here' Mentality January 6, 2011, 5:15 pm By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-Linda Thor, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, started a session here at the Higher Ed Tech Summit with a startling statistic: In her previous job, as president of Rio Salado College, the college improved online-course completion rates from 50 percent to upward of 80 percent. Technology played a big role, she said. Adding 24/7 student support, detecting signals of classroom success and failure, and making things like library services available online when students needed them were aspects of this. So if such big gains are possible, why isn't everyone doing this? "It's the 'not invented here' issue," said Ms. Thor. "We have a boutique problem," said Mark David Milliron, deputy director of higher education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who joined Ms. Thor on the panel, which was about using technology to improve graduation rates. There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses. There is an institutional mind-set, Mr. Milliron said, that if something was not invented on a particular campus, it is not appropriate for that particular campus. Ms. Thor added that there are many "best practices" in technology but few mechanisms for disseminating them to a wider community. So things that work are not picked up or are deliberately passed over. So how do we break down the resistance? asked Philip Regier, executive vice provost and dean of Arizona State University Online, who was also on this panel."