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"After about two decades of steady growth in the number of graduates, the country likely peaked at about 3.4 million graduates in 2011 and will see a modest decline over the next few years, according to a report released Thursday by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. According to the report, the number of graduates will fall in the immediate term, settle at about 3.3 million graduates a year by 2014 and begin to grow gradually starting in 2020, but at nowhere near the rate seen from 1990 to 2011."

"Compare: 17,839,330 took classes this spring, while in 2013 we enrolled 19,105,651 students.  That's about a 6.7% decline.  And it comes after a generation of steady enrollment growth. Consider how much planning American institutions have done, predicated on those decades of rising numbers.  Think of how many expectations and habits were instilled then, and which are now obsolete."

"The rising discount rate, coupled with enrollment declines at several of the institutions surveyed, is a reflection of the myriad forces that are making it harder for colleges to get students and their families to pay top dollar for a college education. Those forces include a decline in the number of traditional-aged college students, increased competition for students with the ability to pay, decreased household incomes, increased scrutiny of tuition hikes, and more questioning of the value of a college degree."

"Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did."

The real opportunity, I think, is in trying to build longer arcs. Now that the cycle of new is eating itself in a race to ever-faster, there's a bigger chance to make long term change by consistently focusing on what works (and what's important), not what's new and merely shiny.

"That's the latest number from the Social Media Report, an annual snapshot by Nielsen and NM Incite. The report says that Facebook is still the top social network, though its tally of unique visitors has fallen 4 percent from the same time last year. Blogger, the second-place network, also saw a slight decline (3 percent) while third-place Twitter saw a gain of 13 percent. Wordpress, likewise, saw a 10 percent jump. The break-out social media star of the past year has been Pinterest, the report said, which jumped 1,047 percent from the same time last year. And since its Sept. 2011 debut, Google+ has grown 80 percent."

"Pew released its annual State of the New Media report highlighting a continued decline in all forms of journalism except online. Yet online reporting has come with an increase in journalists using social media"

The 'Opt Out' Movement among parents seems to picks up steam in direct proportion to how enthusiastically President Barack Obama and his U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan embrace standardized testing. The most recent attempt to subvert the testing system was in Seattle, where over 600 high school students declined to take the standardized test [...]

""Going forward, IDC expects that tablet shipments will surpass desktop PCs in 2013 and portable PCs in 2014, according to IDC. "In 2013, worldwide desktop PC shipments are expected to drop by 4.3 percent and portable PCs to maintain a flat growth of 0.9 percent. The tablet market, on the other hand, is expected to reach a new high of 190 million shipment units with year-on-year growth of 48.7 percent while the smartphone market is expected to grow 27.2 percent to 918.5 million units.""

"My prediction? Hold fast, millennials. This current wave of punditry will peak and then start declining six years from now. In 2020, about half of you will have turned 30. You'll no longer be young-and therefore no longer scary-and today's rhetoric about your entitlement and narcissism will evaporate. You'll be in charge. I can't imagine what you're going to say about the kids being born today."

"Christopher Brinton at Princeton University and a few pals offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs). And they have depressing news. They say that participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and that almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What's more, the participation of a teacher doesn't improve matters. Indeed, they say there is some evidence that a teacher's participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline."

"not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, "that's treated as just normal science," says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or-most explosively-racial groupings."

Perhaps even more surprising, "From 2000 to 2011, the amount of overall class coverage declined by [about] 44%, whereas the averages on MAT exams increased by 13% over the same period." (p. 332) "Our data suggest that a more efficient use of time is mastering fewer topics deeply while fostering the development of critical thinking skills that enable the student to apply known information (with greater confidence) to new topics." (p. 333) In this case then, the claim that less teaching resulted in more learning stands. "We define our use of the term 'less teaching' as moving the burden of active effort from the teacher to the student." (p. 333)

"In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. (In other words, it won't impact you very much today.) But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don't. This is why small choices ("I'll take a burger and fries") don't make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long-term."

"Contrary to a progressive lens of technology where asynchronous patterns replace older asynchronous patterns, I like to think that the big picture here is that the gathering collection of asynchronous technology over time - with all of its varieties of communication frequency and durability - gives humans more choice and autonomy over how we interact and what we interact about. Radio has not been replaced by television or even podcasts, but only declined in popularity and taken its place among what is now available. An abundance of asynchronous options is not really a shift that we have been experiencing, but liberation from a narrow range of vastly different options."

"The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers surveyed over 250 American colleges and universities and found that 39 percent of Americans schools witnessed a decline in international applications in the last year."

"Over 6 Million Students Now Enrolled in Distance Education. The Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017, produced by Digital Learning Compass, in partnership with OLC, Pearson and Tyton Partners, points to continued growth in distance education, even as overall higher education enrollments decline."