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The education bubble

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Tailoring Hight School for success. A long term goal for my wife and I is to found a private high school, and one of our disagreements (besides finding) has to do with exactly this issue: what market will we be tailoring the schoo for? She is interested in a performing arts type school, while I am more interested in a STEM based school (in essance, we really want two schools, but resource wise....). I think that students are preceptive enough to already ahve an idea of what they do want farther downstream, and high school could be tailored to help them reach their goals. A general diploma could still be offered for those who are adrift (not everyone develops at the same rate, after all), and even this isn't too difficult, home schools and I believe Finland can teach the "core" subjects in as little as 3 hr per day by staying focused. Indeed our own presumptive school(s) are modeled on that idea: the morning is given over to core instruction while the afternoon is given over to the specialties:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/we-cannot-forget-people-who-did-not-graduate-from-high-school/282124/

'We Cannot Forget People Who Did Not Graduate From High School'
A community college in New York City offers GED classes tailored to specific careers—with great results.
Fawn Johnson
Dec 7 2013, 10:03 AM ET

LaGuardia Community College is a GED machine. At this urban school, near the Long Island Expressway in the New York City borough of Queens, the prep courses for the state's high school equivalency exam aren't just textbook reviews—they are professional-development classes. There is a course for would-be health workers, another for business students, and yet another for anyone interested in technology and engineering.

LaGuardia's free classes, funded by state, city, and foundation grants, have a months-long waiting list. Students willing to pay for courses (at about $3.50 per hour of instruction) can usually get a spot in the next scheduled class, although those fill up, too. Most students are black or Latino.

Gail Mellow, LaGuardia's president, says postsecondary educators who don't reach out to high school dropouts are ignoring many of the young people who most need their help. In big cities such as New York, almost 40 percent of students who enter high school don't finish. "To really educate the American populace," she says, "we cannot forget people who did not graduate from high school."

But a General Educational Development certificate alone won't suffice for people who want to make a decent wage. So, three years ago, LaGuardia began tailoring its GED-prep classes toward certain professions. Reading material for aspiring health pros includes a book about three friends trying to become doctors. Math homework for prospective engineers involves interpreting charts and graphs. These professional-development additions to GED classes were intended to create a smooth transition to college classes or more job training. The community college wound up inheriting a lot of its own successful GED students. Seventeen percent of its college students are from the GED program.

Lillian Zepeda was one of them. She dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant with her second child. She decided to go for her GED certificate when she was 20. College courses at LaGuardia followed easily after that. "I hadn't already decided that's what I was going to do, but it was in that [GED] class that I said, 'This is the next step,' " she says. It didn't hurt that LaGuardia applications were waiting for her outside the GED testing facility. She is now enrolled at New York University.

GED classes relevant to a student's desired profession are far more efficient than a textbook-only class in getting people to pass the high school equivalency exam, because they spend more time in class and receive college-prep advice from the staff. The pass rate for LaGuardia's students in the "contextualized curriculum" courses is twice as high as for those who took LaGuardia's regular test-prep class until 2012, 53 percent versus 22 percent. Students who earn their GED certificate through a LaGuardia course are three times as likely to sign up for additional college study—24 percent versus 7 percent.

The presence of so many minority students on campus is also important for demystifying these first-timers' ideas of college. Jane MacKillop, LaGuardia's associate dean of academic and career development, explains, "They come here and they look around and say, 'Everyone here looks like me. I could belong here.'
 
Tailoring Hight School for success. A long term goal for my wife and I is to found a private high school, and one of our disagreements (besides finding) has to do with exactly this issue: what market will we be tailoring the schoo for?

Curious to know if you have considered home schooling or correspondence courses? IMHO private schools are nice, but a colossal waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere on the development of a kid. Public high schools can be a total nightmare depending the economic demographic in the area, but some some are pretty darn good. Both my Nephews are being home schooled, and their father is a private high school teacher if that tells you anything. ;)
 
Thucydides said:
Tailoring Hight School for success. A long term goal for my wife and I is to found a private high school, and one of our disagreements (besides finding) has to do with exactly this issue: what market will we be tailoring the schoo for? She is interested in a performing arts type school, while I am more interested in a STEM based school (in essance, we really want two schools, but resource wise....). I think that students are preceptive enough to already ahve an idea of what they do want farther downstream, and high school could be tailored to help them reach their goals. A general diploma could still be offered for those who are adrift (not everyone develops at the same rate, after all), and even this isn't too difficult, home schools and I believe Finland can teach the "core" subjects in as little as 3 hr per day by staying focused. Indeed our own presumptive school(s) are modeled on that idea: the morning is given over to core instruction while the afternoon is given over to the specialties:

Hope your not the spelling teacher! ;D

j\k  ;)
 
Hope your not the spelling teacher! ;D
I'm the first to admit I'm lost without spellcheck. I'm also forever ruined in trying to spell any word with 'ie' vs. 'ei' through my German language classes.  I'm definitely going to be the math and physics teacher. ;)
 
A possible future for the university campus:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/01/04/the-column-the-academy-hopes-no-one-will-read/

The Column the Academy Hopes No-One Will Read

Here’s a column the academy hopes no-one will read: Glenn Reynolds’ insightfully advocating in the WSJ for deep reforms to the American college system. Reynolds argues that mounting college debt paired with stagnant wages will catalyze solutions that could drastically disrupt the academy. Some of his predictions will be familiar to regular VM readers: online education will become more important, and schools will have to find ways to reduce administrative bloat. One particularly interesting suggestion he makes is that colleges might keep physical spaces but still conduct their classes online:

We may eventually see the rise of “hoteling” for college students whose courses are done primarily online. Build a nice campus—or buy one, from a defunct traditional school—put in a lot of amenities, but don’t bother hiring faculty: Just bring in your courses online, with engineering from Georgia Tech, arts and literature from Yale, business from Stanford and so on. Hire some unemployed Ph.D.s as tutors (there will be plenty around, available at bargain-basement rates) and offer an unbundled experience. It’s a business model that just might work, especially in geographic locations students favor. Grand Cayman is awfully nice this time of year.

With the social and technological picture changing so rapidly, it’s hard to know if all of Glenn’s predictions will work out, and we might emphasize even more strongly than he does that the right kind of humanities education can be as practical as anything in the engineering department. But any college president who isn’t taking Glenn’s concerns seriously isn’t doing the job.

Published on January 4, 2014 4:10 pm

In a way this is like the "reverse" model for public schools; students do their lessons on line at home and see a tutor/mentor during the day to help with the homework, ask follow up questions etc. For College/University students, the idea of living on campus provides some real life preparation (pay rent, budget, balance school, work, social life) in a semi controlled setting, but using this model the student isn't sucked into endless, lifelong debt payments.
 
Thucydides said:
A possible future for the university campus:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/01/04/the-column-the-academy-hopes-no-one-will-read/

In a way this is like the "reverse" model for public schools; students do their lessons on line at home and see a tutor/mentor during the day to help with the homework, ask follow up questions etc. For College/University students, the idea of living on campus provides some real life preparation (pay rent, budget, balance school, work, social life) in a semi controlled setting, but using this model the student isn't sucked into endless, lifelong debt payments.

Don't know about that. I know technology has evolved, but what this is detailing is fairly close to what the intent behind the original concept for the College Montmorency. I was told that at the time the idea was to have classes taught by TV's with tutors available. My memory is fuzzy on the details (and it is second hand information in any case). But this didn't pan out at all. Seems people like to have teachers...

And while distance learning is great (I use it regularly), a big part of formal schooling is the social aspect: learning how to interact with people and building a social/peer network. Sure having a campus with amenities does provide chances for interaction, but I predict that this will never be enough.
 
I am already the kind of student mentioned in that article.  By May I will be enrolled in 5 different programs, each at a different institution.  Mind you my own cicumstances are a little unique, in how I am able to do that. 
 
More on the evolution of education. Unbundling is the wave of the future (and the bane of existing institutions and their defenders, since bundling is the source of much of their power, influence and wealth):

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/the-degree-is-doomed/

The Degree Is Doomed
by Michael Staton  |  8:00 AM January 8, 2014

The credential — the degree or certificate — has long been the quintessential value proposition of higher education.  Americans have embraced degrees with a fervor generally reserved for bologna or hot dogs.  Everyone should have them!  Many and often! And their perceived value elsewhere in the world — in Asia in particular — is if anything even higher.

From the evaluator’s standpoint, credentials provide signals that allow one to make quick assumptions about a candidate’s potential contribution to an organization and their ability to flourish on the job. To a prospective student (or parent), the value lies in assuming these signals will be accepted in employment markets and other times of social evaluation.  These signals have long been known to be imperfect, but they were often the only game in town. Thus, a degree from a top university has been seen to contain crucial information about a person’s skills, networks, and work habits.

Higher education, however, is in the midst of dramatic, disruptive change. It is, to use the language of innovation theorists and practitioners, being unbundled. (Some more of my thoughts on higher-ed unbundling can be found here.) And with that unbundling, the traditional credential is rapidly losing relevance.  The value of paper degrees lies in a common agreement to accept them as a proxy for competence and status, and that agreement is less rock solid than the higher education establishment would like to believe.

The value of paper degrees will inevitably decline when employers or other evaluators avail themselves of more efficient and holistic ways for applicants to demonstrate aptitude and skill.  Evaluative information like work samples, personal representations, peer and manager reviews, shared content, and scores and badges are creating new signals of aptitude and different types of credentials. Education-technology companies EduClipper and Pathbrite, and also general-interest platforms such as Tumblr and WordPress, are used to show online portfolios.  Brilliant has built a math-and-physics community that identifies and challenges top young talent. Knack, Pymetrics, and Kalibrr use games and other assessments that measure work-relevant aptitudes and attitudes. HireArt is a supercharged job board that allows applicants to compete in work challenges relevant to job openings.  These new platforms are measuring signals of aptitude with a level of granularity and recency never before possible.

There are sites — notably Degreed and Accredible — that adapt existing notions of the credential to a world of online courses and project work. But there are also entire sectors of the innovation economy that are ceasing to rely on traditional credentials and don’t even bother with the skeumorph of an adapted degree.  Particularly in the Internet’s native careers – design and software engineering — communities of practice have emerged that offer signals of types and varieties that we couldn’t even imagine five years ago.  Designers now show their work on Dribbble or other design posting and review sites.  Software engineers now store their code on GitHub, where other software engineers will follow them and evaluate the product of their labor.  On these sites, peers not only review each other but interact in ways that build reputations within the community. User profiles contain work samples and provide community generated indicators of status and skill.


In these fields in the innovation economy, traditional credentials are not only unnecessary but sometimes even a liability. A software CEO I spoke with recently said he avoids job candidates with advanced software engineering degrees because they represent an overinvestment in education that brings with it both higher salary demands and hubris. It’s a red flag that warns that a candidate is likely to be an expensive, hard-to-work-with diva who will show no loyalty to the company.  MBAs have an even more challenged reputation in the innovation economy.  Several of the education startups I advise that directly provide programs to students — notably Dev Bootcamp and the Fullbridge Program — recently met with other immersive unaccredited programs to consider whether to jointly develop a new type of credential. Their conclusion: Credentials are so 20th century.

Employers have never before had such easy access to specific and current information pertaining to a candidates’ potential.  It is truly unprecedented in all of human history.  And society will reorganize around it as we wake up to its power. Who stands to benefit from this reorganization is very much in question.

A credential, like any common currency, is valued only because of the collective agreement to assign it value.  The value of a college degree has been in question since the Great Recession, but there have yet to emerge clear alternatives for the public to rally the around.  There are plenty of contenders, though, and it won’t be long before one of them crystalizes the idea for the masses that the traditional degree is increasingly irrelevant in a world with immediate access to evaluative information.
 
Employers have never before had such easy access to specific and current information pertaining to a candidates’ potential.  It is truly unprecedented in all of human history.

I disagree.....up until fairly recently craftsman applicants had to provide a sample of their abilities eg: a carpenter built a multi chambered tool box that displayed his ingenuity, his skill, his dovetailing, and finishing abilities, as well as who he apprenticed under....the same was true for many trades.

The measure was not certifiable certification, but ability.
 
Agree this is still a viable model for trades and skills that can be objectively tested (OK, write a script to make the computer do the following....), but this might also be cumbersome and time consuming in many diciplines and maybe even impossible to do for "soft" skills.

On more models of low cost education:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/01/10/is-the-college-of-the-future-in-new-hampshire/

Is the College of the Future in New Hampshire?

Changes in the higher-ed marketplace are forcing colleges to radically rethink their approach to education, and those struggling with the challenge may find inspiration in Southern New Hampshire University, which is the subject of an excellent profile at Slate.

For years, SNHU was a traditional, small, residential school in Manchester, NH. But after nearly a decade of declining enrollment and tuition revenue, President Paul LeBlanc decided to take the school in a very different direction, pumping tons of resources into the school’s nascent online education department, which now boasts enrollment 11 times higher than the residential college. Slate explains the strategy:

[LeBlanc's] solution was to tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt. The low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population. The vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.

“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience. But in the process, he turned what had been a small New England college with red-brick buildings and a quad into something barely recognizable. There are still nearly 3,000 students enrolled at its campus in Manchester (the men’s soccer team won the NCAA Division II championship last season), but the action has shifted to its fast-growing online division.

The result is a system which strives for efficiency and cost-effectiveness above all else. Classes are highly standardized, generally taught by low-paid adjunct professors who serve more as guides than teachers, and students’ activities are closely monitored by programs that analyze data to determine where professors should spend most of their time. It may not sound inspiring, but it’s cheap: a four-year degree costs only $35,000, and the school is already experimenting with new ways to lower the price still further.

In some ways, this looks like a good way to educate the millions of people who are shut out from, or poorly served by, the current higher-ed system. On the other hand, it moves dangerously close to the education-as-training model we’ve expressed concerns about in the past. Some say the school could devolve into a diploma mill. But as cost pressures make life difficult for small, lower-tier schools like SNHU, we’re likely to see more experiments like this amid mounting pressure to stay afloat. The future of higher ed could look more like this than many expect.

Published on January 10, 2014 5:00 pm

As far as finding a flexible model, I have run across some products which offer to teach basic proficiency in a very short amount of time ( the Duolingo app offers basic language proficiency in 39 hr http://www.duolingo.com/). I plan to put Duolingo to the test (my OC is Franco, so if I can make myself understood then it actually does work.) Ultra short and intensive courses might also be a way to go for special circumstances.
 
An interesting observation by a reader of Instapundit about education. The idea of a certain amount of homogeneity is required for schools to function at a high level makes sense; you need to have or instill a common "culture" of learning and academic success if you want schools to perform at a high academic level. You can see similar "cultural" adaptations in other directions as well; one I spent a lot of time fighting as a military instructor is the "C's a P" attitude among some candidates. If you let that one go then you are failing as an instructor and a leader.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/182401

I enjoyed The New School very much, and have been shipping copies around to my small circle of academic friends with open minds. Great stuff.

Being a one-time faculty brat and more or less surrounded in consanguinity and geography by liberal educators, these are all topics that have intrigued me even before you started linking away on Instapundit. So I have a couple of unsolicited thoughts and reactions, which you may or may not find worthy.

On the question of declining standards, especially in primary and secondary education, conservatives tend to focus on institutional blockages, such as bloated administrations, unions and the application of post-modern ideology of one sort or another. I note, however, that here in Texas we have lower costs per student, no unions, and very little liberal ideology. Rather, the attack on standards has come from the right, and the extremely tight central control of education at the state level. My new mother-in-law is an old school Texas high school teacher, and very articulate on the subject. Can’t we all just teach science whether involving primate reproduction or natural selection? (Notwithstanding that, Texas gets by far the best results in math and science of any large state, spending around half per student of New York and New Jersey, so it must be doing something right, but that’s its own interesting subject.)

I think the biggest threat to standards comes from the intersection of democracy and heterogeneity. One cannot both cater to voters (whether in local elections anywhere or statewide in Texas) and impose high standards, except in those relatively rare circumstances where the voters themselves are fundamentally homogeneous (e.g., the Eanes school district in suburban Austin, which is very white, affluent, and excellent).

Put another way: Among (1) rigorous standards, (2) heterogeneity or socioeconomic “diversity” in the constituent population, and (3) democratic control of the schools, pick any two. The objective of any shared enterprise is the least common denominator of its participants. That is why businesses and other effective organizations spend so much time selling their objectives to their internal constituents (employees, investors, donors, and congregants). Schools with diverse constituents under democratic control cannot even forge a consensus objective to sell internally, so the least-common denominator is very low.

So: The schools worked in to the 1960s because America was much more homogeneous, and schools were especially so.

The question is, what to do about it? I would argue that the effectiveness of charter schools (and voucher-supported systems) comes from the self-selection: In effect, they eliminate heterogeneity in attitudes about education, at least, and (furthermore) they substitute market choice for majority-wins democracy. Yes, they also allow schools to bypass unions and get vastly more productivity out of the administration (my kids went to the Princeton Charter School, which is superb, and there were only two employees who did not teach), but I think these factors are less important than vesting control of individual schools in like-minded people with a shared vision and objectives.

Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing whether you think there is merit to that argument.

On the book itself, there were only three observations I would make. First, I absolutely agree that one of the things that sustains colleges is that employers leverage not just college transcripts but college admissions decisions as a way to distinguish applicants. Selective colleges are just about the only institutions in America who are allowed to say who makes the cut and who does not without any real oversight or risk of liability. This has been very useful for employers, because their own judgments are now subject to such intense scrutiny, especially for any business large enough to be a federal contractor. (The stories I could tell about the Office of Federal Contract Compliance… on the list for my retirement.)

The only way to break this, I think, is to revise OFCC rules, and that will require a Republican administration with some testicular fortitude. If only. But a topic perhaps worth exploring if you are going to develop this angle.

Second, I am not sure I understand the argument for allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. Student loans go mostly to people who are ipso facto insolvent. If you could discharge the loans in bankruptcy, why wouldn’t everybody just do that when they graduate? Yeah, bankruptcy carries a bit of a stigma and could damage one’s credit rating and therefore one’s borrowing capacity for a few years, but the stigma is declining and a huge student loan obligation is as big an obstacle to obtaining credit as a low credit rating. And, obviously, if the practice became widespread lenders would start discounting the significance of it.

If *that* happened, presumably, private lenders would stop making student loans, and that would put (even if desirable) fiscal pressure on universities. Perhaps that was your point, but if so I do not think you hammered it home.

Third, to my mind the most arresting point you made comes on page 60 in the “exit” paragraph: “While it’s harder than it used to be to get ahead in America, even with a college degree, it’s probably easier (and more comfortable) than ever to just barely get by.” For some reason, I had not framed it that way in my mind, caught up as I was in the back and forth about whether our material quality of life is really higher even though our incomes have stagnated (not mine, fortunately, but all y’all).

Anyway, thank you for writing that. I hope you sell a ton of them.

P.S. No problem from quoting from this on the small chance you would want to, but I’d prefer without attribution.
 
Another experiment, this time on a focused campus and program which has the incentives tied to education and teaching:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2014/01/16/small-new-university-does-something-radical-only-hires-professors-who-want-to-teach-and-only-admits-students-who-want-to-learn/

Small, New University Does Something Radical -- Only Hires Professors Who Want To Teach And Only Admits Students Who Want To Learn
George Leef, Contributor

Is a college degree worth what it costs? More and more Americans are questioning the conventional wisdom that it is, as the price tag climbs while the educational value (at least for many students) falls.

That isn’t either a “right” or a “left” critique. Honest observers from all over the political landscape realize that to a great extent, colleges and universities are run more for the benefit of their faculty, than for the benefit of their students.

Two well-known liberal writers, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus made that point in their 2011 book Higher Education? “The schools almost function for (the professors), for their aspirations and interests. Students come and go every four years, administrators will move on, but the tenured stay on in Bloomington, College Park, and Chapel Hill, accumulating power, controlling resources, reshaping the university according to their needs,” they write.

The libertarian Peter Thiel, a Stanford graduate, thinks that the pursuit of the college degree is a waste of time for bright and energetic young people. He has established Thiel Fellowships for people like that, enabling them to bypass college and start their productive careers years sooner.

But just because much of our higher education system is now a poor value for students who really want to study, we shouldn’t think that worthwhile schools have disappeared. In fact, just a few years ago, a new, very small university was created — the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) – that does just what a college is supposed to do.
While online education is getting most of the attention these days when the subject of change in higher education comes up, UMR shows that the old-fashioned professor-facing-students-in-a-classroom model can be reworked so that it gives serious students a true education at reasonable cost.

First, a short history of UMR.

Rochester, Minnesota is best known as the home of the famed Mayo Clinic. IBM also has a large presence in the city. Going back to the 1960s, Mayo, IBM, and other leaders pressed the state for a higher education institution and their efforts resulted in a community college and a branch of Winona State University in the city. Predictably, those off-the-shelf educational models didn’t do much for Rochester.

Business and civic leaders kept angling for a full University of Minnesota campus and in 2006 that wish was granted when the state designated University of Minnesota—Rochester as a “full and official coordinate campus.”

At that point, however, there was no campus. Nor was there any plan for what to do with this new entity. Minnesota might have set up UMR like almost every other state university campus, with lots of departments, degrees, dormitories, sports teams, and so forth. Had that happened, the country would have had one more cookie-cutter university, churning out graduates who have had a good time but learned little during their college years—and doing so at high cost.

Fortunately, that did not happen. For one thing, Minnesota didn’t have the money for a “real” university. More importantly, the man chosen to be the chancellor of the new institution, Stephen Lehmkuhle, insisted on thinking outside the standard higher education box. Lehmkuhle is a psychologist who is interested in how people learn. He had been the top academic administrator at the University of Missouri and saw UMR as a clean slate for developing a college that would maximize student learning.

Furthermore, the small budget had had to work with made him think like an entrepreneur: How can I get the most benefit from my very limited resources?

Lehmkuhle decided that UMR should focus on just one thing, namely training people for careers in medicine and related fields, a perfect fit for the Mayo Clinic’s headquarters. UMR only offers a B.S. in Health Sciences. The curriculum includes a liberal arts component in the first two years, alongside rigorous grounding in the STEM disciplines. In their last two years, students are immersed in studies that prepare them for their careers, including a capstone senior project.

One of the unique features of UMR is the absence of academic departments. Colleges and universities are almost always an assemblage of numerous departments, each requiring considerable overhead expenses, and often squabbling among themselves for money and prestige. Lehmkuhle saw that UMR could not afford that, so the faculty is all one team rather than a group of jealous departments.

Another remarkable feature of UMR is its approach to tenure.

At nearly every college and university that has tenure (about 98 percent according to this somewhat dated report), the decision to award it rests overwhelmingly on how much research the faculty member publishes. That causes professors seeking tenure to concentrate so much on getting published that teaching students becomes  a distraction from the work that really matters. Moreover, their published research often has nothing to do with knowledge that is useful in the teaching of undergraduates.

UMR’s approach to tenure is altogether different. Its tenure criteria reflect Chancellor Lehmkuhle’s focus on student learning. Candidates for tenure must first of all demonstrate excellence in teaching.

To show that, professors can present an array of evidence including their efforts at developing community-based learning activities for students, how they have interacted with student projects, course evaluations and letters from students, and their advising, mentoring and supervising of capstone experiences. (Professors usually teach 12 hours, and are also expected to devote around 20 hours per week to student contact.)

UMR also requires faculty research, and the research obligation has two aspects.

A professor’s primary research needs to “advance the field of inquiry of student learning.” That is to say, professors must study and write about how to improve educational results. What an idea—telling professors that if they want to keep their jobs, they’ll have to focus on the effectiveness of their teaching!

The second area of research is the standard work in one’s academic field—the sort of research that is usually all that counts toward tenure.
In addition, once tenured, professors can’t simply coast because there are post-tenure reviews. If any faculty member might be inclined toward what Professor Murray Sperber, author of Beer and Circus, calls the “faculty/student non-aggression pact,” he’ll quickly abandon such thoughts. That approach can succeed elsewhere, but certainly won’t in UMR’s learning community.

“Learning community” has become an educational buzzword, but it is evident that one has actually formed at UMR. Reading articles on the school, such as this Minnesota Public Radio piece, we find that students revel in the “intense academic environment” and enjoy the chance to work closely with professors. None of those massive lecture classes where the professor or a TA drones an accompaniment to power point slides, or office hours that are a joke.

As for the faculty’s involvement, one student said, with regard to UMR’s Just Ask Centers, “For five minutes or an hour (professors) sit there and work with you. I was actually studying for pretty much my entire organic chemistry final at the center last year. I got to sit with the professor and a few other people and worked through the problems.”

Naturally, UMR isn’t for everyone. The attrition rate for the first class (only 57 students) was nearly 25 percent. Too much work (most students report that they devote at least 35 hours per week to their studies, outside of class) and too little fun for quite a few.
At that point, most college administrators would have started thinking, “How can we change the school to retain more students?” Instead, Chancellor Lehmkuhle decided to improve the school’s marketing to the kind of student who’d be a good fit for the serious intellectual environment. That’s apparently working and UMR has grown to 475 students.

Tuition is the same for all students—no discount for Minnesotans—and a year costs about $13,000. The school receives about $5,000 per student from the state, which is only a third of the subsidy it gives the flagship campus in the Twin Cities.
And one more tidbit about UMR: its “campus” is in a shopping mall.

Most of our colleges and universities grew fat and happy during the lush years following the 1965 passage of the Higher Education Act. But the halcyon days are past. The future is perilous for many schools because Americans are figuring out that the college experience they offer costs far too much and often delivers little  value.

UMR seems built for survival in the fast-arriving future where educational programs and institutions sink or swim based on their ability to teach students who want an education and not just a degree.
 
An interesting interview with the founder of the Khan Academy. One of the key take aways is the model's focus on education rather than credentials; you move at your own pace and level of understanding rather than according to a course syllabus and getting a diploma at the end. I think there is some value to both approaches: you certainly don't want to hire a person for a skilled trade or profession if they have not mastered the skills needed to do the job, but for background and preparatory work (as well as "lifelong learning" and developing the critical thinking skills that the Humanities are supposed to develop) the Academy would seem to offer a much more flexible approach:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/science/salman-khan-turned-family-tutoring-into-khan-academy.html?ref=science&_r=1

It All Started With a 12-Year-Old Cousin
Salman Khan Turned Family Tutoring Into Khan Academy
JAN. 27, 2014

Salman Khan at the offices of Khan Academy, which reaches more than 10 million users. Bill Gates invested in the school. Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A Conversation With
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master’s in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied. I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversations.

Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?

A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She’s from New Orleans, where I grew up.

It turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked into a slower math class. I don’t think she or her parents realized the repercussions if she’d stayed on the slower track. I said, “I want to work with you, if you are willing.” When Nadia went home, we began tutoring by telephone.

Did you have background as a math educator?

No, though I’ve had a passion for math my whole life. It got me to M.I.T. and enabled me to get multiple degrees in math and engineering. Long story shortened: Nadia got through what she thought she couldn’t. Soon word got around the family that “free tutoring” was going on, and I found myself working on the phone with about 15 cousins.

To make it manageable, I hacked together a website where my cousins could go to practice problems and I could suggest things for them to work on. When I’d tutor them over the telephone, I’d use Yahoo Doodle, a program that was part of Yahoo Messenger, so they could visualize the calculations on their computers while we talked.

The Internet videos started two years later when a friend asked, “How are you scaling your lessons?” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “Why don’t you make some videos of the tutorials and post them on YouTube?” I said, “That’s a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano.”

Still, I gave it try. Soon my cousins said they liked me more on YouTube than in person. They were really saying that they found my explanations more valuable when they could have them on demand and where no one would judge them. And soon many people who were not my cousins were watching. By 2008, I was reaching tens of thousands every month.

Youtube is a search engine where producers can upload short videos at no cost. Would the Khan Academy have been possible without this technology?

No. Before YouTube, the cost of hosting streaming videos was incredibly expensive. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the server space for that much video — or traffic. That said, I was probably the 500th person to show up on YouTube with educational videos. Our success probably had to do with the technology being ready and the fact that my content resonated with users.

In your videos, the viewers never actually saw you — just cartoonlike equations you’d drawn. The voice-overs were friendly and encouraging. Had you taken the dread out of math instruction?

I tried to strike a balance. There’s some STEM teaching where the lecture is blah — no joy, no intonation. On the other side, you have people who try to make it fun by making it less math-y. That’s often cheesy. I was trying to get to the idea behind the math and say: “This is a really interesting idea. Once you get it, it’s beautiful.”

Least Common Multiple Video by Khan Academy
Talk about the “studio” you built to record your videos.

It was in a closet at my home. It had a $900 desktop from Best Buy and a $200 microphone. I had a little pen tablet that I got from Amazon and screen capture software. I drew on an art program on my computer while talking into a microphone.

Around 2009, I left my job at the hedge fund to devote myself full time to building the Khan Academy. I dreamed a lot. Then, one day, [the philanthropist] Ann Doerr sent a text message. Something like “I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival and Bill Gates is on stage. For the last five minutes, he’s been talking about the Khan Academy, how he uses it for his kids.”

He ended up supporting us financially, allowing the Khan Academy to become a real organization.

How are Khan Academy tutorials different from MOOCs, the massive open online courses that many universities offer for free?

They tend to be regular courses transplanted into the virtual world. They tell you what to do in Week 1, Week 2. You take a final exam. Some people pass. Some don’t.

That’s not what we want. We don’t want to see who can keep up with an M.I.T. course and who can’t. We want to get everyone to the point that they have the knowledge that the M.I.T. course is trying to teach them. When you go to the site today, you get a test to evaluate where you are in math. You determine your own pace. And you don’t go to the next level until you’ve mastered the previous one.

Another difference between us and many of them is we have a platform where people can get personalized suggestions. Our software tracks your progress and customizes your lessons. You can take as long as necessary to get to a high level.

We’re more like a highly enriched, personalized textbook, a tool for you on your own or your teacher or tutor.

Last April, when administrators at San Jose State university wanted to use Harvard’s online version of Professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course as the basis of their undergraduate philosophy class, some San Jose State faculty members protested, saying the school was shortchanging students. Were the professors resisting progress?

I think they are right. To tell the San Jose faculty, “Hey, move over, we’ve got the Harvard guy on tape — why don’t you facilitate him teaching your kids and you grade the papers?” — that’s the incorrect way to be thinking about leveraging technology. The single most valuable thing that any student at San Jose State could have is a conversation with their professor. He or she doesn’t need to watch Michael Sandel having a Socratic dialogue with Harvard students.

The Washington Post had an article last year saying a viewer had discovered that two of your tutorials were wrong and you’d removed them from your offerings. Have you been growing too quickly, doing too much?

You know, the benefit of this form is that everything we do is out there. You get feedback and critiques. And when we see [an error], we take a second look. I view that as very healthy. We are definitely imperfect, but we have processes in place to put in a check. In a traditional classroom, you often don’t know when a professor makes a mistake.

What ever became of your cousin Nadia?

Nadia is now a pre-med and writing major senior at Sarah Lawrence. She’s turned out to be a very impressive young woman. I do, however, sometimes joke with her that a lot is riding on her future!
 
One of the reasons for the rot in conventional education is the insular "culture" of modern academia. Many of the criticisms posted here apply in spades to Canadian "Higher" education as well. Many of the ideas that I have floated upthread have one thing in common: the student is not enclosed by the Academy. Now you might argue that the enclosure has the purpose of allowing the Academy to "shape" the student, and in some instances (like military academies and seminaries) that is entirely appropriate and even desirable. For general purpose education to equip a student to function in the wider world, not so much....

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/21/how_to_improve_our_colleges_and_universities_121657.html

How to Improve Our Colleges and Universities
By Peter Berkowitz - February 21, 2014

Liberal education is in decline. And professors and administrators at our best liberal arts colleges are hastening its demise.

Much has been written about liberal education’s skyrocketing costs, its failure to provide students with the knowledge and intellectual skills they need to succeed in a competitive globalized economy, and its burdening of students with massive debt. But these big problems are only part of the story.

As important as is its contribution to individual economic well-being and to national prosperity, liberal education’s traditional and proper aim is even more comprehensive and vital to the public interest: to prepare students to seize the wide range of opportunities and meet the full spectrum of responsibilities characteristic of free men and women.

When it lives up to its own standards, liberal education equips citizens with the mental habits needed to engage effectively in political debate and cast votes in an informed manner. Moreover, by acquainting students with the rich variety of opinions within Western civilization about moral, political, and religious life and introducing them to competing opinions in other civilizations, liberal education promotes the virtues of toleration and moderation.

Liberal education is not neutral. When true to itself, it encourages gratitude toward free societies for offering the opportunity to study fundamental ideas and seminal events, and for maintaining—by means of customs, laws, and political institutions—a framework that allows individuals and their communities a wide sphere in which to organize their lives as they think best.

And liberal education enriches private life by expanding our sympathies, deepening our self-knowledge, and cultivating the life-long pleasure of learning for its own sake.

Thus, the nation has a vital interest in the quality of its liberal education. Given several recent studies, there is reason to believe America is being short-changed by its colleges and universities.

Last year the National Association of Scholars published “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students”; Harvard University issued “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future”; and, acting on a request from Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences produced “The Heart of the Matter.”

Together they paint a disquieting picture of general curricula without focus or form; humanities disciplines suffering plunging enrollments; a self-perpetuating left-liberal campus orthodoxy entrenched by courses offered and not offered, visiting speakers chosen and not chosen, and written and unwritten speech codes; along with disciplinary procedures that treat due process as a crude impediment to justice.

Gathering and synthesizing pertinent data from publicly available sources including academic catalogues, institutional websites, and media accounts, a cogent new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,  “Education or Reputation: A Look at America’s Top-Ranked Liberal Arts Colleges,” confirms the dire findings. The report focuses on the “Top 25” small residential liberal arts colleges as determined by U.S. News & World Report (several ties brought the total number of colleges counted in the Top 25 to 29).

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have eviscerated the core curriculum.  Of the Top 25, ACTA reports, “only two require an economics course. Only three require a survey in U.S. history.  Only five require a survey course in literature.” Amherst College, Grinnell College, Hamilton College, Middlebury College, and Vassar College have open curricula with no requirements. Bates College, Bowdoin College, Haverford College, Oberlin College, Smith College, Swarthmore College, Wesleyan University, and Williams College do not require undergraduates to study literature, American history, the principles of American politics, or economics.

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges, while aggressively promoting multiculturism, have incongruously demoted language study. The majority of them do not require students to achieve even intermediate-level proficiency—the equivalent of three college semesters of study—in a foreign language.

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have discouraged the free exchange of ideas and free inquiry. According to a study by the redoubtable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, incorporated by ACTA into its report, all of the top liberal arts colleges seriously impair freedom of speech. Fourteen—including Carleton College, Colgate University, Middlebury College, and Wellesley College—have in place “at least one policy that clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.” Several punish “offensive speech.” Some American college and universities have actually banished unfettered expression to designated “free speech zones”—a dodge reminiscent of how Russia marginalized protesters during the Winter Olympics.

Our top-ranked arts colleges have raised fees to extraordinary heights. According to ACTA, “The ‘sticker price’ of higher education has risen 538 percent since 1985—compared to a ‘mere’ 286 percent increase in medical costs and a 121 percent increase in the consumer price index during the same time period.” At the top colleges (not including the three military service academies, which do not charge), annual tuition, room and board, and fees range from a low of $53, 318 at Grinnell to a high of $61,167 at Wesleyan. The median cost is above $58,000 per year.

The lowest cost exceeds the national annual median household income of $52,762.

Our top-ranked arts colleges have substantially increased administrative costs. More than half of the U.S. News Top 25 “increased administrative spending at a faster rate than instructional spending during the five year period ending in 2011-2012, the most recent year for which financial data are publicly available.” Meanwhile, “four schools—Davidson College, Grinnell College, Pomona College, and Scripps College—each increased administrative expenditures by at least 25 percent over five years, after adjusting for inflation.”

And our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have downgraded the faculty’s traditional mission of teaching undergraduates. They have reduced teaching loads while increasing incentives for professors to devote their hours outside of the classroom to research and scholarly publication rather than to discussing ideas with students.

To reverse the decline over which faculty and administration have presided, ACTA calls on trustees, donors, alumni, parents, and students to take action. In their different roles, they can begin by persuading all liberal arts colleges to publish data on their academic standards, including results of nationally normed tests of core collegiate skills, and grade distributions each semester in each department and program.

Liberal arts colleges should also be convinced of the need to reestablish a core curriculum that provides students with a common foundation including math, science, literature, principles of American politics, U.S. history, economics, religion, foreign languages, and world civilizations.

They should be urged to protect the free exchange of ideas by eliminating explicit restrictions on free speech; by expunging broadly written campus code provisions that can be and are interpreted to mean that causing a fellow student or faculty member to feel awkward or uncomfortable is an actionable offense; and by proclaiming at every opportunity—including, for example, on the home page of their websites, prominently in course catalogues, at ceremonies welcoming freshman, and at graduation—the centrality to liberal education of liberty of thought and discussion, of intellectual diversity, and of free inquiry.

And liberal arts colleges should be pressed to improve transparency and accountability by making available data on college budgeting, and they should be pushed to restructure incentives so as to encourage faculty to devote more hours to teaching.

One should not underestimate the entrenched interests—ideological, methodological, and financial—that resist reform of our liberal arts colleges. Nor should one underestimate the threat to freedom posed by failure to achieve reform.

Peter Berkowitz is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.  His writings are posted at www.PeterBerkowitz.com.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/21/how_to_improve_our_colleges_and_universities_121657.html#ixzz2u7DPs6sW
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
 
I note a trend, many of the people pushing new ideas seem to have a poor grasps of history and how things were. Some of the comments here highlight this knowledge gap that is in the articles. Now to be fair the articles are snapshots written by journalists who primary goal is to get published and paid and may be high on the fluff and lower on accuracy.
 
An interesting idea to turn higher education around: "Home Schooling" college and University students:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/04/home-schooling-for-higher-ed/

Home-Schooling for Higher Ed

Here’s a new idea for the thousands of underemployed PhDs competing for the dwindling tenure-track jobs: college by homeschooling. Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, JHU’s Hollis Robbins proposes that students, either alone or in small groups, hire trained PhDs to be their own private professors. This is basically tutoring at the collegiate level:

I don’t think I am overstating the qualifications of many of my fellow academics in the humanities to say that any one of them could provide, singlehandedly, a first-rate first-year college education in the liberal arts. The colleague whom I kidded about home-colleging is qualified to teach expository writing, multiple languages (introductory Latin, French, and Italian), medieval history, European history, art history, and a variety of literature courses. Another colleague could  teach American history, introduction to political theory, introduction to philosophy, African-American literature, and expository writing. Another could teach Surrealism, intro to cognitive science, film, neuroscience, linguistics, and Spanish. I know others who could teach calculus, the history of science, European history, classical literature, film, and art history. [...]

A low-cost, high-value first-year education would allow students to transfer into a traditional degree-granting institution at a second- or third-year level, saving a year or more of tuition. Home-colleged students would have a year of personal attention to writing skills, research skills, oral-presentation skills, and the relationship of disciplines in the liberal arts.  The attention to oral and written skills may be particularly valuable to non-English-speaking students looking to succeed at an American college or university.

This may seem like a fringe proposal, but we see several advantages: for starters, more one-on-one access to professors and tailor-made lesson plans. Depending on the specific arrangements between teachers and students, there could be major cost savings as well. If the student lives at home, he wouldn’t need to pay for room, board, facilities, administrators, or whole academic departments whose halls he would never darken over four years in a traditional college. Students could boost their savings, at a relatively small cost in one-on-one time, by grouping together to hire teachers.

This approach may not be for everyone, but for many it would be a smart twist on the standard college model. To us, it sounds like an interesting way of addressing a reform goal we’ve talked about frequently: the need for colleges to move away from a system that rewards students based on the number of credit hours they rack up (the time-served model), and to move toward a system that rewards them for what they know (a stuff-learned model).

We would love to see some enterprising students or academics take a chance on this idea, or something like it. One of the keys to making it work is a standardized, college-level assessment that would make it easy to measure the performance of home-tutored college students against that of their traditional college peers.
 
A piece in defense of the Liberal Arts. The highlighted paragraph shows the strength of what Liberal Arts is supposed to deliver, the weakness is that in many cases, it no longer does so. In many Canadian and American universities, a legion of Brownshirts will come out and use everything up to physical violence to silence voices they do not "approve" of (generally ideas that are not in line with the Politically Correct orthodoxy), and other interesting ideas that resemble Maoist thought control (Queens University was planning to salt the dorms with Thought Police who would report on anyone who displayed thoughts, words or actions that were on the "not approved" list, and by this I don't mean activities like vandalism or smoking in the rooms...). Since the administrations of the Universities approve of these sorts of activities, or take no steps to discourage them, alternative learning venues which do not place any sort of ideological indoctrination on their teaching packages will provide much of what Liberal Arts was supposed to give:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-01-06/postrel-how-art-history-majors-power-the-u-s-?utm_content=buffer8806a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy: Virginia Postrel

Jan 5, 2012 7:05 PM ET
By Virginia Postrel

There’s nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits.

In a recent column for Real Clear Markets, Bill Frezza of the Competitive Enterprise Institute lauded the Chinese government’s policy of cutting financing for any educational program for which 60 percent of graduates can’t find work within two years. His assumption is that, because of government education subsidies, the U.S. is full of liberal-arts programs that couldn’t meet that test.

“Too many aspiring young museum curators can’t find jobs?” he writes. “The pragmatic Chinese solution is to cut public subsidies used to train museum curators. The free market solution is that only the rich would be indulgent enough to buy their kids an education that left them economically dependent on Mommy and Daddy after graduation.” But, alas, the U.S. has no such correction mechanism, so “unemployable college graduates pile up as fast as unsold electric cars.”

Bill Gross, the founder of the world’s largest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co., has put forth a less free-market (and less coherently argued) version of the same viewpoint. “Philosophy, sociology and liberal arts agendas will no longer suffice,” he declared. “Skill-based education is a must, as is science and math.”

There are many problems with this simplistic prescription, but the most basic is that it ignores what American college students actually study.

Punching-Bag Disciplines

Take Frezza’s punching bag, the effete would-be museum curator. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that no such student exists.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, humanities majors account for about 12 percent of recent graduates, and art history majors are so rare they’re lost in the noise. They account for less than 0.2 percent of working adults with college degrees, a number that is probably about right for recent graduates, too. Yet somehow art history has become the go-to example for people bemoaning the state of higher education.

A longtime acquaintance perfectly captured the dominant Internet memes in an e-mail he sent me after my last column, which was on rising tuitions. “Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,” he wrote. “Many of these people would be much better off becoming plumbers -- including financially. (No shame in that, who’re you gonna call when your pipes freeze in the middle of the night? An M.A. in Italian art?)”

While government subsidies may indeed distort the choice to go to college in the first place, it’s simply not the case that students are blissfully ignoring the job market in choosing majors. Contrary to what critics imagine, most Americans in fact go to college for what they believe to be “skill-based education.”

A quarter of them study business, by far the most popular field, and 16 percent major in one of the so-called Stem (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. Throw in economics, and you have nearly half of all graduates studying the only subjects such contemptuous pundits recognize as respectable.

The rest, however, aren’t sitting around discussing Aristotle and Foucault.

Most are studying things that sound like job preparation, including all sorts of subjects related to health and education. Even the degree with the highest rate of unemployment -- architecture, whose 13.9 percent jobless rate reflects the current construction bust -- is a pre-professional major.

Diversity of Jobs

The students who come out of school without jobs aren’t, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people who thought a degree in business, graphic design or nursing was a practical, job-oriented credential. Even the latest target of Internet mockery, a young woman the New York Times recently described as studying for a master’s in communication with hopes of doing public relations for a nonprofit, is in what she perceives as a job-training program.

The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won’t be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.

That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.

Those who tout Stem fields as a cure-all confuse correlation with causality. It’s true that people who major in those subjects generally make more than, say, psychology majors. But they’re also people who have the aptitudes, attitudes, values and interests that draw them to those fields (which themselves vary greatly in content and current job prospects). The psychology and social work majors currently enjoying relatively low rates of unemployment -- 7.7 percent and 6.6 percent respectively -- probably wouldn’t be very good at computer science, which offers higher salaries but, at least at the moment, slightly lower chances of a job.

(These and many of the other figures in this article come from two studies by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workplace analyzing data from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey: “Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings,” released this week, and “What’s It Worth: The Economic Value of College Majors,” released last May.)

Too Many Plumbers

Whether they’re pushing plumbing or programming, the would-be vocational planners rarely consider whether any additional warm body with the right credentials would really enhance national productivity. Nor do they think much about what would happen to wages in a given field if the supply of workers increased dramatically. If everyone suddenly flooded into “practical” fields, we’d be overwhelmed with mediocre accountants and incompetent engineers, making lower and lower salaries as they swamped the demand for these services. Something like that seems to have already happened with lawyers.

Not everyone is the same. One virtue of a developed economy is that it provides niches for people with many different personalities and talents, making it more likely that any given individual can find a job that offers satisfaction.

As any good economist will remind you, income is just a means to utility, not a goal in itself. Some jobs pay well not only because few people have the right qualifications but also because few people want to do them in the first place. In a culture where many people hate oil companies, petroleum engineers probably enjoy such a premium. Plumbers -- the touchstone example for critics who think too many people go to college -- certainly do.

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning -- the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the “soft” professions that complement them.

Chemists Struggle Too

The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.

I was lucky to graduate from high school in the late 1970s, when the best research said that going to college was an economically losing proposition. You would be better off just getting a job out of high school -- or so it appeared at the time. Such studies are always backward-looking.

I thus entered college to pursue learning for its own sake. As an English major determined not to be a lawyer, I also made sure I graduated with not one but two practical trades --neither learned in the college classroom. At the depths of the previous worst recession since the Great Depression, I had no problem getting a job as a rookie journalist and, as an emergency backup, I knew I could always fall back on my excellent typing skills. Three decades later, nobody needs typists, and journalists are almost as obsolete.

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently -- how to figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smart-phone app.

Learning to Learn

When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors “stressed that they weren’t there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system ... but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I’ve often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.” Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.

The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or “green” industries. It’s just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.

Pundits are entitled to their hypotheses, of course, and if they’re footing the bill they can experiment on their children. But they shouldn’t try to use the rest of the population as lab mice.

(Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg View columnist. She is the author of “The Future and Its Enemies” and “The Substance of Style,” and is writing a book on glamour. This is the second of a two-part series on the economics of higher education; read the first part online here. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Virginia Postrel in Los Angeles at vp@dynamist.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.
 
More pushback by the gatekeepers. Rather than innovate or try to change and compete on the basis of price or quality, they simply seek to ban the potential competition.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/30/regulatory-roadblock-for-online-ed/

Regulatory Roadblock For Online Ed

The Department of Education is revisiting a fight it lost in 2012: to make states authorize every distance education provider that enrolls students within their borders. Ever since a federal judge struck down this requirement on procedural grounds, states have been able to exempt online programs from the authorization process as long as it’s accredited somewhere else. If the Department of Education wins this fight, this would change.  And if distance education programs aren’t locally authorized or exempted from the requirement, their students won’t receive federal student aid.

A North Dakota official spoke to Inside Higher Ed:

“The intentions are good, but the practical implications of the proposed changes are going to wreak havoc on many state regulators and institutions and ultimately students,” said Tanya Spilovoy, director of distance education and state authorization at the North Dakota University System. [...]

Poulin estimated that “easily over half the states are going to have to change their laws or regulations to do something to replace the exemption and come up with processes to implement the authorization review process.”

Many states don’t have the manpower—or the funding—necessary to deal with this regulatory burden. And the real losers will be students, who should be able to enroll in the best and cheapest programs no matter where they live. Some of the most promising developments in higher education are taking place online, from degree-granting programs to MOOCs, and the Department of Education shouldn’t impose regulatory burdens that will discourage innovation in this sector. Let’s not run the internet like a toll road: we don’t want to see online education stopped at state borders.
 
Another gatekeeper reaction. Look for Canadian provinces to try this as well to protect Educrats:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/04/17/maryland-throws-up-roadblocks-to-online-ed/

Maryland Puts Up Roadblocks to Online Ed

Maryland has decided to stand athwart the internet, yelling “Stop!” The Maryland Higher Education Commission recently sent letters to numerous institutions across the country that offer online courses, demanding that they pay registration fees for the Maryland residents enrolled in them. However, there is no data available on how many are enrolled in online programs, or which programs they attend. As Inside Higher Ed reports:

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether. [...]

According to the letter, recipients have until April 25 to respond—even if they don’t enroll students in Maryland. [One] provost therefore described the letter as “the most aggressive attempt to date by any state government to enforce state authorization.”

On top of this, Maryland requires that online education programs undergo a lengthy accreditation review process, and now it seems to be vying for the title of least hospitable state in the union. (Meanwhile, the Department of Education is pursuing its plan to reinstate the requirement that distance education programs obtain accreditation in all states where they do business.)

The motives behind Maryland’s new restrictions couldn’t be clearer, according to Inside Higher Ed. The state wants to stifle programs that compete with the online programs offered by the University of Maryland University College. UMUC has already seen layoffs this year due to declining enrollment. With more than 34,000 students, it is an asset that the state will fight to defend.

The protectionism on display here is distasteful enough, but worse yet, the new regulations will fall hardest on those who  already face steep obstacles to higher education. Plenty of young people could benefit greatly from cheap, accessible, and innovative online programs. States should embrace such programs wherever they originate, rather than scramble to secure home field advantage. Once again, a state has put the security of its employees before the interests of its students.
 
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