By Tracy Lorenz. How successful is higher education, today, when it comes to serving working adults?
When you look at the statistics, only 30 percent of working adults in the United States have a degree. However, when you look at the research, it shows that 75 percent want more education. So you think of this as a supply and a demand issue, but only five percent [of working adults] think they can afford it. …
We believe everyone should have access to affordable college degrees that are attainable. While great things are happening in the higher education space today, I think we have a lot more work to do. More...

By Gary Stocker. There is a generally-accepted practice in business to see how best practices in one industry can be transferred to another. As the higher education industry looks for new models to provide a college education at an affordable price — and to move away from annual tuition increases as the main mechanism to keep net revenues higher — I keep going back to the dynamic and consumer-centered pricing model championed by Priceline. More...

By Lucy Leske. There’s a delicate dance taking place within higher education today. Most everyone understands that the current financial model colleges and universities operate under is not sustainable, yet academics readily bristle at the notion they should become more businesslike and bottom-line oriented. If one looks at higher education as a business, the thinking goes, one sacrifices the fundamental mission of these institutions: to educate students and produce successful professionals, good citizens and enlightened individuals who continue to learn and grow throughout the course of their lives. There is great concern about the commoditization — some say Walmart-ization — of higher education. More...

By Shawn Warren. The interested parties of higher education have in common a complex goal of reducing costs while improving access to quality education provided in the absence of labor exploitation. Even so, tradition has prioritized the interests of universities and colleges over those of academics, students and society, placing an institutional slant on any attempt at improvement. More...

By Cynda Alexander. 1. What are the biggest challenges adult students face when it comes to finding available scholarships?
The biggest challenge is knowing that scholarships exist for them. The first scholarship workshop I held in January 2013 for non-traditional students opened my eyes to what the general student population thought of when it came to scholarships. They thought they wouldn’t be eligible because they were non-traditional. … At [the University of Arkansas], we define non-traditional students a little differently than most higher education institutions. … We have no age minimum — you don’t have to be 25 and up. When I started this position three years ago, I wrote a very extensive proposal on how to serve our non-traditional students. We changed the definition of the non-traditional student [to include]: if you delayed enrolment after high school, you work part-time, you work full-time, you’re financially independent from your parents, you’re in the military, you’re first-generation, you’re already a parent. That makes them non-traditional. They don’t live in our residence halls. We are a metropolitan university; we only have 1,400 beds on campus but we have 12,000 students, so most of our student population is non-traditional given our definition of it. More...

By EvoLLLution NewsWire. On Friday, the Obama administration proposed a new set of gainful employment rules that will tighten federal oversight of for-profit colleges and universities if passed into law. The last set of regulations — which included loan-repayment expectations — were struck down by a federal judge in 2012. After that, the Department of Education went back to the drawing board to protect students from low-quality, high-debt programs while keeping access to career-focused programs open. More...

By EvoLLLution NewsWire. On Tuesday, leaders from community colleges across the United States gathered at the Community College National Legislative Summit and roundly critiqued the proposed federal college rating system. Jeff Appel, deputy undersecretary of education, admitted that there are many shortcomings and obstacles to implementing President Barrack Obama’s rating system, which proposes tying federal funding to performance measured by specific metrics that are yet to be defined; rewarding high-performing institutions with more funding while reducing funding to institutions performing poorly. More...

By Shaun Curran. The concept of higher education institutions becoming business enterprises is not new. This idea has prevailed for years at for-profit institutions with mixed results. There are those who argue — correctly — that without the existence of capitalism, or some form of business model, higher education institutions as they stand today would not be possible; the downside of these business practices is that they have the potential to turn legitimate higher education institutions into degree mills — and change education itself into a commodity. More...

By Phillip Mixon. In the field of economics, the term “competitive advantage” means you have the lowest opportunity cost of providing a good or service. Opportunity cost is simply defined as what you give up in order to complete an action. Competitive advantage should have the same definition in the higher education world. For example, a top engineering school shouldn’t begin a new program in ancient Greek biblical interpretation, especially if the program already exists at a nearby institution. The competitive advantage of the engineering department is to produce high-quality engineers. More...

By Terry Rawls. Time is the challenge of the busy professional. If you’re like me, with a to-do list that’s longer than your arm and never enough time to put a dent in it, you know exactly what I mean. I frequently tell myself that life used to be slower and simpler. And while technology has certainly changed the world of work, let’s face it; we’ve always been too busy. More...