By John Warner. “Good colleges have always been fundamentally human institutions.”
“The fundamental problem of higher education is no longer the availability of content, but rather the availability of motivation.”
Harvard University Press was kind enough to send me a copy of their recently released book, How College Works by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, and I’ve spent a couple of days underlining things like the above. Read more...

By John Warner. In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats in the South Carolina legislature got together to propose that the College of Charleston (my employer) and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) merge to form “Charleston University.”
The legislators believe it's “good business.” As the bill’s co-sponsors, Democrat Leon Stavrinakis and Republican Jim Merrill, said in a joint announcement, “This proposal is a response to business demands in the Lowcountry to create a workforce to match our growing economy. Read more...

Continuing its focus on problems with the servicing of private student loans, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Monday released an analysis of its voluntary request for information from the private student loan industry. The bureau was especially interested in information about how loan servicers process the payments of borrowers seeking to pay down their debt ahead of schedule. The CFPB has said it’s concerned that some loan servicers apply prepayments in a way that maximizes their profits but makes the cost of the loan more expensive for borrowers. Read more...

A think tank's relatively crude analysis of how colleges might fare under a system that rated them on access, affordability and student success finds few institutions scoring high marks on all three, as it chooses to define them. The report by the American Enterprise Institute's Center on Higher Education Reform -- trying to anticipate how an Obama administration plan to rate colleges might play out -- examines the performance of 1,700 four-year colleges on three metrics: the proportion of their undergraduates who are eligible for Pell Grants for needy students, the six-year graduation rate of their students, and their net price -- all of which it concedes are imperfect, if not seriously flawed, measures. Read more...

By Thomas Bailey. Last month the White House hosted a higher education summit to draw attention to the problem of college attainment among low-income students. The summit focused in particular on “undermatching,” in which high-achieving, low-income students fail to apply to highly selective colleges, and instead attend less competitive institutions. Read more...

By Charles C. Reith. A consortium of small colleges and universities in developing nations around the world is collaborating on a multidisciplinary course that delivers many of the merits of MOOCs but also provides experiential education directed at pressing local needs.  The desired result of this pilot is a powerful blend of multidisciplinary scholarly perspectives, global insights from direct interactions with academics around the world, and applied experience such as comes from helping host communities confront barriers to their sustainable development. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. The text in question appears a couple of times in the New Testament as part of what's usually called "the Lord's Prayer." The Book of Common Prayer, the older of the two volumes, renders one line of the prayer as "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." The KJV rendering says, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
To my ear, "trespasses" works better rhythmically, and it expresses the notion of "sin" or "offense" in a slightly more elegant manner. By contrast, "debt" or "debtor" expresses the same thought in a blunt and harsh way, and even conjures the old cartoon image of St. Peter recording good and evil deeds in a big ledger at the gates of heaven. Read more...

By Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio. While there is heated debate over how best to fix America’s higher education system, everyone agrees on the need for meaningful reform. It’s difficult to argue against reform in the face of college attainment rates that are stalled at just under 40 percent and the growing number of graduates left wondering whether they will ever find careers that allow them to pay off their mounting debts. Read more...

By W. Kent Barnds. Recently The Atlantic predicted that one of the top five trends impacting higher education will be a push toward credit given for experience, proficiency and documented  “competency.” The recent results of Inside Higher Ed’s survey of chief academic officers also show openness to competency-based outcomes. Read more...