By Carl Straumsheim. Technology can address some of the financial and organizational challenges facing public flagship universities, according to a new report, but those challenges have to be solved with input from the entire institution -- not just a “coalition of the willing.” Read more...
By Carl Straumsheim. Leaders of a national movement to ease the regulatory burden on colleges and universities that offer distance education say the effort has passed its tipping point after more than a third of the states have joined in less than a year. Read more...
By Mark S. Schneider. The Education Department’s “framework” for its college-ratings plan is surprisingly tentative, filled with verbs like “exploring” and “considering.” It can be seen as a smart move: Kick the ratings can down the road, telegraph what might be coming, get more stakeholder involvement, and so on. But it can also be seen as an OMG moment: After so much effort, so many meetings, and so much chatter, there remain far too many questions unanswered and far too many ratings criteria ill-defined. More...
By F. King Alexander. The plan just released for rating colleges and universities is a concept that higher education should welcome as a first step toward developing more-comprehensive ways to measure colleges’ value. The U.S. Department of Education’s Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS), a continuation of the existing College Scorecard, will be complex for many reasons, including the diversity of our higher-education institutions and our well-documented limitations on data. But we should start by considering ways to make PIRS more effective, rather than immediately devaluing it and viewing it with suspicion and disapproval. More...
By Patricia McGuire. In the time-honored tradition of students’ slipping papers under professors’ doors before dashing home at winter break, the U.S. Department of Education released its first draft of the proposed college-ratings framework on the last day of the fall semester. Like many a late paper, the proposed ratings framework offers interesting insights into the student’s struggle to learn without much illumination of the actual problem the paper purports to solve. More...
By David M. Perry. What are professors allowed to say? Where are we are allowed to say it?
Last week Deborah O’Connor, a senior lecturer at Florida State University, was pushed to resign after making racist and homophobic comments on a public Facebook page. She said some pretty horrible things, like blaming Europe’s troubles on “rodent Muslims.” She also told a well-known gay hairstylist to “Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your ass.” More...
Report: “The Case for Payroll Withholding”
Organizations: New America Foundation, Young Invincibles, National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators
Summary: With student-loan default rates rising, a growing number of policy makers, think tanks, and advocacy groups are calling for automatically enrolling some or all borrowers in income-based repayment, or IBR. In this report, a product of the third round of the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the authors compare four distinct, and progressively more “automated,” ways of expanding the program. More...
By Andy Thomason. For the past 16 months, the Obama administration’s plan to rate colleges has been one of the most talked-about issues in higher education. On Friday morning the Education Department’s draft plan arrived with a whimper, as news outlets and observers quickly remarked that the so-called framework was less a rough draft than a bare-bones outline of what an eventual system might feature. More...
By Andy Thomason. The Career Education Corporation will sell off its 16 culinary-arts campuses, though the for-profit educator has not identified a buyer, according to a corporate filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. More...
By Andy Thomason. Two global-education associations are applauding President Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that the United States will restore relations with Cuba, ending a diplomatic freeze that lasted more than half a century. More...
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