Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Matt Reed. In my sophomore year of college, I took a history course on Tudor and Stuart England with Prof. Dudley Bahlman, who was as close to a human incarnation of Mr. Magoo as I have ever seen.  (If cameraphones had existed then, I would have snapped a few shots of him on his moped.)  He was in his last semester before retirement when I took his class, and he wore his dinosaur status with pride.  There was no social or economic history for him.  For him, classes were lectures, history was royals, and stories were laugh-out-loud funny. Read more...

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...