Can predictive analytics determine which students succeed and which will fail? More universities are finding that the answer is yes.
Students at America's high schools, colleges, and universities are well into their first semesters. But while they plow through their assigned readings and write essays, administrators are turning their grades and their professors' evaluations into millions upon millions of tiny data points. Much like every other field in the world, education is embracing big data--only, this time, they're using it to determine who will thrive in college, who will fail, and who will need some extra help. David Wright is Wichita State University's (WSU) Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. In his position, Wright is responsible for overseeing the vast amounts of data WSU uses to track student and faculty performance. More...

The SAT has become such an important and memorable test in students' lives that many adults still remember their scores decades after taking it.
But according to Peter Coy in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, that test is holding many American students back:
Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a "wealth test." Type "SAT" into Amazon.com, and you'll have to scroll past more than 200 test-prep volumes before you get to one book that's a history or critique of the test. Because the SAT and ACT are now thought of as yardsticks of ability, students who do poorly on them are marked — or mark themselves — as failures. More...

SHOULD Philadelphia reform its tax structure and allow its citizens to add up all they contribute to the city and figure out their own taxes based on those contributions?
That would mean that the ideal citizen - say, one who pays high wage and property taxes, as well as volunteers in the community and is kind to neighbors - would be able to weigh all those contributions and set a lower rate than others who don't do as much.
We didn't think so. More...

By Mary Beth Marklein. Average sticker prices at the nation's four-year public universities rose 2.9% this year, the smallest annual increase in more than three decades, suggesting that the steeper increases over the past few years "did not signal a new era of accelerating prices," says a report out Wednesday. Still, the smaller rates of increase this year — across public, private non-profit and for-profit colleges — are tempered by recent declines in federal grant aid, it says. More...

Although critics disparage the college rankings as flawed and elitist, a growing number of students seem to be relying on them to help with their college picks. That was the conclusion of a new survey by Art & Science Group. The higher-education consulting firm polled high school students about college rankings three times -- in 1995, 2002 and last winter -- and found that the importance of rankings in students' college decisions has climbed considerably since the first two surveys. More...

A Beaverton lawmaker has suggested a plan to give some Oregon high school graduates free tuition at a community college for two years.

The Statesman Journal newspaper reported that the tuition break would allow students to enter a two-year degree program or take college credits that would transfer to a university. More...

The economic prosperity of any nation is inextricably tied to the education of its citizens. In the United States, obtaining a higher-education credential is a pursuit that many now consider a civil right and an essential pathway toward achieving the American dream of upward social and economic mobility. The United States has fallen from being the world's leader in the percentage of citizens holding higher-education credentials to 16th among the leading 34 industrialized economies in the world. Last year, the U.S. was ranked 12th. In math scores, U.S. students rank 25th compared to their global counterparts. This comes at a time when studies show that in less than six years, 67 percent of all new jobs providing livable wages will require at minimum a post-secondary credential. More...

By Alex Stambaugh. There’s a common belief that the more expensive a university, the better quality of the education. But some school leaders, such as Purdue University President and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, are trying to debunk the idea by changing the way schools are rated.
Daniels, who joined Chuck Todd for Tuesday’s The Daily Rundown, said that despite skyrocketing education costs, “people are waking up to the fact, in higher ed at least, that higher sticker prices don’t tell you anything about the quality.”
He proposed instead that school ratings should look at the real quality of an education using scientific data gathered qualitatively and quantitatively from knowledge tests and the success of its graduates in the work place.
“The next frontier is to start measuring the growth of students while at Purdue in a scientifically credible way so we can say to the world and say to future students, ‘Come here, you’ll learn a lot,’” said the university president. More...

By Karen Farkas. Doodling and passing notes in class have been replaced by texting, sending e-mails and checking Facebook.
More than 90 percent of college students admitted they use digital devices for non-class activities during class, according to a recent survey, reported in Inside Higher Ed.
Less than 8 percent said that they never do so. The study is based on a survey of 777 students at six colleges and universities. Barney McCoy, associate professor of broadcasting at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, conducted the study, published in the October issue of the The Journal of Media Education.
Most of the students were undergraduates, and graduate students were less likely to use their devices for non-class purposes. Undergraduates reported using their devices for non-class purposes 11 times a day, on average, compared to four times a day for graduate students. More...