Tackling the remedial classes problem

By Matt Reed. From yesterday’s reports, President Obama’s plan for changing how higher education is paid for is very much a mixed bag. It sounds mostly well-intended, and parts of it are quite good: I was heartened to hear an embrace of competency-based education, for example, and it’s hard to argue with the idea of allowing students with bachelor’s degrees to get aid for vocational training if they need it. A little well-timed brushing up on, say, software skills can go a long way. But with money, the devil is in the details. And I’ve already spotted one slippery devil. The plan is based mostly on “ratings” of colleges, based on their performance on a set of measures to be determined. Students who choose “better” colleges, as defined by the rating system, will be eligible for larger Pell grants and subsidized loans. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. In the fall of 1989, I was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo. I loved the job, I loved the city, I loved my apartment in downtown Buffalo and I loved my colleagues. Had I sought a career in history, I would have followed the footsteps of Ellen DuBois, the wonderful historian of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had recently departed from there for UCLA. Having decided in 1981 to get a doctorate in history, and then go to law school on my way to a career in academic administration, that trajectory was not in the cards. Just before I left Ithaca, where I was teaching, I met the man who would become my husband. We married in August of 1991. In December I made my last trek from Buffalo back to Ithaca, pregnant with my first boy, who is now 21. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. After an emotional build-up watching video of the President’s visit to University of Buffalo, I had a wistful experience being not more than 100 yards away from him when he spoke at a Town Hall Meeting at Binghamton University. As far as memory lane went, on the way there I observed much of the same old rural poverty that has been evident to any observer on route 96b south between Ithaca and Binghamton for the decades I have driven it. Many of President’s proposals for higher education reform are aimed at that population. When youth make their move out of Tioga County, it is most often through the military. Listening to him I came to understand that it is the young people from urban and rural poverty who are the focus of these reforms. When asked about predatory for-profit colleges, he described how some had preyed on military personnel and veterans in particular; this is from where his scorecard idea derives. The media would have been smart to pick up on that point rather than his comment about limiting law school education to three years. Read more...
By Karen Gross. On his education bus tour, President Obama is urging, among other suggestions, a new rating system to ensure that more families are able to afford higher education. I think we can all (well, almost all of us) agree that the rising costs of a bachelor’s degree need to be constrained, and we must find ways that facilitate middle- and lower-income students entering and graduating from college. The value proposition matters, and “debt without diploma” is unacceptable. What is vastly harder to agree upon is how to address the problem, rather than just wringing our hands over it -- which we have been doing for far too long. Read more...
By Doug Lederman. Invest in higher education in good times, drain it (and expect students and families to make up the difference) when the economy sours. State governments have embraced that pattern for decades, even as many analysts deride it as flawed if not foolish. As most states set their budgets for the 2014 fiscal year this spring and early summer, public higher education fared better than it has in several years. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities reported last month that 37 of the 48 states for which it had received information showed year-over-year increases in operating support for public colleges and universities, with an average gain of 3.1 percent over 2012. That compared to 30 states showing increases from fiscal 2012 to 2013, and just eight on the plus side from 2011 to 2012. The fact that these increases come as college enrollments in many states actually begin to slow makes them all the more significant. Read more...
By Paul Fain. Colleges need to demonstrate the value of their product with hard numbers, an increasingly popular maxim holds, or lawmakers will try to do it for them. That prediction is now truer than ever, as the nation’s highest elected official has joined state policymakers in pushing performance-based funding for higher education. The sweeping, ambitious proposal President Obama unveiled Thursday seeks to tie all federal financial aid programs to a rating system of colleges on affordability, student completion rates and the earnings of graduates. The U.S. Department of Education will hold public hearings to develop the ratings before fall 2015. Then the White House will go to Congress to pursue legislation that would link aid levels to colleges’ performance. For example, students who attend standout institutions could receive bigger Pell Grants and more affordable student loans. Read more...
By Carl Straumsheim and Ry Rivard. Advocates of disruptive college business models and carrot-and-stick accountability measures were excited Thursday to hear President Obama back their work in his effort to curb the rising cost of college. The president, in a speech on college costs, praised a new public-private partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Silicon Valley start-up, name-checked a performance-based college funding formula in Tennessee and praised programs that award degrees to students based on how well they test rather than how much time they spend in a classroom. All of this, Obama said, could help “shake up the current system, create better incentives for colleges to do more with less and deliver better value for students and their families.” Read more...
By Scott Jaschik. President Obama appears to be making good on his vow to propose a "shake-up" for higher education.
Early Thursday, he released a plan that would:
By Chris Parr. The US government is to develop a new system of ranking colleges and universities in a bid to ensure the “best value” institutions have access to the most federal funding.
In an extensive speech on college affordability, delivered at the University at Buffalo, US president Barack Obama said the new rating system would be introduced by the start of the 2015-16 academic year. It would, he claimed, take into account measures such as graduation rates, quality of tuition, and whether colleges were “helping people from all backgrounds to succeed”.
“A higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future,” Mr Obama said, adding that colleges should be ranked “not just by which are the most selective”, but in order of those offering “the best value”. “Colleges that keep their tuition down…are the ones that will see their taxpayer funding go up,” he said. More...