Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Walt Hickey. Payscale, a company that tracks salaries in the U.S., is out with its annual report on collegiate return on investment. (Payscale was kind enough to send us an early copy of the data, available here.)
The schools that did the best weren’t a huge surprise. Topping the list is Harvey Mudd College, a leading engineering school. The remaining institutions in the top 10 are elite colleges with expansive alumni networks (Harvard, Princeton) and top-notch technical schools (MIT, Caltech). More...

By Amy Scott. There are some new developments this week in the land of the MOOC. That’s shorthand for the "Massive Open Online Courses" that were supposed to transform higher education as we know it, bringing free education from the likes of Harvard and Stanford to you and me.
MOOC pioneer Coursera has hired a new CEO -- none other than the former long-time president of Yale University, Richard Levin.
Meanwhile Coursera competitor edX has a new president from the business world -- former Vistaprint executive Wendy Cebula. More...

By Eddie Small. Kevin Floerke has been down this road before.
A student at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California, Floerke, 26, already graduated in 2010 from UCLA, where he majored in archaeology. This time, however, unlike many other people in his field, he's not interested in getting yet another degree. He's just trying to master a set of techniques and technologies that will help him verify the details he finds while doing fieldwork.
"I'm really there to learn the program itself and be able to use it in a professional setting," he said. Floerke, who leads tours for the National Geographic Society, is part of a group of students known as "skill builders," who are using conventional colleges in an unconventional way: not to obtain degrees, but simply to learn specific kinds of expertise without spending time or money on courses they don't think they need. More...

By Gene Budig and Alan Heaps. Those who question the fundamental value of a college degree need to stand back and accept undisputed facts. The truth is the worth of a college degree is rising. Today, young adults with just a high school diploma earn 62 percent of the typical salary of college graduates. In 1965, those with just a high school diploma earned 81 percent of the salary of college graduates.
And this is only part of the story as told by the Pew Research Center and reported to the country by The Associated Press. Ninety percent of young workers say their college degree has already or will pay off and 86 percent of those who borrowed money agree. The Associated Press reported that the medium salary of young workers is $45,500 for those with a four-year college degree or more; $30,000 for a two-year degree or some college; and $28,000 for high school graduates. Read more...

By Pamela Dockins. The company that administers one of the two most widely-used U.S. college admissions tests recently announced its first major revisions to its test since 2005.  The College Boards' changes to the SAT exam drop infrequently used vocabulary words and the mandatory essay, and add passages referencing U.S. historical documents.
When Howard University students from Nigeria and Jamaica were applying to college, they were among the approximately 100,000 foreign students each year who took the SAT. More...

By George Leef. Sometimes it makes sense to borrow to finance an investment; sometimes equity is a better choice. When it comes to college education, however, borrowing (especially through the government) is usually a mistake. If we could catalyze a system of equity financing for higher education, that would be a great improvement over the status quo.
In his 1955 paper “The Role of Government in Education,” Milton Friedman suggested the idea of equity contracts to finance college education. Friedman thought that loans were not the appropriate means of financing education and argued that the better way was to advance the needed funds for college to qualified students, who would repay a percentage of their earnings for an agreed-upon number of years. More...

By Marcia Layton Turner. For years, The Extended Campuses of Northern Arizona University used a traditional marketing model. The four-person marketing team would create an annual budget and tie its goals and specific projects to it. Freelancers and local advertising agencies provided support for the 50 or so marketing pieces produced throughout the year.
That model worked fine until around 2010, says Ann Marie deWees, director of strategic marketing. “Then things began to change with increasing digital expectations.” More...