Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Steven Mintz. For-profit universities provoke fierce criticism.
Among the charges: That these institutions deploy unscrupulous recruiting practices, leave students with crippling levels of debt, award worthless degrees, and inflate job placement rates. Students at the for-profits are more likely to drop out, default on their loans, and be left unemployed than those who attend non-profit colleges and universities. Read more...

By Steven Berg. I ask my students, “If you were a gladiator, which technology would you prefer:  a trident, a net, or a wooden sword?”  It is a question I would like you to consider; a question to which I will return. Even before Verus and Priscus entered the Coliseum in AD 80, individuals realized that access to higher education combined with appropriate technologies was a pathway to social mobility.  Although we often think of gladiators as slaves and criminals, many poor freemen chose to train to become gladiators.  These men made the decision to enter a gladiatorial school because they considered obtaining a higher education as their best opportunity for social mobility. More...

By Louis Hyman. If, as the New York Times claimed, 2012 was the Year of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), then 2013 was the Year of Pushback Against the MOOC. The point versus counterpoint played out according to a predictable script. First right-wing entrepreneurs, who see American universities as a nest of inefficient yet arrogant tenured radicals, proclaimed that higher education was a "bubble." Traditional universities, they announced, would be rendered extinct by the MOOC-as-category-killer, which could deliver a free product to consumers around the world. Academics fired back, insisting that taped lectures, multiple-choice questions graded by algorithm, and troll-filled discussion threads were no substitute for actual human beings. As results from the road-testing of MOOCs started to trickle in over the second half of 2013, the critics proclaimed victory. Typically, less than ten percent of students who initially signed up for such "courses" completed them. More...

By S.A. Swanson. After nearly two decades working for the University of Chicago's executive MBA program, associate dean Patty Keegan thought she had heard just about every question a prospective student could ask. Last month, however, she heard a new one: Why should I pay you for this program when I can just cobble together my own with MOOCs? More...