Are productivity gains possible in higher education?

Answer: Maybe? See the author’s suggestions for bridge programs instead of remediation and outcomes-based Core courses. I’m surprised that he didn’t mention some of the other usual suspects when it comes to experiments in “productivity” increases in higher education (Straighterline, Western Governor’s University, for-profits more generally, and so on), but he may have wanted to focus on endeavors that appear to increase both productivity and quality.

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/june/are-productivity-gains-in-higher-education-possible

Do Majors Matter?

Does what you study in college matter? It certainly does when it comes to how much you'll make on average when you graduate. Counseling Psychology students just out of college make on average about $29K. Petroleum Engineers make about $100K above that figure.

http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth/

But what students study in college also matters a lot when it comes to how much students improve their critical thinking abilities. Interestingly, fields such as sociology and foreign languages appear to come out the best on this latter scale, with physical education and business close behind. Economics and Architecture bring up the rear. The author of the following piece has a few theories about why that might be.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/16/connor_essay_on_why_majors_matter_in_how_much_college_students_learn

Perhaps not surprisingly, these two sets of data are not at all correlated.

The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure?

Here's Naomi Riley's take on this perennial hot-button topic. Riley has been more sympathetic to CCCU types of institutions than many higher education writers, witness her earlier book "God on the Quad," so she's someone I read with interest.

http://chronicle.com/article/Smart-Ways-to-End-Tenure/127940/

More "future of higher education" articles

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/gates-wikipedia-university/29541?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/14/essay_rejecting_idea_of_a_higher_education_bubble

Learning outcomes replace college?

Back to the “self-educated” man concept from the Renaissance, what if we really believed that learning outcomes were all that mattered and not “inputs” or the format in which those outcomes were delivered. With existing and developing on-line resources, could people skip the credentialing middle-man (higher education institutions) and take their self-developed skills and learning outcomes directly to employers? Perhaps, though the model presented in this article assumes some things about higher education that we would not completely agree with here at JBU.

http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Learning-Portals-/127694/

If higher education is only about information delivery and skill development, then yes, there are probably other ways to develop and demonstrate those outcomes. But if higher education is also about the signaling of a certain “prestige,” social interactions, and whole person development, then this type of self-directed credentialing can’t measure up. Nonetheless, it is true that for many people, these other functions of higher education are not that important (or at least will not be seen as that important). And if “information wants to be free,” we’re going to have difficulty running our university for “free.” Straighterline, for instance, offers many of our Core courses for $100/course compared to our TUG costs of roughly $5,000/course. In short, we can’t compete, especially when it comes to “general education,” if all that matters is just information delivery and skill development. We clearly need to be about (and be seen as being about) much more than just that.

http://www.straighterline.com/