Another "higher education bubble" story

Megan McArdle is typically interesting to read, and I do agree with much of what she writes, but I am getting a bit tired of the whole "higher education bubble" story line. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/09/megan-mcardle-on-the-coming-burst-of-the-college-bubble.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=in_newsweek&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bin_newsweek&utm_term=Tina%20Brown%20List

How federal financial aid has distorted higher education?

Interesting economic argument, but I have a difficult time seeing how any of this will change in the immediate future. http://www.american.com/archive/2012/august/the-high-cost-of-college-an-economic-explanation

Cheescake Factory meets medicine?

From the author of "The Checklist Manifesto," this interesting piece about chain restaurants and their potential applicability to the medical world might have similar applicability to our education world. I really don't think that it's a question of if but rather of when such changes will occur and the extent to which they will occur. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Personalized education comes to college?

http://chronicle.com/article/College-Degrees-Designed-by/132945/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en Data mining comes to advising, course scheduling, individualized lesson planning, grade prediction, and even keeping track of which students might be leaving because they’re sending transcripts to other schools. Is this the future of engaged learning or Big Brother in prettified form? That’s the general gist of the article. Personally, I'm a fan of a lot of these efforts, but they're big and expensive, which is why the article talks primarily about big institutions doing the experimenting at this point.

Science Education is Fine in U.S.?

This short news piece counters a lot of what I've typically read about science education in the U.S. Not sure I'm convinced, but I am having to rethink some of my assumptions. http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-06-03/science-math-education-us-schools/55363868/1

Not worth the debt?

There have been lots of articles like this in the last few years. I'm including this link mostly just to make it obvious where the general wisdom is on these issues. What's often missing from such discussions is the question of net revenue and net costs, which have not been going up nearly as dramatically. Also missing is that the premium for a college education has far outpaced the rising cost of a college education. This article assumes that the value of a college education has not gone up because the average student is studying less. But there are problems with that data as well, because the real decline occurred in the sixties and seventies, and using CLA data only touches on a small part of what higher education is supposed to be all about. Here's the less dramatic version of what's been going on. Tuition rates have been going up faster than inflation, but net costs have been staying roughly flat after adjusting for inflation. And the market value of a higher education degree (in general) has continued to increase in recent years. So, most students are not really paying much more money while reaping a significantly higher profit for their higher education investment. Remind me again, how is this a higher education bubble? http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/not_worth_the_debt_tPmHeOgrp5qbKpoFxUt4hI

End "college for all"?

I like Samuelson a lot. He's one of the more balanced economist/pundits out there. Here he touches on some of the problems that I deal with every day. But I have some concerns with his argument that college isn't for everyone. We see it every day in our degree completion program--adults who didn't think that they could or maybe even should get a college degree doing so and having their lives transformed. In Samuelson's telling, these stories would have less chance of happening. I'm not sure I can support that. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/28/ditch_college_for_all_114285.html

Good teachers make their students into better people?

A somewhat different take about the effects of good teaching than I’ve read before. The study applies to elementary and middle school teachers, but the implications are probably relevant for all teaching, that good teachers help people do better in life as a whole, not just in terms of better subject scores. Intuitively, we’ve always argued something like this for our work at JBU, but this article makes the argument more concrete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?src=me&ref=general

From the authors of "The Innovative University"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/guest-post-eight-thoughts-on-higher-education-in-2012/2011/12/22/gIQA0RwXBP_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_linkedIn

This is pretty much standard fare for those following these issues, but this book is probably one of the better summaries of the general situation that is confronting higher education.