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.

The transition from professor to administrator

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2011/12/21/essay-professorial-traits-administrators-need-drop

I resonated with a number of items on his top 10 list, though I think that much of what he talks about applies much more to state schools than to our Christian college setting.

Moneyball comes to college?

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Moneyball-Approach-to/130062/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Taking data-mining too far or wave of the future?

Everything you know about education is wrong?

Another of these pieces that argue that our traditional markers for quality education (small classes, lots of resources, highly credentialed teachers, etc.) do not correlate much if at all with student learning. It's not resources that matter, but culture, namely a culture of setting high standards and rigorous expectations.

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/everything-you-know-about-education-is-wrong/249722/

How College Affects Students

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

These authors are a couple of the gurus of higher education research, and their book, How College Affects Students, has been cited over the past couple of decades more than any other book of its type. This Chronicle story is about their presentation at the CIC conference that I attended. They are essentially summarizing the research that various graduate students have been doing, harnessing the results of the Wabash Study in particular. Mandy is doing her dissertation using this Wabash Study data and, I believe, in conjunction with one of the presenters. I’m also attaching my notes from the session I attended at the CIC meeting. Much of the information is similar. The CCCU dinner then held a response panel on this topic, in which I was one of the presenters. As you might expect, the 7 respondents had very different things that they focused on. The provost at IWU, for instance, noted that most of our graduates in the CCCU are in adult programs, but that we don’t have very good data on these kinds of topics as they relate to adult learners. Others noted the role of diversity in developing critical thinking skills.

My response focused on the “knowing-doing gap” in that all of our institutions hear these sorts of explanations about academic challenge and student learning outcomes, but we really don’t change much of what we’re doing to accommodate this information. To take just one example, our salary systems are predicated on a 19th century German research model (hierarchical, knowledge based, oriented toward scholarship) instead of rewarding those who produce the best outcomes by these measures of academic challenge and student learning. At the institution-wide level at JBU, for instance, we have almost an inverse relationship between pay levels and academic challenge/student learning outcomes. But it’s obvious that these structures are so firmly ingrained in our academic cultures and that we have such significant questions about the validity or applicability of this type of research (perhaps because these structures are so firmly ingrained?), that I concluded in my talk that we were unlikely in the near future to see any real movement toward taking this data seriously. After my depressing presentation, my fellow panelists felt so bad for me that they gave me a group hug. 


Evidence on student learning - Pascarella & Terenzini

- Wabash Study results of longitudinal studies of 49 institutions and 17,000 students
- conservative approach designed to produce lots and lots of complicated data
- nsse is a reasonable approach at the institutional level to figuring out whether these experiences are leading to the desired outcomes, but much of these outcomes are due to the kinds of students that we recruit and not the programs and activities that we're running
- they replicated academically adrift results with different tests and different students. 17 percentile points over 4 years, roughly 1/3 making non-significant four year gains, spending 15 hours a week studying. But what kind of change and how much should we be looking for? Kids not going through college can also change, some for the better and some for the worse (such as in faith development).
- good teaching does make a difference in engagement and re-enrollment, and they are learnable skills. One standard deviation increase leads to 30% increase in re-enrollment.
- diversity experiences counted more than anything else in developing critical thinking skills. Had the most effect on students with lower ACT scores.
- effect of study abroad is weak, perhaps because of selection effect. Factor that out and it does impact orientation toward engaging in diverse social and cultural activities.
- liberal arts colleges have higher levels of perceived good teaching, high quality of interaction with faculty, academic challenge, high academic expectations, liberal political views
- why does collaborative learning approaches look good here but bad in academically adrift.
- curriculum that is interdisciplinary, integrated, and academically challenging
- out of class experiences have significant effects not just on psychosocial and related social skills but also academic and intellectual skills. Students do have to be involved with this to make it work.
- same with in class experiences affecting social outcomes
- experiences that influence student learning include experiencing different ideas and people, that requires active engagement with this cognitive dissonance, that occurs in a supportive environment, that confronts real world problems, that deals with relationships, that incites reflection and analysis.
- there are many roads to being an effective educational institution, but it does need to follow these approaches and themes
- focusing too much on parts or on best practices is a problem. Focus on the larger themes and on being effectives (outcomes)
- the peer and organizational contexts also affect student learning. It's not only the direct experiences people have but the context within which everyone operates.
- set the culture in the first year

Steve Jobs - Tweaker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell

As usual, I enjoyed Gladwell's explanation of the influence that Jobs has had and why he had it. As with much of Gladwell's work, the argument is that genius is seldom (and less and less so) the lone individual creating ex-nihilo but someone why knows greatness "when he sees it" and then "tweaks" from there to create something much more refined.

Our Universities: Why are they failing?

Good review of some recent books on the topic.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false

Daniel Kahneman, the top social scientist of the last half century?

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Anatomy-of-Influence/129688/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112

Much of what I've been reading in recent years really comes back to Kahneman's work from the 70s.

The West and the Rest?

Niall Ferguson is something of a “bad boy” economic historian from England known for his controversial stances. He’s also become something of a PBS celebrity. Here’s the summary version of his new book and his new PBS series.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/niall-ferguson-how-american-civilization-can-avoid-collapse.html

Sexual Relationships in the 21st Century

Combine these two Atlantic articles, and you have a whole new cultural world that our kids are coming out of. What’s also interesting to me as an historian, however, is that we seem to have a “whole new world” every century or so. Such a dramatic shift in cultural norms isn’t unprecedented, in other words, but it sure is making our lives more complicated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

The University of Wherever

Another "change in higher education" article, this one focused on the discussions at Stanford.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion

California AND Bust

Michael Lewis is a fun writer, one of my favorites, so even though this isn't an education story, I'm posting the link. I particularly enjoyed page 6 of this article, the story of the fat pheasant.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-lewis-201111