Coder boot camps. Accelerated learning programs. New economy skills training. Whatever you call them, these new players in higher education are multiplying. The intensive programs say they can teach job-ready skills in technology, design and related fields. In record time. In three or four months of really long days, students with little prior experience are … Continue reading
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Pols’ High Anxiety Over Higher Ed
College, once a sure ticket to the middle class, is causing a lot of anxiety these days. People are concerned about its cost, about low graduation rates and about the poor employment prospects of some graduates. Hillary Clinton complained about the burden of student debt in a speech in New York last month. Senator Marco Rubio … Continue reading
Liberty University Owes Rapid Growth to Federal Student Loans
Liberty University is not just your average school down the road. The once small Christian college founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell now has the largest student body of any private nonprofit university in the country. With over 70,000 students, the university has become a destination for political candidates seeking the GOP’s more … Continue reading
Community Colleges Coming Live to California Prisons
Bryan Hirayama, an assistant professor at Bakersfield Community College, made a little bit of history this year. He became one of the first community college professors to teach inside a California state prison in roughly the last 20 years. Hirayama’s communications course at Kern Valley State Prison last spring led the way for hundreds of … Continue reading
Universities Told to Cap PhDs and Check Plagiarism
Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission (UGC) will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the … Continue reading
In California Budget Plan, Brown Wins Deal on Tuition Freeze for In-State Students
Ending a standoff over whether tuition at the University of California schools would rise, Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday that he would send millions more dollars to the university system than he had proposed earlier this year, in exchange for a tuition freeze for in-state students in the 10-campus system. The proposal, part of the … Continue reading
The Growth in College Costs Is Slowing, Particularly for Poorer Families
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, President Mitch Daniels of Purdue University said, “For decades college tuition has outpaced inflation, forcing students to increase their borrowing.” While this sort of hyperbole is rampant in the media, it’s disconcerting, to say the least, coming from a college president. Daniels claims “tuition has outpaced inflation” for … Continue reading
State Higher Ed Cuts to Widen Degree Gap
A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released Wednesday warns that persistent cuts to state higher ed budgets will widen the gap of college degree attainment. The report, titled “Years of Cuts Threaten to Put College Out of Reach for More Students,” found that, in most states, funding for higher ed … Continue reading
Federal Solutions To Our Student Loan Problem
My dad grew up in a country that was generous and farsighted enough to see that the more its people learned, the more its people earned. So after deploying to fly a B-24 Liberator over Japan, he went to college on the GI Bill and learned enough to open his own law practice. And he … Continue reading
School: What is it Good for?
One of the curious features about schooling is that there is no explicit consensus about its purpose. Any assertion with regards to function should dramatically affect both the content of what is taught and the structure in terms of how to best instill the things that are taught. For instance, if the purpose of schooling … Continue reading
