More Self-Sponsored and Self-Serving Far-Right Scholarly Research
Richard Vedder, an emeritus economist at Ohio University, has recently released another study showing the benefits of “right to work” legislation. In a newspaper interview, he has predicted that Ohio will adopt “right to work” legislation in 2015. Vedder has, of course, long been on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute; so, despite his…
PBS NewsHour Series on “Rethinking College”
Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…
State Legislation on Online Postsecondary Education Passed from January to July 2014
Colorado CO S 114 2014 State University Global Campus Student Access Status: Enacted – Act No. 144 Date of Last Action:* 05/02/2014 – Enacted Author: Todd (D) Topics: Postsecondary, Postsecondary-Community and Junior Colleges, Distance/online/virtual learning Summary: Amends the role and mission of Colorado State University global – campus on-line university to permit baccalaureate degree programs instead of upper-division baccalaureate completion…
The Cost of For-Profit Education
Writing in The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson observes: In the years before the mortgage crisis, financial regulators often looked the other way as banks and other lenders pursued reckless activities that cost investors, taxpayers and borrowers billions of dollars. When trouble hit, these regulators had to scramble to fix the mess that their inertia had helped create.…
Too Big–and Too Awful–to Fail
The Department of Education and Corinthian Colleges have been engaged in extended negotiations over how the for-profit corporation will either shut down or scale down its various entities, including the Everest University, WyoTech, and Heald College chains. The government actions against Corinthian Colleges came after the Harkin Report highlighted Corinthian’s extraordinarily high student-loan default rate,…
So Everything That We Have Read and Heard Is Wrong?
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…
Reinvesting in Higher Ed: A Lesson from Four States
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ Jeff Kolnick CFHE Guest Columnist The dramatic increase in college tuition and fees over the past dozen years is justifiably big news. Few doubt that the massive disinvestment of public dollars is responsible for much of the…
Collateral Damage: The Problem With Proposed Institutional Performance Standards for Federal Financial Aid
It is easy to teach good students. The “star teachers” at Harvard or Stanford can assume a certain knowledge base as starting points in their classes and can set expectations that the majority of their students can reasonably meet. They have a narrow range of students, all of whom have been carefully selected through an…
The Dirty Secret in the Education Wars: Money Matters
This post was written by Jeff Bryant for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Riger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s…