Category: higher education
Is the College Debt Bubble About to Pop?
The New York Times has been running a series about the college debt crisis. Both public and private institutions continue to hike tuition and fees, resulting in graduates coming into the job market with greater debt loads and relatively poor prospects of finding employment that pays well enough to retire that debt in a timely [...]
A Consumer’s Guide to MOOCs
Want to compare the various MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) out there? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a handy guide here. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded [...]
“Academically Adrift” is Methodologically Adrift
That’s the buzz, anyway. You’ve probably read about the latest jeremiad on higher education: Academically Adrift. Among its findings is the claim that 45 percent of students show no academic improvement during the first two years of their undergraduate careers. People are taking exception to the report’s findings and methodology. At the Chronicle of Higher [...]
Are Colleges Becoming Dropout Factories?
Jordan Weissmann raises that issue in the latest Atlantic Monthly: The phrase “dropout factory” is ordinarily applied to America’s failing high schools — the ones where students are expected to fall through the cracks, where those who make it past graduation and on to college are considered the exceptions, the lucky survivors. But by that [...]
A Good Time for Tech-led Education Start-Ups
This according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education: In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, [...]
Higher Education: Will MOOCs Change Everything?
Over at Inside Higher Ed, University of Prince Edward Island graduate student Bonnie Stewart weighs in on the affect that massive online open courses (MOOCs) like MITx will have on higher education: Too often, MOOCs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it [...]
