21st Century Scholar

  State Fall 2005 Fall 2006 Fall 2007 Fall 2008 Fall 2009 Fall 2010 California 5.43% 6.46% 6.20% 6.81% 8.20% 8.67% Texas 3.89% 2.16% 1.94% 1.90% 2.08% 2.41% New York 3.97% 1.63% 1.74% 1.73% 1.78% 1.92% Florida 9.52% 4.60% 5.14% 5.16% 6.05% 7.58% Arizona 41.18% 60.32% 67.01% 63.70% 73.06% 74.25% These are some interesting numbers. [...]

State Fall 2005 Fall 2006 Fall 2007 Fall 2008 Fall 2009 Fall 2010 California 26.32% 19.84% 18.85% 20.72% 24.79% 24.99% Texas 15.28% 9.85% 9.29% 9.48% 10.92% 12.98% New York 7.83% 2.81% 3.02% 3.05% 3.15% 3.33% Florida 27.28% 12.75% 14.31% 14.09% 16.31% 19.85% Arizona 89.45% 97.56% 98.06% 98.10% 98.74% 98.89% So, it looks like private for-profit [...]

I was famously quoted in a PBS documentary on for-profit education that I thought, for the vast majority of students who do not attend a highly-selective research university, that education was a business. Two years later, I have to admit, I still think so. What led me to revisit this issue was not the recent [...]

Let’s assume we’re friends and you’re hungry and out of money. You come to me and say, “I need some money for lunch.” I look in my wallet, pull out a 10, and say, “Keep the change.”  You come back in an hour and sheepishly say, “I need another five bucks.” I shake my head [...]

18 SWM, lks math, World of Warcraft & b-ball. 600s SATs, prez of MESA. Lkg 4 cllge w rays, not 2 tgh and grls. Frnd me. We’ll tlk. Okay, so maybe it won’t come to that, but I really can’t see college admissions doing business tomorrow the way they are doing it today. In an [...]

Accreditation is the primary barrier to innovation in American higher education … the biggest barrier to real competition. Accreditation is the biggest barrier to real change.  –Charles Miller, Chair of the Spellings Commission Consistent with this approach are the general assumptions on which accreditation processes are based, including: first, that each academic institution should define [...]

I do not see the current environment as a viable option. If we want to maintain the status quo two actions would need to occur. First, state governments would need to provide many more resources to higher education than they are currently doing. Second, consumers would need to be willing (and able) to pay much [...]

To figure out where we want to go, we first need to figure out what we want to do. For most of my academic life I have harped on Ortega y Gasset’s statement about the importance of understanding the mission of higher education and if we do not, then everything else is “love’s labor lost.” [...]

Peter Scott uses the metaphor of “the angle of repose” in his nice new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. The angle of repose is an engineering term, but I know it as the title of a book by one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. In engineering an “angle of repose” is the angle at [...]

In a recent New York Times magazine article, Joe Nocera spells out a compelling argument about why we need for profit colleges. Given the fight and fury concerning the private sector colleges in the U.S. Congress, the Department of Education, and the media, I find myself frequently writing in support of the sector. My nearly [...]