21st Century Scholar

Recently, a friend asked us for a loan. This is someone we have known for a long time and because of the vagaries of the stock market and a downturn in the economy he has seen his savings diminish at the same time as he lost his job. The prospects in this economy for a [...]

When today’s college students were born, hardly anyone used e-mail or had a cellphone. Modern communications have evolved so much since then that many young people now consider e-mail to be passé, and they would be mortified if they had to use a landline. They prefer to stay in nearly constant communication via texting, Facebook, [...]

June, 2010 In a blockbuster announcement, recently elected Republican Governor of California, Meg Whitman, announced this morning that the Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix has bought the California State University System for 1.3 billion dollars.  Whitman had pledged to balance the state’s budget and bring greater efficiencies to all state agencies, and with this action, [...]

The Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis operates SummerTIME. The program is a month-long intensive writing seminar designed for high school seniors entering a four-year college or university in the fall. Students attend daily writing seminars, conferences with writing tutors, and engage in “college knowledge” workshops on issues relating to college enrollment, such as financial [...]

Necessary limits to student access? Until recently I had assumed that student access was an unbounded goal and an unqualified “good” – more is, without exception, better, and, far into the foreseeable future, we can’t have too much of it.  Current debates on promoting access via financial aid, however, raise some questions about the inherent [...]

Roughly five states face budget cuts that approximate 30% of the state budget.  One of those states is Arizona.  If taxes are unpalatable, then a state is inevitably going to look to schools and universities as one place that will help balance the budget, and that is what is happening in Arizona.  In response, a [...]

I mentioned in an earlier thread that for-profit colleges and universities have a higher proportion of first-generation, low-income and minority college-goers than traditional institutions.  For-profits like to tout that point, and those in traditional institutions generally don’t know what to make of it.  It is embarrassing that we have profit-making organizations doing a better job [...]

In my last post I outlined what a for-profit is doing that seems legitimate and worthwhile.  A sticking point for me is the fragmentary work that faculty do.  For many of us, tenure is critically important to protect academic freedom.  Academic freedom enables me to speak my mind – as long as it pertains to [...]

A friend visited this weekend who was in town to offer a module for Walden University.  Walden is a primarily online, for-profit institution that offers graduate courses in various low-cost disciplines.  They don’t focus on lab-intensive graduate  programs such as chemistry or engineering, but instead offer classes leading to a degree in education, business, psychology [...]

We have been writing about the Governor’s proposed budgets cuts that will lessen the ability of poor students to go to college.  Less money for education will also impact the college-readiness of students precisely at a time when everyone is trying to improve it. Remediation is a vexing problem.  States do not want to have ‘college [...]