21st Century Scholar

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 [...]

I admit it. I am a fan. I get misty-eyed every year when they play One Shining Moment (CBS’s montage of highlights of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament). My heart beats a little faster when I hear CONQUEST and call for Traveler. And I will drop everything at a moment’s notice and travel to South [...]

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 [...]

As this blog is being published, I find it amusingly coincidental that I am traveling through some of the United States’ most earthquake-prone areas to get to the USRio+2.0 Conference: Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. It is a conference that is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that [...]

My children live in St. Louis. Sadly, like many urban school districts, St. Louis faces desperate, some say lethal problems. The condition has been so serious that the state of Missouri has been forced to take control of the district. Several superintendents later, there is no sign of improvement and although St Louis is a [...]

It is that time of year when children extort candy from nice old people. With a joy that comes with brisk clear skies, I watch my young children at this harvest ritual. My daughter is resplendent as an ice princess. My son is startling as a prematurely bearded pirate. This festival where we celebrate the [...]

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 [...]

At the risk of aging myself, I want to refer our talk today to a time and place where I grew up. Most of my immigrant family worked in mills that supported the steel industry. Blessed with abundant resources of iron ore and coal, towns sprang up in Pennsylvania that soon became synonymous with specialty [...]

What is Gainful Employment? Why Should Universities Care? by Mark DeFusco, Ph.D. Recently, for-profit colleges and universities have been rocked by allegations of impropriety and their valuations have plummeted in the wake of hearings and Qui Tam investigations. The fear has been that these for-profit institutions have taken advantage of uninformed consumers who flock to [...]

Why Does College Cost So Much? by Mark DeFusco, Ph.D. Last month, I addressed the fact that in many cases, states were contributing a paltry amount of help to their higher education systems. The notion that the Governor of Pennsylvania is proposing to slash nearly 50% of the state’s contribution to Penn State—from 8% of [...]