Apt. 11D

State Colleges

I'm working on an article about state colleges. Got any gripes? Got links to great research? Send it my way. 

(Off for the morning. Going to art school.) 

Guest Blogger

I'm guest blogging at the Atlantic for a couple of weeks. (Thanks so much to Megan for giving me this opportunity.) My first post tied together school vouchers and integration. 

Nicholas Lemann Explains Why College Costs So Much

Nicholas Lemann:

College costs so much because people are paying for unstated social goals. Each college and university is a collection of many different activities, some of which pay for others. Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions. More broadly, the United States created the world’s first mass system of higher education. Hundreds, not dozens, of colleges aspire to be research universities—because there lies status, prestige, and intellectual excitement—and so they have faculty members with low teaching loads. That costs money. The system is built to take in just about all high-school graduates, and that costs money, too.

I said that in the comment section of this post and in this article. 

Special Education and NCLB

Ian and Jonah went through four days of state standardized testing this month.

A lot of suburban parents gripe about the lost days of learning during that week. The morning is spent with the tests and then they rest for the afternoon. There is no homework or school projects. The nervous kids leave for school with sharpened pencils and reminders from their parents to check their work. 

I don't have a huge problem with Jonah's week of testing. It's a testing world, and he'll need those skills when he takes the SATs. I like to know how he compares with other kids in terms of math and writing. He is a good writer, but he writes very slowly. It will be interesting to see if he improves in that area this year. 

For Ian, my special ed boy, these tests are torture. He and his classmates are not on grade level for learning, but they don't know that. Until they get these tests. For four days, they take standardized tests on information that they haven't learned yet. Ian is nearly on grade level for math. He could be on grade level, but he has so much remedial work in other areas that his teachers don't push the math. His language deficits are most obvious in the reading and writing section of the test.

There's no question that Ian and all his classmates will fail the test. And they know that. They come home from school that week, sad and dispirited. 

One mom told me that she took her daughter on vacation for three days after the test to help her recover from that humiliation. 

I suppose that there are good political reasons for testing the special ed kids. If those kids were released from the testing requirements, schools would put all the slower kids into special ed classes in order to raise overall test scores for the school. However, the result is a class of humiliated children. There has to be a better way. 

Please stop humiliating the special ed kids with standardized tests. 

Vouchers For College Tuition

Dean Dad at Insider Higher Ed has a very interesting post about Pennsylvania's proposal for vouchers for college tuition.

Apparently, Pennsylvania is considering moving to a voucher system for public higher education. The idea is to zero out the direct funding for colleges and universities, and to replace it with money to students. Colleges’ funding will become a direct function of enrollment.

There’s a superficial appeal to the idea. Colleges would have to direct funding more intensively towards the kinds of things that result in higher enrollments or they would suffer cuts. At some level, the locus of power would shift to students, since he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Read the whole thing.

Even More on Student Loan Debt

There's a great article on student loan debt in this weekend's New York Times. (May I just say that it is shameful that these stories never recieved attention from the higher education newspapers until now?)

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Please play with this great tool from the NYT about debt over time, by university, and by geography. 

I'm sorry, but I won't be here much today. The hard drive on my Mac is shot after six months. I need to back everything up and get a new hard drive today. Ugh! 

MOOC

In the historic sweep of technology, higher education stands apart as a bastion of old-fashioned thinking. But in anticipation that the information revolution is coming for colleges, Ivy League colleges are competing to create online classes without the Ivy League price tag and without the Ivy League admission hurdles. In a recent article in the New Yorker, the President of Stanford, John Hennessy said, "There's a tsunami coming."

Daphne Koller, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a free online classroom, believes that Hennessy is right. "The tsunami is coming whether we like it or not," she said. "You can be crushed or you can surf and it is better to surf."

Coursera is a massive online open classroom -- or MOOC -- that operates in conjunction with four top universities - Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Princeton. Co-founded by Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera currently offers forty classes on topics ranging from poetry to robotics. Like a traditional class, each online class is comprised of a series of video lectures with PowerPoint slides. Students can participate in discussion boards and are graded on the assignments. Students who complete the course with passing grades receive a certificate of completion.

Read more here. 

Open, Online, Massive, Elite

Earlier this week, I wrote an article about the creation of free, online, open classrooms by Ivy League colleges. I believe that it's going to be published later this morning. I tried to be fair and balanced in the article, but it's hard to anticipate who you're going to piss off. Inevitably, someone gets pissed off. It's hard for someone who was trained to always be the "Nice Girl" to deal with angry Internet commenters. Ugh. I'm pacing around my office bracing myself for some blows. 

In the meantime, here are links to two bloggers writing about this same topic: Dean Dad and Audrey Waters. 

Higher Ed Links

Higher ed is hot, hot, hot right now. Here are some of stories that have been getting some buzz:

The PhD Now Comes With Food Stamps - Been there. (Thanks, Anjali.) 

Ken Auletta's "Get Rich U" was excellent. I need to read it again. 

The Chronicle fires one of their bloggers. Guess which one. 

"It's Not My Job to Read Entire Dissertations"

Wendy sent me a link to a column in the Chronicle, which mocked Black Studies departments. I should have written about it yesterday, because now it has taken off across the blogosphere. Arg!! I like to be first!

OK. Here are all the relevent links. 

On April 30, Naomi Schafer Riley wrote "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies Departments? Just Read the Dissertations." 

Commentary followed from Balloon Juice and Crooked Timber. 

Here's Riley's response.