Topic: Educational Transformation

There is an unstated subtext to the growing calls for colleges and universities to lower their costs. When colleges and universities are asked to lower their costs, what they are really being asked to do is lower their costs without decreasing quality. There is no other way to square cost concerns with the other major demand on higher education: to increase completion rates. When we talk about costs, what we’re actually talking about is productivity—increasing output for the same or…

The discussion about MOOCs and their impact on higher education has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. The fear and foreboding that accompanied MOOCs’ explosive debut has dissipated. It seems that the MOOC storm has passed. Much of that hype was predicated on the expectation that these new free courses were going to replace traditionally delivered higher education and reduce the price of pursuing degrees. There was also a belief that these courses would undermine or “unbundle” the…

In a new NBER working paper released this month, economists from the University of Texas and Texas A&M scrutinize some of the factors motivating racial and ethnic differences in college application choices, using data from the entire population of high school graduates in Texas over the past two years. In disaggregating rather than lumping together minorities (as some other studies do), the authors find that Hispanic students are in particular less likely to apply to any college, even after…

As part of a panel organized for the recent annual conference of the American Library Association in San Francisco, I was invited to talk about future trends in higher education. This was something of a fool’s errand, I realize, since we are bombarded every day by the media with higher education’s most pressing challenges and opportunities:   Low completion rates New pedagogies that meet more of today’s students’ needs—online learning, competency-based education, etc. Need for a higher education ecosystem…

The concept of the “student swirl” was conceived in the 1980s to describe undergraduates who moved among institutions before earning a bachelor’s degree. Students who transferred often did so because they made a poor initial match with an institution, or encountered academic or financial problems along the way. But now there is a growing body of evidence that students might be making a deliberate choice to transfer institutions as part of their pathway to a bachelor’s degree. First there is…

A recent study by Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith, and Julia Fox explores the relationship between siblings’ college choices. Using data from 1.6 million pairs of siblings who took the SAT between 2004 and 2011 they find that 31% of younger siblings apply to and 19% enroll in the same college as their older sibling. They also find that younger siblings are 16 percentage points more likely than their high school peers to enroll in four-year colleges if…

My colleague Derek Wu recently wrote about dual enrollment programs and the promise they hold for improving outcomes, especially for underserved students. These programs, which allow students to earn college credits while still enrolled in high school, are just one of many forms that partnerships between K-12 systems and postsecondary institutions can take. Two and four-year postsecondary institutions across the nation have created partnerships with local K-12 districts, sharing resources, aligning curricula, and coordinating support services in order to…

After nearly two years of debate, the Department of Education has backed away from its plan to produce public ratings of colleges and universities, deciding instead to produce a data dashboard with no ratings. Users of the dashboard will be able to organize the data into custom reports of their own design, and there may be some contextualizing information, such as a comparison to the national average on certain measures. But the Department will include no judgment as to…

As college costs rise and student success rates stagnate, states and institutions of higher education have grappled with creative ways to improve student outcomes – particularly for those who are traditionally underserved. Recently, policymakers have increasingly turned to programs that target students even before they enroll full time in college, by implementing and expanding dual enrollment options that allow students to earn college credit while in high school. In theory, dual enrollment programs (along with programs like Advanced Placement…

The chance of getting into an elite college or university seems to be getting more difficult by the year. Every spring, selective institutions promote their latest admit rate, which is almost always as low or lower than the year before. It’s now a figure tracked by the mainstream media, another statistic in an endless line of numbers reported about higher education in the United States This year, Stanford received 42,487 applications, and accepted 5 percent of them. Harvard collected…

Last week, we explored what the data behind “The Effects of Rising Student Costs in Higher Education: Evidence from Public Institutions in Virginia” tell us about degree-attainment rates at community colleges. We noted that eight years after students started at a community college, only 20% of those on track to earn a bachelor’s degree had earned one, and only 14% of students in the lowest income quintile had earned one. (See the blog post from May 7,…

Recently, Arizona State University announced that it would partner with edX, the online platform for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) founded by MIT and Harvard, to offer an online freshman year of college that students could take for free without admissions and apply for credit after the fact. The announcement is just another example of efforts in recent years to rethink the bachelor’s degree from a bundle of services offered by one college over four years (usually in a…

Community colleges serve an important role in educating people from a variety of backgrounds and providing affordable access to higher education for people with a variety of educational goals. In recent years the missions of community colleges have grown, as has the number of students attending these institutions. Many community colleges serve some or all of their missions very well; others less so.  All operate with very limited resources. One important role of community colleges is to prepare students to…

In a recent report, we described changes in student-level net costs at Virginia’s public colleges and universities and their effects on student outcomes, particularly for the poorest individuals. In our most robust analysis, for example, we found that a $400 decrease in net cost for Pell-eligible students caused a 5.9-percentage-point increase in the rate at which those students stayed for a second year of college. I use the word “caused” carefully – in the social sciences, to say that…

For more than a decade, Georgia State University has focused intensively on improving the retention and graduation rates of students with long odds of succeeding. The results of this effort are truly remarkable. Between 2003 and 2014, GSU’s six-year graduation rate increased by nearly 70 percent, from 32 percent to 54 percent.  During the same period, the share of its undergraduate population eligible for Pell grants has increased by nearly 90 percent, from 31 percent to 58 percent. This dramatic…

The competitive pressures facing higher education these days are often compared to the massive changes that overwhelmed the music and publishing industries in the last decade. The music industry seems to have emerged at the other end of that transformation in better shape than it entered. The same can’t be said of newspapers, of course. But publishing companies continue to evolve and colleges and universities might still be able to learn lessons from the decisions they are now making about…

From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s announcement of the finalists for its Next Generation Courseware Challenge to the launch of the new inSpark Science Network, adaptive learning has been in the news. Though diverse in their content and structure, the core feature that adaptive learning solutions share is the ability to respond to learner activity by adjusting assessments, content, pace, and sequence of instruction. Whether offered on its own or as a supplement to face-to-face instruction, adaptive…

What happens when Professor Everybody teaches at the University of Everywhere? I’ve been grappling with this question for the last week after I heard talks at SXSWedu in Austin and then in Washington, DC about the coming free-agent, unbundled era of higher education. At SXSWedu—the education offshoot of the popular music and film festival—Jeff Young, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, explained how the so-called “sharing economy” might disrupt the higher education teaching model in…

It was announced last week that Paul Le Blanc, the President of Southern New Hampshire University, will take a three-month leave to work with the U.S. Department of Education, where he will “assist the Department’s innovation agenda, focusing on the competency-based education experimental sites project and developing new pathways for innovative programs in higher education.” SNHU is responsible for College for America, a partnership between the university and corporations to provide a new kind of learning experience that…