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In "My Valuable, Cheap College Degree," Arthur C. Brooks presents his own personal experience with distance education to lend support for the idea of the $10K Bachelor's Degree. A graduate of Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J., Brooks was obviously very self-motivated and assembled his degree piecemeal, in much the way that supporters of MOOCs imagine that future college grads will be able to do:
I took classes by mail from the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, and other schools with the lowest-priced correspondence courses I could find. My degree required the same number of credits and type of classes that any student at a traditional university would take. I took the same exams (proctored at local libraries and graded by graduate students) as in-person students. But I never met a teacher, never sat in a classroom, and to this day have never laid eyes on my beloved alma mater.
Read the rest online at The New York Times.
In "Revolution Hits the Universities" (The New York Times, January 26, 2013), Thomas Friedman joins the rising tide of voices cheering on MOOCs as the best hope for a better future in higher education. As he concludes his piece:
I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment.
A lot has to happen before that comes to pass, but it certainly fits with the positive view espoused by Amanda Ripley in her TIME Magazine piece, "College Is Dead. Long Live College!" that we will discuss on Tuesday.
There has been an ongoing debate among economists that the rise in college graduates (and continued government policies pushing for more college grads in coming years) has cheapened a four-year degree by the simple economics of supply and demand. In "The College Grad / Employment Mismatch" (Inside Higher Ed., January 28th, 2013), Doug Lederman sums up the debate and offers some interesting facts for both sides: for while the number of jobs requiring a college degree have not increased, the pay rate for many jobs that do not necessarily require a B.A. is higher for college grads.
Though Rutgers has done brilliantly well this year in making their move to the Big Ten conference, which should eventually bring their sports programs to a self-supporting level after decades in the red, it is good to be reminded that for most schools the investment in college sports is unlikely to pay off. In fact, it is likely to be a costly mistake. That is the message of Bill Pennington's "Big Dream, Rude Awakening" (NY Times, December 29, 2012) which uses the struggles of UMass to create a big time football program as a jumping off point for discussing the risks associated with investing in college sports. Worthwhile reading.
Jason DeParle's "For Poor, Leap to College often Ends in a Hard Fall" (NY Times, December 22, 2012) is a compelling piece of journalism on the growing crisis of college debt, especially for poor students with little safety net. Following three girls from Texas who made a pact to go to college and "not end up working at WalMart," the story puts a face to what the Times's statistics show is an increasingly common experience for college students from poor backgrounds. As DeParle argues, the story of the struggle for higher education among the poor is actually the story of "the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions." As he writes:
Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.
Read the rest online.
"The Things They Taught Me" is a fascinating radio show, from Freakonomics Radio and broadcast on NPR. The discussion focuses on the costs of college and what you get for the money you spend. In the end, it is a more positive view than you'd expect considering all of the problems with college that they cover. Worth a listen.
In a trend that is likely to keep some college administrators up at night, Alex Williams reports for The New York Times that more young people are "Saying No to College." Some are following the lead of famous drop-outs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs into the computer industry, where tech skills have always trumped degrees and "one-and-done" is "almost a badge of honor." Others are following more of a "DIYU" path: learning online from MOOCs and piecing together an education on their own. Williams even suggests that the traditional college path may no longer be a good match to the current economy, which calls for and rewards creativity over conformity, as argued by Michael Ellsberg in The Education of Millionaires. The article does a good job of capturing the voices of dissent to the "college for all" paradigm, and the range of evidence it presents suggests a new anti-college convergence, especially with "Student Loan Debt Rising, and Often Not Being Paid Back." Worth reading.
