More on the ‘bifurcation’ of higher education

Nicholas Lemann argues that elite colleges are actually priced too low.

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do. The number of applications to those schools continues to grow faster than their cost. (Ivy League colleges will charge about sixty thousand dollars next year.) That’s because the perceived value of their degrees continues to rise. Now that we know that either Obama or Romney will be President next year, we also know that, from 1989 through at least 2017, every President of the United States will have had a degree from either Harvard or Yale or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. That could be a three-decade accident, or it may be a sign of something lasting—the educational version of the inequality surge, elevating “one per cent” institutions far above the rest.
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The trend in higher education may be in the direction of sharper class distinctions, and Lemann thinks pumping more taxpayer money into more colleges will improve opportunity and help society.

In higher education, the United States may be on its way to becoming more like the rest of the world, with a small group of schools controlling access to life membership in the élite. And higher education is becoming more like other areas of American life, with the fortunate few institutions distancing themselves ever further from the many. All those things which commencement speakers talk about—personal growth, critical-thinking skills, intellectual exploration, breadth of learning—will survive at the top institutions, but other colleges will come under increased pressure to adopt the model of trade schools. Student loans open access to students, and give colleges more freedom. Obama and Romney will have plenty to disagree about, and it’s good that the interest rate on student loans isn’t on the list. For the federal government to pump extra tuition money into the system, in the form of low-cost loans, in order to spread opportunity more widely, and to allow more schools to provide more than skills instruction, seems like a small price to pay for the kind of society it buys.

I don’t think simply pumping extra tuition money into the system will bolster the growth of rigorous institutions that produce intellectual graduates with strong critical thinking skills.  The problem I see is a scarcity of high school graduates adequately prepared for those types of colleges.  Unless that changes, we’re likely to continue to see the growing bifurcation between elite universities and “trade schools”.

Harvard online learning: ‘five years from now will look very different from what we do now’

Last week Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their new partnership, known as edX, will offer free online courses.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.

Coursera and Udacity, two other MOOCs (massively open online courses) from elite universities have also recently been announced.  This online thing seems to be taking off, accompanied by ardent predictions from educators.

“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,” said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard …

“Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation.…

President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”…

Online learning is not brand new, but David Brooks makes a point about the recent entry by the most selective institutions:

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures….

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Rescrambling.  Makes me think of this.

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
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College-educated wives dropping out of the workforce

College-educated wives married to similarly educated husbands are leaving the workforce in increasing numbers, creating a trend that may hinder an already weak economic recovery.  But will young men’s lower college graduation rates reverse this trend?

… between 1993 and 2006, there was a decline in the workforce of 0.1 percent a year on average in the number of college-educated women, with similarly educated spouses.

That contrasts with growth of 2.4 percent a year between 1976 and 1992.

The result: the labor force in 2008 had 1.64 million fewer such women than if the growth rate had kept up its earlier trend, slightly more than 1 percent of the total workforce in that year….

May have a negative effect on economic growth

Stefania Albanesi, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one of the study’s authors, said the loss may hurt economic growth at a time when the nation can ill afford to have highly skilled workers on the sidelines….

Dropping out of the workforce is not just for the super-wealthy, and babies are not the reason these women are staying home.

But the trend is not limited to top earners. It has been detected among households earning around $80,000 per year….

… it’s not the tug of looking after young children that makes most educated women give up their career.

“These women usually give up their jobs when their children are school-age and not babies any more,” Albanesi said.

This doesn’t surprise me.  I know I’m not the only mom who found that juggling babies and work was a lot easer than caring for older, school-aged children while working full-time.  As they grow older, the logistical, disciplinary, and emotional needs of children can become more complicated.  For me, out-sourcing childcare for my pre-teens proved more challenging than finding a good caregiver for my babies.

Will the more women than men graduating from college, will this trend be affected?

Educational homogamy, the tendency to marry someone of the same educational level, is a decades-long pattern particularly strong among college graduates.  With the declining “supply” of men who are marriage material for educated women, what will happen?  Will female college graduates change their behavior and join their less-educated sisters in the growing trend of having children outside of marriage?  Or maybe they will begin to marry down in greater numbers.  In this case, quitting work to care for children may not be such a good option for wives out-earning their husbands, and we may see more men staying home to care for children.  That would be a significant shift in traditional gender roles, with unpredictable effects on families.

Add in the higher education bubble to these possible scenarios and anyone’s prediction about the next 30 years starts to look very fuzzy.  All I can think to do is advise my children to be ready for anything and be careful what you wish for.

Related articles:

• Non-marital births by education level as part of the growing class divide
• US Economy: Women Leaving Workforce Over Past 20 Years (wire.kapitall.com)
• Decline in Labor Force Participation Reflects Demographics, May Not Be as Bad as Reported

The Minerva Project is an attempt to establish an elite online university

The Minerva Project is attempting to create an elite online university, a move that if successful could accelerate the higher education reform being driven by escalating costs and improving technology.

Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America’s educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry’s sites.

That is, until now.

This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,” and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he’s joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.

A shortage of elite schools

… The demand for elite, American-style education far outstrips the current supply, he explained, not just stateside, but worldwide….  applications from qualified students are skyrocketing, while admissions rates are falling.

The Minerva business model

… The idea is to scoop up those students who are being shut out, whether it’s a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts. Minerva will admit applicants based on their academic chops alone — jocks need not apply — and students would live in urban dorms scattered across the globe’s great cities. They’ll take online courses designed by highly esteemed professors from other established institutions. Meanwhile, tuition would cost “less than half” the price of the standard Ivy league sticker price (so somewhere around $20,000 or below). That, anyway, is the plan.

There are opposing opinions on whether something like this can work, and I can only go on my feeling that some big change is around the corner.  Exactly how it will shake out is probably anyone’s guess, but imposing stringent admission standards would be critical in raising the prestige of any online institution.

The value of peer interaction on a physical campus is cited as one reason online college will always be considered second best.  On the other hand, the argument is made that young people are finding online interaction to be just as important as  face-to-face meetings.  Perhaps related,  it has recently been reported that a smaller percentage of teens are bothering to get their driver’s license these days.

A physical campus helps create a community of scholars who engage in various social, artistic, political, and humanitarian pursuits that are integral to the experience sought by elite students.  But if an individual has the smarts and the initiative, an online community could also offer support for getting this type of experience,  just without the need to go into debt for next 20 years.

Will the Minerva Project be the the first elite online university?  If so, we may have to make room for an online Ivy League.

The Minerva Project

Related:  Online degree from London School of Economics for $5,000

No shame in living at home after college (usually)

Young adults living with their parents is on the rise, but it’s not always a bad thing.

“Few are proud to carry the stigma of a ‘boomerang kid’ — someone who moves back in with their parents after failing to make ends meet on their own. But the move makes a lot of financial sense, and could serve as a springboard that can get boomerang kids off to a flying start when they head back out into the cruel world.

Amanda Grad Meets World justifies boomeranging, describing how the plan is working for her. Thanks to help from her parents, she’s able to plot out her career without burying herself in debt.

‘Think about it — how many of you would rather be in debt up to your eyeballs instead of having the ability to put money away in the bank? How many of you would rather struggle, and I mean really struggle, during a Recession rather than taking it easy and trying to do things the smart way?

On the other hand, there are lessons to be learned  from early struggles that may prove valuable in the years ahead.  Let me put it this way.  Surviving hard times by depending on your own resources, both personal and financial, can help you gain the confidence that will buoy your chances of success during the next difficult episode in your life.  Because you know there will be more, right?

But it’s also true that  sometimes those rough early struggles can break your spirit, weaken your confidence, and set you back financially in a way that is difficult to recover from.

I am open to the possibility that my own kids will boomerang back home at some point, and I would be happy to help them if this happens.  However, I’ve seen unhappy, dysfunctional  cases of slacker kids postponing adulthood indefinitely while being enabled  by weak-willed parents.  I don’t want to fall into that trap.

Related articles

• Is it wrong to be your kid’s administrative assisstant? (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

An important step in breaking higher education’s credentialing monopoly?

On the road to the dismantling of  higher education’s expensive monopoly on credentialing comes an announcement of new online testing options for students.  

First, a review of economics.

… If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes. Resources (dollars) are scarce, and individuals want to make the best use of them. They “maximize their utility” by shifting away from high-priced good or service A to lower-priced good B.

Students and employers are stuck in our current system, where colleges hold credentialing monopoly.

With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes–the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at communicating, disciplined, etc., is by presenting a bachelor’s degree diploma. College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status.

As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren’t there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers?

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New competency tests as college alternatives:

The search for alternative ways is leading to other entities offering credentials for much less than the $30,000-$60,000 per year that colleges charge.  New agreements between Burck Smith’s StraighterLine, the Education Testing Service (ETS), and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to offer online competency tests have just been announced.

Students can tell employers, “I did very well on the CLA and iSkills test, strong predictors of future positive work performance,” and, implicitly “you can hire me for less than you pay college graduates who score less well on these tests.”

Will it be more “fair”?
The suggestion is that employers will be a driving force in the move to alternative credentialing as a way to keep salary costs in line.  This could be true, pointing to a possible increasing class divide between high and low earners, with only graduates of elite residential colleges in the running for top salaries.  On the other hand, employers would be able to spurn the graduates of the many expensive-but-mediocre colleges in favor of alternatively credentialed employees who would be able to compete for jobs on a true merit basis.

More:  How quickly will the Higher-Ed Revolution happen?

It’s happening, almost overnight: what could be the collapse of the near-monopoly that traditional brick-and-mortar colleges and universities currently enjoy as respected credentialing institutions whose degrees and grades mean something to employers.

Related:  Higher education is a prisoner’s dilemma

Are college students with psychological problems over-indulged?

Increased incidents of  psychological problems among college students have caused colleges to become more accommodating, but some wonder if all this is just another sign of  a coddled generation.

Colleges say they’re seeing more students on campus with psychiatric illnesses. About 11.6% of college students were diagnosed or treated for anxiety in the last year, and 10.7% were diagnosed or treated for depression, according to a survey of more than 100,000 students at 129 schools conducted by the American College Health Association. Many mental illnesses, particularly depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, emerge during late adolescence.

Psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety can have serious academic consequences because they affect concentration, sleep and cognitive processing, say mental health professionals.

Institutions are required to comply with the American for Disabilities Act, but it can get complicated.

Schools say they can’t require faculty to adjust deadlines or attendance policies. And in some courses, like science labs and speech classes, participation is critical, but schools can push instructors to compromise with students.

Even with increased accommodations, psychological conditions are often not viewed as charitably as physical ones.  Is it really an anxiety disorder, or simply a frail temperament overwhelmed by hard work and tough deadlines?  And does a school’s forgiving attitude adequately prepare graduates for a competitive work environment?

“There’s the danger that we take too much care and when they hit the real world that same kind of support isn’t there,” says David Cozzens, dean of students and associate vice president of student affairs at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

This harsh tone was typical among the 250 comments to this story:

I am so sickened by this article I don’t even know where to begin…….what a bunch of coddled whiners this generation is…….if these students cannot make deadlines because their “karma” is upset ot they are having a bad day caused by the pressure of deadlines and exams…then they should be allowed to fail…as they will in the real world whjere they will not be coddled or catered to….there will be nobody to ‘understand’ just somebody in line to take their job and they will be fired…deservedly…this is not high school…you are in college to perform…under all sorts of pressures….performance requires that you deliver the goods when asked to do so…not on your own timetable…those who can will advance…those who do not will fail…and oh by the way…when allowed an extra 10 days to complete her report where is the fairness to the other students who busted their you know what to be on time? If she is that mentally oppressed and cannot play by the rules then she should simply not be there.

Ouch!  It’s a tough world, even if official attitudes seem more humane  than before.  Parents and students dealing with psychological problems should become fully informed about individual school policies.

Some formal accommodations, like additional test time, are fairly standard across universities and apply to students with physical and learning disabilities, too. But, schools diverge widely on formal accommodations for flexibility with assignment deadlines, class attendance and participation. Some schools leave it up to individual instructors. Others intervene more directly on students’ behalf.

Some more tough talk from college professors over at College Misery

Related articles

• Mental Illness in Kids: The Surprising Warning Signs (everydayhealth.com)

Getting smarter or grade inflation? – College grades have improved since 1960

With an increasing percentage of A’s being “earned” in college classrooms, are we to conclude that students are getting smarter?  Or are we experiencing grade inflation?  A new study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy that examines grades over 69 years suggests the latter, a finding consistent with results reported by the authors of Academically Adrift.

Findings/Results: Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Conclusions/Recommendations: As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.

Increase in A’s correlates with two enrollment factors

In considering the possible causes of more A’s for college students, two opposing factors come to mind.  One is the overall increase in the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in college.  Expanding higher education opportunities for more youngsters has probably created a pool of students less academically prepared than those of recent generations, a reason often given for declining SAT scores but inconsistent with the increase in better grades.  Another competing factor is the higher proportion of women attending college.  From elementary grades to college, females earn higher grades than males do, so the increase in A’s could be related to this.

Higher overall percent attending college

More women attending college

test

Related articles

• Eric Claire: Grade inflation, lack of effort hurts secondary education (tcpalm.com)

Hybrid learning breaks down geographic barriers for Northeastern University

Northeastern University is expanding its brand of co-op business education across geographic regions by investing heavily in hybrid education, with its first branch campus in Charlotte, NC.

The goal is to offer master’s degrees in industries like cybersecurity, health informatics and project management, matching programs with each city’s industries and labor needs, through a mix of virtual learning and fly-ins from professors based in Boston (tuition will be the same as at the main campus).

And it’s not doing it on the cheap

Northeastern, which is spending $60 million to support the expansion, is perhaps the most ambitious of a handful of brick-and-mortar institutions looking to broaden their footprint in new markets and with new methods of instruction….

Northeastern has hired 261 tenured and tenure-track professors in the last five years, about twice as many as in the previous five, and plans to add 200 more in the next three years — all of whom will be based at the home campus in Boston.

Examining traditional assumption that face-to-face is always better than online

“This is a time of huge transition in an industry that hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages,” said Charles P. Bird, a former vice president of Ohio University who helped develop the institution’s online offerings and now works as a consultant. “Higher education is going from traditional face-to-face delivery, and the unexamined assumption that that is good, to thinking about delivering a high-quality online experience, whether fully online or hybrid.”

Drexel University has struggled with a similar enterprise it began in 2009, perhaps miscalculating the importance of local relationships.

“Bill Gates says place is going to matter less and less for universities in the future, but I think that’s wrong,” said Mr. Aoun, Northeastern’s president. “I think a successful university has to be part of a community.”

Savings for students, and the question of quality

Tuition costs for Northeastern’s new hybrid master’s are the same as those for its Boston campus program, but the savings for students will be in time, convenience, and living expenses.  I remember years ago when my husband was planning his return to school to pursue an MBA.  Since online was not an option, we had to price out the potential costs in terms of my lost income and moving expenses.  Today, that equation is quickly changing.

An important question that remains unanswered is about how the quality of online education compares with face-to-face.  Northeastern, ranked 56 on BusinessWeek’s list of business schools , would seem to have a good chance of serving up a high quality experience with its hybrid approach.

Related:

• The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is taking its brand online.
• M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program 

M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program

M.I.T. has enhanced its long-standing free online course program.

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

CREDENTIAL for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught!

While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

“I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

The certificate will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go to support the M.I.T.x platform and to further M.I.T’s mission.

Will employers buy it?

“It seems like a very big deal because the traditional higher education reaction to online programs was, yeah, but it’s not a credential,” said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So I think M.I.T. offering a credential will make quite a splash. If I were still in industry and someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.”

Related:  Is higher education on track to lose its credentialing monopoly?