Our Under Achieving Colleges
Bok's Dark View of the Sad State of Learning in Higher Education

Golden Parachutes Rewarding Failure

What are the big faculty cat fights all about?

The 3-2 Five Year College Degree Duo Gaining Steam

Online Distance Education Is Rapidly Gaining Acceptance

A Guide on How to Be an Online Student and Survive in the Attempt

"The Overworked College Administrator," by Barbara Mainwaring, Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/10/mainwaring
How can teachers/researchers gain collegiate administrative skills?
Many professors worry that colleges these days prefer a professional class of administrators to promoting faculty members. In turn, many administrators complain that faculty members — however good at their teaching and research — may lack key skills for more responsibility. A new program at Simmons College — one of six master’s institutions receiving grants Tuesday to promote “faculty career flexibility” — aims to provide professors with a path to pick up administrative skills, without just adding on to their workloads. The grants are being awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which last year awarded similar grants to research universities.
Scott Jaschik, "Promoting Career Flexibility," Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/sloan

The Almanac of Higher Education 2009-10
The new Almanac of Higher Education features national and state-by-state data on colleges and universities, and their students, finances, and faculty and staff members, as well as regional profiles of the issues facing academe across the country.
Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://chronicle.com/section/Almanac-of-Higher-Education/141/
Jensen Comment
There's a ton of financial information here, including salary juxtaposed against cost of living in different regions.

Foreign Students Pour Back Into the U.S.

Asian Countries, Especially China, Investing Trillions More in Education

Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools

• Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools
• Lean Times for MBA Programs
• Accounting Profession Holds Steady Despite Turbulent Economy
• Doctoral-Level Accounting Faculty Numbers Continue to Decline (while demand increases)
• Credentials of Accounting Instructors Are Changing Dramatically

Dating Students May Be Roommates in Dorms

Student Engagement

Student Partying Controversies
How should administrators handle student-sponsored events that feature alcohol?
Or, for that matter, half-naked partygoers dressed in caution tape?

Unacceptable Dropout Rates

Sex and the Modern Language Association Academic Conferences

Teaching Excellence Secondary to Research for Promotion, Tenure, and Pay

Teaching Evaluations and RateMyProfessor

Smile Professor, You're on Candid Camera

Does faculty research improve student learning in the classrooms where researchers teach?
Put another way, is research more important than scholarship that does not contribute to new knowledge?

Do we want the Shotgun Game to be so dominant in academic research?

How much tenure credit should be given to micro-level research?

How should credit to co-authors (joint authors) be granted in tenure and performance evaluations?

Privatization Issues 

Endowment Funds and Accounting Controversies

Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded

Supplemental fees for excellence
A rose by any other name is , ... , ah er , ... a required supplemental enhancement charge

Financial and Academic Lack of Accountability and Conflicts of Interest

Study Abroad Conflict of Interest Fraud
What students and their parents should, but probably don't, know about study abroad programS
Questions about globalization of business schools

Professors and Colleges Skating on the Edge of Questionable Ethics

Colleges throw rocks at students who cheat
Colleges throw powder puffs at professors who cheat
Professors Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Liberal Bias in the Media and in Academe

Are we Overworking Our Graduate Teaching Assistants?

Admissions and Financial Aid Controversies: Grades are Even Worse Than Tests as Predictors of Success 
Bound to Fail
We need to get serious about creating universities that are actually designed to educate undergraduates successfully

Too Much Need for Remedial Learning in College, Too Little Success

Pre-collegiate Remedial Studies

Paying for Improved SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, TOEFL and Other Qualifying Test Scores

Note to College Presidents:  We've got kickback ethics problems right here in River City!

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education?

Academic Calendar Issues (it's more than just quarters versus semesters)

Professors Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Students Who Cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

In terms of earnings expectations, should a black student graduate from a historically black college or another college?

Some Doctoral Programs Are in Need of Big Change  

The New European Three Year Plan for Undergraduate Degrees

Nontraditional and Online Doctoral Degree Programs: Some With No Courses

Students may take the easiest way out in customizable curricula

Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge? 

Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?

What's it really like to be the president of a university?

How can you ruin a student's career and maybe her/his life on a discussion board?

Debates Over the Limits of Academic Freedom

When Professors Can't Get Along

A Call for Professional Attire on Campus

U.S. Supreme Court Speaks Out About Religion on Campus

Controversies in Doctoral and Other Graduate Programs (more clinical studies possible?)

Are American Scientists an Endangered Species?

An Internet Casualty:  The Losing Research Edge of Elite Universities

Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education 

Authoring and Faculty Ethics or Lack Thereof

Issues in Information Technology on Campus

Teaching With versus Without Textbooks

Accreditation Issues --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Colleges On the Far, Far Left Are Having a Difficult Time With Finances and Accreditation

Peer Review in Which Reviewer Comments are Shared With the World

Flawed Peer Review Process

Elite Researchers No Longer Need Peer Reviewed Elite Journals

Rethinking Tenure, Dissertations, and Scholarship
Academic Publishing in the Digital Age

Obsolete and Dysfunctional System of Tenure
Over 62% of Full-Time Faculty Are Off the Tenure Track

Inexorable March to a Part-Time Faculty

National Association of College Business Officers (NACUBO, CFOs) --- http://www.nacubo.org/

Political Correctness and Other Academic Freedom Issues
Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism
Political Correctness, Free Speech and Academic Freedom:
How Unsafe Are Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous Professors?

Does a professor have more freedom of speech than any employee?

Liberals Debate Political Islam

The Politically Correct Fracture of Academe (including sponsored boycotts of some professors)

Ethics Centers in Universities Devote Scant Attention to Ethics Breaches in Their Own Houses

What type of alumni gifts to colleges are just not politically correct?

The Politically Correct Fracture of Harvard University (including the gender gap in science)

Salary Compression, Inversion, and Controversies
How you can compare living costs between any two college towns in the U.S.?

Gender Differences versus Discipline Differences in Salaries

Non-salary Controversies

Rethinking the Roles of Spouses of College Executives

Debates on Size:  Pomona College, Amherst, and Some Other Small Colleges Plan to Grow in Size

Debates on Unionization of Faculty and Graduate Assistants

New Critique of Teacher Ed

Do we need revolutionary changes in Economics 101? 

Do we need revolutionary changes in Government 101?

Do we need huge changes in J-Schools and B-Schools?

Some Business Schools No Longer Have Silo Core Courses

New, Albeit Shaky, Partnership Forming Between Professors and the FBI

Elite colleges are for the rich and the poor and selected minorities,
but less and less for middle income families

Fraternity and Sorority Controversies

College Dating/Marrying Ain't What It Used to Be Many Long Years Ago

Athletics Controversies in Colleges 

On the Dark Side of the Higher Education Academy:
Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness

How much would you charge to help restore the tarnished image of a CEO you never knew?

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Incredible shrinking men in higher education: 
The problem is not just a shortage of black male applicants

Declining Rate of Growth

The Eroding Faculty Paycheck

Universities may not provide commissions or other success-based rewards to student admissions officials

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Hiring and Pay Raises

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action and Academic Standards

Pre-collegiate Remedial Studies

Too Much Need for Remedial Learning in College

Graduation Trends

Why are blacks and latinos avoiding teacher education majors?

The Controversial Top Ten Percent (10 Percent) Law

Controversial Issues in Silver Spoon Admissions and Academic Standards

Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Preferences for Gay Students

Controversial Issues of the Study Abroad (International Studies) Curriculum

Dealing With Disturbed and Possibly Dangerous Students

Engineering Programs Facing Up to Possible Requirements for Masters Degrees
Accounting Programs Were Forced to Do This Via Newly-Enacted State Laws for CPA Licensure

Many Professors Oppose Free Open Sharing of Research

Some Disciplines, Especially in Business Research, Do Not Encourage Replication

Appearance Versus Reality of Trustee/School Kickbacks

Appearance Versus the Reality of Research Independence and Freedom

Appearance Versus Reality in Church Dogma and Education Integrity

College Ranking (Rankings) Issues in the Media 

Journal and School Ranking Controversies and Eigenfactor Scores

Paying More for a Lower-Ranked University: Where What You Pay is Supposed to Mean Prestige

Commission on the Future of Higher Education Final Report: 
The National Education Database and College Assessment Controversy

Earmarked research funding

The Decline of the Secular University

Too Many Law Schools

Residence Hall and Fraternity/Sorority House Fires a Growing Threat

Executives' accountability and responsibility?

Prestige Competition from U.K. Universities:  "Who Needs Harvard or Yale?"

Since the Virginia Tech massacre are college instructors more at risk?

Are college students good surrogates for real life studies?

How can you protect your work in progress and finished works on your computer?
Why are some of these alternatives problematic for your college and/or your employer?

Long Deferred Campus Maintenance:  Crumbling Buildings and Stadiums

What is the best method of peer review?
Is it truly a value-adding process?
What are the ethical concerns?
And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?

Differences between "popular teacher"
versus "master teacher"
versus "mastery learning"
versus "master educator"

Bob Jensen's threads on Cognitive Processes and Artificial Intelligence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#CognitiveProcesses

In an educational system strapped for money and increasingly ruled by standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a needless extravagance, and the arts are being cut back at schools across the country

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Downfall of Lecturing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#DownfallOfLecturing

Social Networking for Education:  The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses of Twitter)
Updates will be at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

How to author books and other materials for online delivery
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
How Web Pages Work --- http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm

Education Tutorials

Free Images from the U.S. Government --- http://rastervector.com/resources/free/free.html

Free Federal Resources in Various Disciplines --- http://www.free.ed.gov/

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

"U. of Manitoba Researchers Publish Open-Source Handbook on Educational Technology," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3671&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their own additions.

In the its introduction, the handbook declares the old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces, add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making sense of this flood of information fragments.

But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest that the institution also needs to change.”

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning ---
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning

Preface

This Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (HETL) has been designed as a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in their teaching and learning activities.

Introduction

How is education to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in the hands of learners[3], contributing to the growing complexity and confusion of information abundance?

Change Pressures and Trends

Global, political, social, technological, and educational change pressures are disrupting the traditional role (and possibly design) of universities. Higher education faces a "re-balancing" in response to growing points of tension along the following fault lines...

What we know about learning

Over the last century, educator’s understanding of the process and act of learning has advanced considerably.

Technology, Teaching, and Learning

Technology is concerned with "designing aids and tools to perfect the mind". As a means of extending the sometimes limited reach of humanity, technology has been prominent in communication and learning. Technology has also played a role in classrooms through the use of movies, recorded video lectures, and overhead projectors. Emerging technology use is growing in communication and in creating, sharing, and interacting around content.

Media and technology

A transition from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (being) suggests media and technology need to be employed to serve in the development of learners capable of participating in complex environments.

Change cycles and future patterns

It is not uncommon for theorists and thinkers to declare some variation of the theme "change is the only constant". Surprisingly, in an era where change is prominent, change itself has not been developed as a field of study. Why do systems change? Why do entire societies move from one governing philosophy to another? How does change occur within universities?

New Learners? New Educators? New Skills?

New literacies (based on abundance of information and the significant changes brought about technology) are needed. Rather than conceiving literacy as a singular concept, a multi-literacy view is warranted.

Tools

Each tool possesses multiple affordances. Blogs, for example, can be used for personal reflection and interaction. Wikis are well suited for collaborative work and brainstorming. Social networks tools are effective for the formation of learning and social networks. Matching affordances of a particular tool with learning activities is an important design and teaching activity

Research

Evaluating the effectiveness of technology use in teaching and learning brings to mind Albert Einstein’s statement: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". When we begin to consider the impact and effectiveness of technology in the teaching and learning process, obvious questions arise: "How do we measure effectiveness? Is it time spent in a classroom? Is it a function of test scores? Is it about learning? Or understanding?"

Conclusion

Through a process of active experimentation, the academy’s role in society will emerge as a prominent sensemaking and knowledge expansion institution, reflecting of the needs of learners and society while maintaining its role as a transformative agent in pursuit of humanity’s highest ideals.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

From the University of Michigan
National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife --- http://www.academicworklife.org/

Today, college and university faculty members face many challenges, including an increasingly diverse workforce and new models for career flexibility. The National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife (NCAW) provides resources to help faculty, graduate students, administrators and higher education researchers understand more about all aspects of modern academic work and related career issues, including tenure track and non tenure track appointments, benefits, climate and satisfaction, work/life balance, and policy development.

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
Assessment/Learning Issues: Measurement and the No-Significant Differences --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AssessmentIssues

Education at a Glance 2007 (Comparisons Across Nations) --- http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_39263294_39251550_1_1_1_1,00.html

Bob Jensen's threads on oligopoly textbook publisher frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals

Academic Conferences that Rip Off Colleges --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#AcademicConferences

Effort Reporting Technology for Higher Education ---
http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/uploadedFiles/ECRT_email.pdf

Assessment of Learning Achievements of College Graduates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AdmissionTesting

Work Experience Substitutes for College Credits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#WorkExperience

Has positivism had a negativism impact on research in the social sciences, business, accounting, and finance? --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluation controversies and grade inflation --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Study says B-schoolers (at the graduate level) are more likely to cheat than other students.
Now administrators are fighting back --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#MBAs

Bob Jensen's threads on course evaluations and grade inflation are at
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/28/caesar

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations and learning styles are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#LearningStyles

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on technology controversies in education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on classroom, building, and campus design are in a module at  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on Hypocrisy in Academia and the Media ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Hypocrisy.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Cognitive Processes and Artificial Intelligence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#CognitiveProcesses

Bob Jensen's advice to new faculty --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm

Ten Largest Universities in the United States

Rank	Institution	Location	Founded	Affiliation	Enrollment
1	Allama Iqbal Open University	Islamabad, Pakistan	1974	Public	1.9 million
2	Indira Gandhi National Open University	New Delhi, India	1985	Public	1.8 million
3	Islamic Azad University	Tehran, Iran	1982	Private	1.3 million
4	Anadolu University	Eskişehir, Turkey	1982	Public	884,081
5	Bangladesh National University	Gazipur, Bangladesh	1992	Public	800,000
6	Bangladesh Open University	Gazipur, Bangladesh	1992	Public	600,000
7	Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University	Andhra Pradesh, India	1982	Public	450,000
8	State University of New York	New York, United States	1948	Public	418,000
9	California State University	California, United States	1857	Public	417,000
10	University System of Ohio	Ohio, United States	2007	Public	400,000+
11	University of Delhi	New Delhi, India	1922	Public	400,000
12	Universitas Terbuka	Jakarta, Indonesia	1984	Public	350,000
13	Universidad de Buenos Aires	Buenos Aires, Argentina	1821	Public	316,050
14	State University System of Florida	Florida, United States	1905	Public	301,570 (2008)
15	Osmania University	Hyderabad, India	1918	Public	300,000 [
16	Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University	Nashik, India	1989	Public	300,000
17	National Autonomous University of Mexico	Mexico City, Mexico	1551	Public	290,000 (Aug 14th, 2006)
18	Tribhuvan University	Kirtipur, Nepal	1959	Public	272,746
19	University of South Africa	Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa	1873	Public	250,000
20	Instituto Politecnico Nacional	Mexico City, Mexico	1936	Public	229,070

Data are provided for 51 universities  --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_universities

Size Matters (Video) --- http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfunyCeU5g
Otherwise entitled "Shift Happens"

Even the Top Ranked Business Schools are in a Crisis in 2008 (including a slide show) --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_47/B4109best_business_schools.htm
Applications for MBA programs are up, but job opportunities for second-year students in finance or consulting have turned wretched.
The scary part is that it will be a long, long time before finance and economics students will have rising opportunities.

But accounting students fair well in rain or shine --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/accountingstudents.xml

Bob Jensen's threads on careers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

Bob Jensen’s threads on the financial markets meltdown --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

"The Shorter, Faster, Cheaper MBA Accelerated MBA programs of a year or less are gaining in popularity, but critics say they're not right for everyone and may leave some students shortchanged, Business Week, October 15. 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/oct2009/bs20091015_554659.htm?link_position=link1 

Schools in the U.S. are already responding to the demand from students for alternatives. One school starting a new program is Rutgers Business School (Rutgers Full-Time MBA Profile), which is launching a one-year MBA program in the summer of 2010. The school has offered a two-year MBA program on its Newark (N.J.) campus for years, but never offered a one-year program, says Susan Gilbert, Rutgers' associate dean of MBA programs, who was asked by the school to explore options for a new MBA program on the school's New Brunswick campus.

While researching, she reviewed applicant data from the past few years and unearthed a surprising discovery; about 40% of the applicants to the school's two-year MBA program already held undergraduate business degrees and were likely up to speed on the concepts typically covered in first-year core MBA courses. Adding a one-year MBA program to the school's degree offerings seemed to make sense, Gilbert says, with the idea that the program would cater to these more experienced applicants. "There's a growing niche segment of students who aren't making as big of a career switch." Gilbert says. "They want their MBAs in a hurry in order to advance their career in the field and function that they are already in."

Uptick in Enrollments

Schools that already offer one-year MBA programs say they are starting to reap the rewards of catering to this new market of students. At Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, which has offered a one-year MBA for more than a decade, enrollment is at 56 students this fall, up from 43 last year. In fact, this year's class was so big that the first-year cohort couldn't fit into the classroom where lectures are typically held and had to move into the school's larger 80-person capacity classroom, says Ken Snyder, Huntsman's director of MBA programs.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are lots of pressures for change in academe, but shortening the MBA program to one year or less is not the type of change I advocate in any way, shape, or form. When other professions like medicine are adding to the education requirements, cheapening the MBA degree is not a good idea for status as a profession.

I graduated from a one-year MBA program a hundred years ago and found it to be almost a joke. It got me out of a few business courses when I commenced a doctoral program in accountancy, but aside from that I think it did little for preparing me for a career in business. Of course, in Colorado in those days you could take the CPA examination as a senior majoring in accountancy. Hence, I entered the MBA program with the CPA exam already under my belt. In those days, an MBA degree in accountancy in Colorado also substituted for work experience, which made getting a license to practice in Colorado an even bigger joke (if I had not also worked in auditing and tax at Ernst and Ernst in Denver).

The proof of the pudding so to is said to be placement. If recruiters are offering jobs to one-year MBA graduates then some might deem the education program to be a success. However, this can be misleading. Some one-year MBA programs cater to military officers or other applicants who are not seeking immediate changes in their jobs upon graduation. Recruiters may also have other agendas such as badly wanting to hire a top engineer or hospital administrator who just happened to get a one-year MBA degree before seeking a new job. And recruitment can be motivated by affirmative action that sometimes leads to hiring of graduates that were short changed in education.

I am most definitely opposed to giving course credit or shortened degree programs to students with "work or other qualified life experience." By age 25, all God's children got "life experience." This in no way, shape, or form is a substitute for earned college credits --- well, er, maybe I could be convinced otherwise in a very unique circumstance, but as a general rule --- never!

For MBA applicants who majored in business as undergraduates I would allow waiving some core courses, but I would insist on substituting other courses.

Bob Jensen's thread on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Definition of Millenials (Generation Y or Net Generation) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

"The Millennials Invade the B-Schools:  They're pursuing MBAs to change the world, but first they're forcing business schools to make changes in order to accommodate them," Business Week, November 13, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_47/b4109046025427.htm?link_position=link2

Top Global Business Schools According to Business Week --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006014.htm

Slide Show --- Click Here
The 15 business schools included here are strong contenders among the world's top MBA programs, but lower marks keep them just shy of the top tier

Top European Business Schools According the Business Week --- http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/03/31/2008europeanb-s.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Controversies in College Rankings --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Test Drive Running a University
Virtual Learning Games/Simulations for Understanding the Complexities of Managing a University
This is a very serious virtual learning project funded, in large measure, by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

"Virtual University (a free download) --- http://www.virtual-u.org/

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on April 15-16 the Education Arcade, The Comparative Media Studies Program at M.I.T., The Virtual U Project, and The Serious Games Initiative will host a two-day workshop at M.I.T titled “Game Simulations for Educational Leadership & Visualization: Virtual U and Beyond”. This event is designed to look at the past, present, and future of games about education and educational life.

Virtual U is designed to foster better understanding of management practices in American colleges and universities.

It provides students, teachers, and parents the unique opportunity to step into the decision-making shoes of a university president. Players are responsible for establishing and monitoring all the major components of an institution, including everything from faculty salaries to campus parking.

As players move around the Virtual U campus, they gather information needed to make decisions such as decreasing faculty teaching time or increasing athletic scholarships. However, as in a real college or university, the complexity and potential effects of each decision must be carefully considered. And the Virtual U Board of Trustees is monitoring every move.

Virtual U models the attitudes and behaviors of the academic community in five major areas of higher education management:
 

Spending and income decisions such as operating budget, new hires, incoming donations, and management of the endowment; Faculty, course, and student scheduling issues; Admissions standards, university prestige, and student enrollment; Student housing, classrooms, and all other facilities; and Performance indicators.

Virtual U players select an institution type and strive for continuous improvement by setting, monitoring, and modifying a variety of institutional parameters and policies. Players are challenged to manage and improve their institution of higher education through techniques such as resource allocation, minority enrollment policies, and policies for promoting faculty, among others. Players watch the results of their decisions unfold in real- time. A letter of review from Virtual U's board is sent every "year," informing players of their progress.

Jensen Comment
Click on "Team" to be impressed with credentials of the development team, including William F. Massey, the long-time President of Stanford University.

Virtual University may be downloaded free and/or ordered in a box set of disks.

One potential application is in not-for-profit accountancy classes where students can learn how to prepare and analyze financial reports for decision making.

There are all sorts of applications for advanced managerial accountancy classes as well.

Bob Jensen's threads on virtual learning and simulations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

Grade Inflation and Dysfunctional Teaching Evaluations (the biggest scandal in higher education)

College is about having a career after high school, after college, so you want students to understand the material and not just get good grades in class. I feel like it’d be better for the students to actually understand the material and for the teachers to change their teaching so that the students get a real understanding.
Student, Los Medanos College

Grade Inflation and Teaching Evaluations

Especially note the grade inflation graphs at www.Gradeinflation.com

For many years teaching evaluations were private (often anonymous) communications between students and teachers. When colleges commenced to share teaching evaluations with department heads, deans, and promotion/tenure committees, grade inflation commenced to soar. When employers commenced to refuse to even interview students below a B+ or A- overall grade average, college students commenced to lobby intensely for higher grades.

Especially vulnerable are assistant professors whose careers are on the line when their teaching evaluations are shared with promotion and tenure committees. Especially vulnerable are all professors in colleges that share teaching evaluations with the entire college community and/or the world. Also vulnerable are over a million professors who are on public display at RateMyProfessor.com --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

Sadly, many of our "Coach Grahams and Gazowski's" of the teaching world commenced to care more about their careers than their students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm

To obtain data on GPA trends, click on the institution of interest. Median grades of graduates, the 50th percentile of a graduating class, will be about 0.1 higher than the GPAs shown here. When data sources do not indicate how GPAs were computed, this is denoted as "method unspecified." All non-anonymous sources are stated on the data sheets.

Especially note the grade inflation graphs at www.Gradeinflation.com

Valen E. Johnson, a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan and author of "Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education" (Springer Verlag), said the use of student ratings to evaluate teachers also inflates grades: "As long as our evaluations depend on their opinion of us, their grades are going to be high."
Links to several formal studies if the impact of teaching evaluations on grade inflation ---

The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

It is also commonly said that grade inflation is by far the worst in Ivy League schools. This isn't exactly correct, either. I discuss this issue at length in our recently finished research paper on college grading in America. It's beyond the scope of this web post to examine this issue except to note that while grades are rising for all schools, the average GPA of a school has been strongly dependent on its selectivity since the 1980s. Highly selective schools had an average GPA of 3.43 if they were private and 3.22 if they were public as of 2006. Schools with average selectivity had a GPA of 3.11 if they were private and 2.98 if they were public
Stuart Rojstaczer, GradeInflation.com --- www.Gradeinflation.com 

College students are not as intelligent
Where as college grades are being inflated, intelligence of students in college is being deflated with rising numbers of college admissions. A much larger fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of average cognitive ability.
"College students are not as intelligent" --- http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/college_students_are_not_as_in.php

"Grade Inflation Seen Rising," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, March 12, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/12/grades

A professor who has crusaded against grade inflation by gathering and publicizing data has released his largest analysis to date -- suggesting that grade inflation continues to be a broad problem across much of higher education. The figures may embarrass some colleges and renew a debate over whether students experience enough rigor.

The new analysis found that the average grade-point average at private colleges rose from 3.09 in 1991 to 3.30 in 2006. At public colleges and universities, the increase was from 2.85 to 3.01 over the same time period. The study also examines -- and seek to refute -- the idea that students are earning better grades simply because they are better prepared. The greatest increases in grades appear to be coming at flagship public universities in the South and at selective liberal arts colleges.

The study was done by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who created GradeInflation.com to document these trends. For this study, he significantly expanded the numbers of institutions examined, and the time frame.

In addition, Rojstaczer says that his new study shows that it is possible to tame grade inflation. He finds that Princeton University has largely done so -- by making an issue of grades and encouraging professors to give a broader distribution of grades. Further, he finds that there is one sector that has held the line against inflated grades: community colleges.

Rojstaczer's findings will likely resonate with professors, many of whom regularly bemoan grade inflation and say that students are conditioned to expect good grades just for showing up, and that professors who refuse to go along get punished with harsh course evaluations. Many professors who are off the tenure track or who are pre-tenure report great fear of being punished by students (and then not rehired) if they gain a reputation for tough grading, and studies have found correlations between being an easy grader and earning good ratings at RateMyProfessors.com. But other researchers question this study and conventional wisdom and say that reports of grade inflation are themselves inflated.

Various professors start campaigns against grade inflation, but Rojstaczer has stuck with the issue. He gained national attention in 2003 with an op-ed in The Washington Post called "Where All Grades Are Above Average," an article in which he confessed to having let two years pass without awarding a C. The Web site followed, but the new data represent more colleges than ever before and come after several years in which he didn't update the statistics.

In an interview, he said that he releases this information because he believes that not much more is really needed to tackle grade inflation. "People say this issue is complicated and difficult. It really isn't. It's incredibly simple," he said. "You get so fat that it effects your health. You lose weight. I really don't see all the problems in reducing GPAs that everyone else seems to see."

He noted that once Princeton deans said that the issue mattered and encouraged tougher grading, there was a significant change. "How difficult is this?" Rojstaczer asked. Other colleges and universities have seen the opposite trend. At Brown University last year was the first time, for example, a majority of undergraduate grades were A's, up from 42.5 percent a decade earlier.

The issue matters, Rojstaczer said, because "the alternative is a student body that frequently misses class, never prepares in advance, studies about 11 hours a week if they are 'full time' students, and drinks itself into a constant stupor out of boredom. That's not an acceptable alternative anywhere."

Clifford Adelman, a senior analyst at the Institute for Higher Education Policy and a leading education researcher, has conducted extensive studies of grades and degrees, using national data sets, and he believes that grade inflation is marginal -- and that the issue receives far too much attention. (Adelman has criticized the quality of Rojstaczer's past work, and Rojstaczer has in turn been critical of the critique.)

"If grade inflation is so rampant, how come at least a third of kids who start in four-year colleges don't graduate?" Adelman asked.

"My point is not that there is no grade inflation, rather that inflation in the judgment of human performance is something that cannot be proved," he said. In many cases, he said, there is a far more significant shift going on that gets missed in the discussion of grade inflation. "A significant proportion of grades that are not really grades" are being given, Adelman said, as students and professor embrace "alternative signs of student academic behavior" in a way that "devalues grading."

Added Adelman: "I see grade devaluation as a more serious problem for a variety of reasons that Stuart would never consider, but that academic administrators and enrollment managers everywhere instantly understand when the trend is pointed out." Adelman said that he stands by his earlier work, based on national data, that there is not a national surge in grades.

Community College Standards

Rojstaczer's work focuses on four-year institutions, and most of his criticisms relate to traditional college age students. But he notes in his new report that data from community colleges suggest that professors in that sector have been getting tougher in recent years, and have never abandoned the C. Rojstaczer had data from the entire California Community College system (the largest in the United States) and selected other community colleges -- and he found none of the patterns that bothered him in the four-year sector.

Michael R. Chipps, president of Mid-Plains Community College in Nebraska, said his institution and other community colleges take grades seriously for a number of reasons. One is that community colleges use grades to track how their students do when they transfer to four-year institutions (and he noted that many community college graduates perform better than students who started at four-year institutions). In addition, he noted that because community colleges admit students with a range of academic backgrounds, accurate assessment is seen as important to help students enter the best possible programs and to track their progress.

"Community colleges want the rigor to be sufficient, so that our students can not only prosper in the world of work, but seriously compete with students at the senior level institutions," Chipps said.

At a reception for college composition instructors Wednesday night in San Francisco, professors from community colleges were not surprised that grade inflation seemed less present at their institutions than at four-year institutions -- and they were proud of their standards too.

Sandie McGill Barnhouse, chair of the Two-Year College English Association, who teaches at Rowan Cabarrus Community College, said that community college professors see it as part of their missions to teach students of a "diversity of entering skills," so there is no assumption that everyone in the class will do well. She said that many community college students haven't had great high school experiences and so aren't those demanding an A on everything.

Sharon Mitchler, associate professor of English and humanities at Centralia College, a community college in Washington State, said that she thinks grading at community colleges may be more honest because that's the way students want it. Her students, she said, are focused on how improving their writing will help them professionally, and they want to see that the course will give them new skills they can use, not a letter grade.

"If I gave out all A's, my classes would think I'd lost my mind," she said

Professors read student comments on RateMyProfessors.com and now it's their turn to strike back on video
Watch their rebuttals on video --- http://video.ratemyprofessors.com/
Note that some of these videos are chopped up into segments, so don't assume the video is over until it's over.
It appears to me that the instructors who are willing to post video rebuttals are probably more self assured and probably receive higher ratings by students than many of the lower-rated professors who do not strike back. Keep in mind that both student evaluations and instructor rebuttals at this site are self-selecting and often the students who supply evaluations in a given course are only a small proportion of the students in the course. Outliers well above and below the mean of satisfaction tend to be the respondents for a give professor.

Some of the links below may now be broken.

RateMyProfessor now claims to have archived evaluations of over 1 million professors from 6,000 schools based on over 6 million submitted evaluations from students.

The proportions of students who submitted evaluations are self selecting and miniscule compared to the number of students taught by each professor. Also the outliers tend to respond more than the silent majority. For example, sometimes the overall evaluations are based on only 1-10 self selecting (often disgruntled) students among possibly hundreds taught over the years by an instructor.

The controversial RateMyProfessor site now links to Facebook entries for professors

Our new Facebook app lets you to search for, browse and read ratings of professors and schools. Find out which professor will inspire you, challenge you, or which will just give you the easy A.
RateMyProfessor --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp

Probably the most widespread scandal in higher education is grade inflation. Much of this can be attributed to required (by the university) and voluntary (RateMyProfessor) evaluations of instructors by students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#GradeInflation

Accounting Professors are the Least Hot Business Professors (according to students)
Just in case you didn't notice, Finance professors were rated as the hottest among the business disciplines (and accounting was rated least hot). So if you're deciding between a PhD in Finance and Accounting, if you want hotter colleagues, choose Finance, but if you want to look better by comparison, go with accounting.
The Unknown Professor, Financial Rounds Blog, January 29, 2009 --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/

Jensen Comment
Although the Financial Rounds Blog has a lot of tongue in cheek, caution should be seriously noted about electing to go into a finance doctoral program. Demand for finance graduates may be down for a long, long time which, in turn, will affect the demand for new PhD graduates in economics and finance. But I've not seen anywhere that the demand for accounting PhD graduates will be relatively low for the long haul (apart from the short term budget crises colleges are having these days that in many cases has frozen virtually all hiring). In fact, a lot of undergraduate finance majors may be shifting over to accounting, thereby creating more need for accounting professors.

Apart from short term hiring freezes, the number of new PhDs in accounting is greatly in short supply such that it's probably better to consider job opportunities and to lower expectations about being rated as hot on campus --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

Question
What disciplines on campus have the hottest professors?

Answer --- Click Here

"Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com," by James Felton Central Michigan University, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell, and Michael Stinson, SSRN, July 2006 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283

Question
What criterion emerges as the single most important criterion for professorial ratings on RateMyProfessor.com?

Answer
Grading. Grade inflation has been heavily impacted by the rise in the use of required teaching evaluations for performance and tenure evaluations --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Question
If median grades for each course are made publically available on the Internet, will students seek out the high grade average or low grade average courses?
Examples of such postings at Cornell University are at http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html

Hypothesis 1
Students will seek out the lower grade average courses/sections thinking that they have a better chance to compete for high grades.

Hypothesis 2
Students will seek out the higher grade average courses/sections thinking that particular instructors are easier graders.

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.
"Easy A's on the Internet:  A surprising Cornell experiment in posting grades; plus a look at recent research into ethical behavior, service charges, and volunteer habits," by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, December 11, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2007/bs20071211_885308.htm?link_position=link2 

In a striking example of unintended consequences, a move by Cornell University to give context to student grades by publicly posting median grades for courses has resulted in exactly the opposite student behavior than anticipated.

Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences originally set up a Web site in 1997 where median grades were posted, with the intention of also printing median class grades alongside the grade the student actually received in the course on his or her permanent transcript. Administrators thought students would use the information on the Web site to seek out classes with lower median grades—because, they reasoned, an A in a class that has a median grade of B-minus would be more meaningful than say, an A in a course where the median was A-plus.

Course Shopping Leads to Grade Inflation

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.

This "shopping" in turn led to grade inflation, Vrinda Kadiyali, associate professor of marketing and economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, one of the authors, explained in an interview. The study, which is undergoing peer review, has not yet been published.

So far, however, the university has posted the median course grades only on the Internet and has not yet put those grades on transcripts. According to an article in the Cornell Daily Sun, the school will start posting the grades on transcripts in the spring. School officials were not immediately available for comment.

The research team hopes the school follows through on its plans. "That will allow Cornell to hold itself to a higher standard because it lets potential employers know where students stand relevant to other students," says Kadiyali.

The presence of the median grade data is well-known to students but less well-known to faculty. The researchers themselves were prompted to do the study when one of them learned of the Web site from a student questioning grades in her course.

Kadiyali says the formula the researchers used to come to these conclusions could easily be applied to Internet teacher rating sites, such as ratemyprofessors.com. It's something educators should consider, she adds, to find out how these posts affect the decision-making of students and, thus, professors and their courses.

Jensen Comment
The problem is that, in modern times, grades are the keys to the kingdom (i.e., keys unlocking the gates of graduate studies and professional careers) such that higher grades rather than education tend to become the main student goals. A hundred years ago, just getting a degree could open postgraduate gates in life because such a small proportion of the population got college diplomas. With higher percentages of the population getting college diplomas, high grades became keys to the kingdom. In many colleges a C grade is viewed as very nearly a failing grade.

At the same time, formal teaching evaluations and teacher rating sites like ratemyprofessors.com have led to marked grade inflation in virtually all colleges. The median grades are often A, A-, B+, or B. The poor student's C grade is way below average. Just take a look at these course medians from Cornell University --- http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Grades/MedianGradeSP07.pdf

December 19, 2007eply from a good friend who is also a university-wide award winning teacher

I'm not for easy grading, but I also wonder some about this study. Could it be that the MORE EFFECTIVE instructors are also easier graders and vice versa? I have no idea, but I'd like to see a control for this variable.

And God help us if a professor is popular! What an awful trait for an educator to have!

Jeez!

December 20, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Dear Jeez,

The terms "easy grader" and "easy grading" are probably not suited for hypothesis testing. They are too hard to precisely define. Some, probably most, "easy graders" counter by saying that they are just better teachers and the students learned more because of superior teaching. In many cases, but certainly not all cases, this is probably true. Also, it is almost impossible to distinguish easy grading from easy content. Students may learn everything in a course if the course is easy enough to do so.

Instructors will also counter that they are ethical in the sense of scaring off the poor students before the course dropping deadlines. Instructors who snooker poor students to stay in their courses and then hammer them down later on can show lower median grades without punishing better students with C grades. Fortunately I don't think there are many instructors who do this because they then face the risk of getting hammered on teaching evaluations submitted by the worst students in the course.

Easy grading/content is a lot like pornography. It's probably impossible to precisely define but students know it when they shop for easier courses  before registering. It may be possible to a limited extent to find easy graders in multiple section courses having common examinations. For example, I was once a department chair where our two basic accounting courses had over 30 sections each per semester. But even there it is possible that all instructors were relatively "easy" when they put together the common examinations.

It is widely known that nearly every college in the U.S. suffers from grade inflation. Only an isolated few have been successful in holding it down. College-wide grade averages have swung way above C grades and in some instances even B grades. It is typical any more for median grades of a college to hit the B+ or A- range, and in many courses the median grade is an A.

The Cornell study sited above covering 800,000 course grades (a lot) did not identify easy graders. It identified courses/sections having higher median grades. Higher median grades may not signify easy grading or easy content, but students seem to know what they are shopping for and the Cornell study found that students do shop around for bargains. My guess is that the last courses left on the shelf are those with median grades in the C range.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

The Ketz Solution to Grade Inflation

"Sue the University!" by: J. Edward Ketz, SmartPros, September 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67598.xml 

She graduated from the college last April with a bachelor of business administration degree, majoring in information technology. Trina finished with a “solid” attendance record and a grade point average of 2.7. She applied to every potential job placement available through the college’s placement services, but to no avail. Because she cannot get a job, she is suing the college for tuition costs ($70,000) plus compensation for the stress due to her inability to land a job ($2,000).

News agencies that have reported on this event uniformly point out that the case is meritless because colleges do not promise a job to their students. Instead, they promise an education. These reporters and pundits, however, miss the significance of the lawsuit. When universities offer an education to their students, what are they really offering and what do they deliver? And how can you tell whether the university has actually provided an education to the student?

We used to say institutions of higher learning supplied higher levels of knowledge; but with the knowledge explosion in the last 100 years or so, nobody today comprehends much of the total human knowledge that we collectively have. Besides, anybody can log on to the web and presumably find knowledge. Whether the individual knows what to do with it is another matter.

And Bill Gates is one example that it is possible to gain knowledge without a college degree. Of course, one might quickly add that for every success story such as Gates’, there are hundreds of uneducated people who are unemployed or working for minimum wages.

For some time universities have been asserting that an education is a process by which the university teaches students to think. Academia teaches “critical thinking”, communication skills, global awareness, and diversity training. Bypassing any thoughts about whether this is what higher learning should be about, I want to focus on assessment. When a student graduates, how does he or she (or parents) grasp whether the mission has been accomplished? Did they receive value commensurate with the costs?

Our society is quite utilitarian, and that philosophy began to pervade universities when Congress democratized college education after World War II with the GI bill. Education at universities was once for the elite, but now it exists for the masses. By necessity, universities have had to water down the content of courses because the average person, by definition, is unable to accomplish what the elite can do.

The irony, as many have stated, is grade inflation for the masses, especially when contrasted with grades that existed a century ago. The interesting point is that universities do not have the will to change this aspect of the system. They prefer to have satisfied “customers” and parents and governments—and the tuition dollars.

One simple scheme to improve the grading system is to require faculty to rank order the students and resolve ties with the median of the tied scores. Any faculty member who assigns all A’s ranks all of the students in the 50th percentile. A faculty member who gives 60% A’s and 40% B’s assigns the first group to the 70th percentile and members of the latter group to the 20th percentile. But, this improvement will never be implemented because universities don’t really want to fix this problem.

The utilitarian worldview raises its head at various points, and one concerns the value of education. While many analysts dismiss Thompson’s lawsuit because her college did not promise her a job, it would prove interesting to take a poll of students and parents across the land. My hunch is that enough people would side with Trina to make university administrators uncomfortable.

After all, how can you tell whether somebody has achieved a sufficiently proficient level of critical thinking? How can you assess one’s ability to communicate or his or her ability to grasp global issues or be sensitive to diversity? Of course, we professors claim to have the professional judgment to answer these questions, but what we do is a black box to outsiders, if not to ourselves.

In a lot of ways trying to answer these questions isn’t much different from debating the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead. I hypothesize that most Americans would escape the subjectivity of these issues by saying the acid test for these concerns is the ability to get a job. Perhaps not immediately, as a liberal arts education is often deemed a useful foundation for a professional education, such as law, but eventually one needs some sort of employment to say that the education has succeeded.

Accounting education is no different. On the one hand, we would like graduates to demonstrate critical thinking, ethical decision making, and be aware of international business issues. On the other hand, graduates need skills for the marketplace. And not just skills to obtain a job, but skills and attitudes and a work ethic to advance and contribute to the firm and to society.

As I reflect on Trina Thompson’s lawsuit, I wonder how many more students will sue their alma maters. And, if a judge allows the suit to proceed, I wonder whether jury members will sympathize with the colleges or with the unemployed graduates. There is more at stake here than merely the discontent of one unemployed former student.

Jensen Comment
Below is my August 17, 2009 on the Trina Thompson lawsuit. ABC News asserted that Monroe College in overzealous recruiting practices made "promises" beyond what is normal more traditional colleges and universities. If she wins this lawsuit it need not make most other learning institutions worry.

A New York City woman who says she can't find a job is suing the college where she earned a bachelor's degree. Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court. The 27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition. Thompson says she's been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information technology degree in April.
"Jobless NYC woman sues college for $70K in tuition," Yahoo News, August 2, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090803/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_jobless_grad_sues
Jensen Comment
ABC News added some added some revelations about deceptive promises being made to student prospects and tuition rip offs. There may be circumstances that make this lawsuit different from most situations for college graduates in general.

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

"Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, June 3, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/03/dumbest_generation_getting_dumber 

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students ranked 25th of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science. McKinsey & Company, in releasing its report "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools" (April 2009) said, "Several other facts paint a worrisome picture.

First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce." That's a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.

While the academic performance of white students is grossly inferior, that of black and Latino students is a national disgrace. The McKinsey report says, "On average, black and Latino students are roughly two to three years of learning behind white students of the same age. This racial gap exists regardless of how it is measured, including both achievement (e.g., test score) and attainment (e.g., graduation rate) measures. Taking the average National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for math and reading across the fourth and eighth grades, for example, 48 percent of blacks and 43 percent of Latinos are 'below basic,' while only 17 percent of whites are, and this gap exists in every state. A more pronounced racial achievement gap exists in most large urban school districts." Below basic is the category the NAEP uses for students unable to display even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level.

The teaching establishment and politicians have hoodwinked taxpayers into believing that more money is needed to improve education. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation's costliest, spending about $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at 15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation's average. Yet student achievement is just about the lowest in the nation. What's so callous about the Washington situation is about 1,700 children in kindergarten through 12th grade receive the $7,500 annual scholarships in order to escape rotten D.C. public schools, and four times as many apply for the scholarships, yet Congress, beholden to the education establishment, will end funding the school voucher program.

Any long-term solution to our education problems requires the decentralization that can come from competition. Centralization has been massive. In 1930, there were 119,000 school districts across the U.S; today, there are less than 15,000. Control has moved from local communities to the school district, to the state, and to the federal government. Public education has become a highly centralized government-backed monopoly and we shouldn't be surprised by the results. It's a no-brainer that the areas of our lives with the greatest innovation, tailoring of services to individual wants and falling prices are the areas where there is ruthless competition such as computers, food, telephone and clothing industries, and delivery companies such as UPS, Federal Express and electronic bill payments that have begun to undermine the postal monopoly in first-class mail.

At a Washington press conference launching the McKinsey report, Al Sharpton called school reform the civil rights challenge of our time. He said that the enemy of opportunity for blacks in the U.S. was once Jim Crow; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, he said it was "Professor James Crow." Sharpton is only partly correct. School reform is not solely a racial issue; it's a vital issue for the entire nation.

"Listening to Students About Learning," by Andrea Conklin Bueschel, The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching of Community Colleges, 2008 ---  http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/dynamic/publications/elibrary_pdf_737.pdf

Students get it. By the time they get to college, they know a good deal about education. They know that grades do not always reflect “real understanding.” They know that not every class is the same and that not all teachers teach the same way. They know that students learn in different ways, and they understand that how teachers teach has very real consequences for their future. They understand that they have a role in their own success.

Students who come to college underprepared are especially attuned to these realities. Recent reports from education researchers and in the mainstream media point to how few of the growing numbers of students entering college underprepared move successfully through the system. But students do not need reports and headlines to understand how much learning matters and how elusive success can be. For them the challenge is personal and immediate: if they can’t get the education they need, then they can’t get a job that pays the rent, read the rental lease, or calculate the monthly budget. If they don’t succeed, there are real consequences—for them as individuals and for all of us as a society. This problem is not just one of depressing statistics, but of people whose life chances rise or fall depending on their performance in our community colleges.

Too often, community college students taking basic skills classes have been exposed throughout their earlier schooling to the same material taught in the same way multiple times with unsuccessful results (see, for example, Grubb and Associates, 1999). Their knowledge tends to be precarious, and often they haven’t mastered the art of being a good student, let alone content knowledge.

The chances of failure are high indeed. There are many approaches to this challenge. Often discussions of community colleges—and the many underprepared students who attend them—focus on financial aid policies, student background, and support services of various kinds. Real gains have been made by focusing on these non-instructional or extracurricular aspects of students’ lives.

In addition to addressing these factors, however, there is much to be gained from a focus on the classroom itself, especially in the pre-collegiate (developmental or basic skills) courses that are supposed to prepare students for college-level work.1 In particular, this essay focuses on how listening to students talk about learning can help them become more active partners in their own education, more engaged in the classroom, and better positioned to succeed. A large literature on adult learning supports the value of student engagement and partnership, insights that were brought home in a recent project undertaken with 11 California community colleges sponsored by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Faculty who participated in the Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) project, used technology, different class structures, learning communities, lab components, and supplemental instruction to help developmental students master material they had struggled with in the past. At the same time, these teachers of precollegiate English and mathematics used a variety of strategies to become better observers of student learning and help students themselves become more aware of their needs as learners.

Perhaps the most common message from our interviews with SPECC students (like the young woman quoted at the beginning of this essay) is that students care about their educational experiences.2 In many cases, students didn’t think about how their classes were taught until they saw a teacher do something different from traditional instruction (especially lecture format). Once they were exposed to different practices and styles—whether group work, different technology, or new types of assessment—they felt more confident about articulating what helped them learn best. Not only can innovations in teaching improve students’ mastery of content, they can also make students better learners. Perhaps the most important message is that teachers can accomplish a great deal when they treat students as valuable partners in improving teaching and learning.

Continued in article

When all the grades are above average

"Grade Inflation Seen Rising," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, March 12, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/12/grades

A professor who has crusaded against grade inflation by gathering and publicizing data has released his largest analysis to date -- suggesting that grade inflation continues to be a broad problem across much of higher education. The figures may embarrass some colleges and renew a debate over whether students experience enough rigor.

The new analysis found that the average grade-point average at private colleges rose from 3.09 in 1991 to 3.30 in 2006. At public colleges and universities, the increase was from 2.85 to 3.01 over the same time period. The study also examines -- and seek to refute -- the idea that students are earning better grades simply because they are better prepared. The greatest increases in grades appear to be coming at flagship public universities in the South and at selective liberal arts colleges.

The study was done by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who created GradeInflation.com to document these trends. For this study, he significantly expanded the numbers of institutions examined, and the time frame.

In addition, Rojstaczer says that his new study shows that it is possible to tame grade inflation. He finds that Princeton University has largely done so -- by making an issue of grades and encouraging professors to give a broader distribution of grades. Further, he finds that there is one sector that has held the line against inflated grades: community colleges.

Rojstaczer's findings will likely resonate with professors, many of whom regularly bemoan grade inflation and say that students are conditioned to expect good grades just for showing up, and that professors who refuse to go along get punished with harsh course evaluations. Many professors who are off the tenure track or who are pre-tenure report great fear of being punished by students (and then not rehired) if they gain a reputation for tough grading, and studies have found correlations between being an easy grader and earning good ratings at RateMyProfessors.com. But other researchers question this study and conventional wisdom and say that reports of grade inflation are themselves inflated.

Various professors start campaigns against grade inflation, but Rojstaczer has stuck with the issue. He gained national attention in 2003 with an op-ed in The Washington Post called "Where All Grades Are Above Average," an article in which he confessed to having let two years pass without awarding a C. The Web site followed, but the new data represent more colleges than ever before and come after several years in which he didn't update the statistics.

In an interview, he said that he releases this information because he believes that not much more is really needed to tackle grade inflation. "People say this issue is complicated and difficult. It really isn't. It's incredibly simple," he said. "You get so fat that it effects your health. You lose weight. I really don't see all the problems in reducing GPAs that everyone else seems to see."

He noted that once Princeton deans said that the issue mattered and encouraged tougher grading, there was a significant change. "How difficult is this?" Rojstaczer asked. Other colleges and universities have seen the opposite trend. At Brown University last year was the first time, for example, a majority of undergraduate grades were A's, up from 42.5 percent a decade earlier.

The issue matters, Rojstaczer said, because "the alternative is a student body that frequently misses class, never prepares in advance, studies about 11 hours a week if they are 'full time' students, and drinks itself into a constant stupor out of boredom. That's not an acceptable alternative anywhere."

Clifford Adelman, a senior analyst at the Institute for Higher Education Policy and a leading education researcher, has conducted extensive studies of grades and degrees, using national data sets, and he believes that grade inflation is marginal -- and that the issue receives far too much attention. (Adelman has criticized the quality of Rojstaczer's past work, and Rojstaczer has in turn been critical of the critique.)

"If grade inflation is so rampant, how come at least a third of kids who start in four-year colleges don't graduate?" Adelman asked.

"My point is not that there is no grade inflation, rather that inflation in the judgment of human performance is something that cannot be proved," he said. In many cases, he said, there is a far more significant shift going on that gets missed in the discussion of grade inflation. "A significant proportion of grades that are not really grades" are being given, Adelman said, as students and professor embrace "alternative signs of student academic behavior" in a way that "devalues grading."

Added Adelman: "I see grade devaluation as a more serious problem for a variety of reasons that Stuart would never consider, but that academic administrators and enrollment managers everywhere instantly understand when the trend is pointed out." Adelman said that he stands by his earlier work, based on national data, that there is not a national surge in grades.

Community College Standards

Rojstaczer's work focuses on four-year institutions, and most of his criticisms relate to traditional college age students. But he notes in his new report that data from community colleges suggest that professors in that sector have been getting tougher in recent years, and have never abandoned the C. Rojstaczer had data from the entire California Community College system (the largest in the United States) and selected other community colleges -- and he found none of the patterns that bothered him in the four-year sector.

Michael R. Chipps, president of Mid-Plains Community College in Nebraska, said his institution and other community colleges take grades seriously for a number of reasons. One is that community colleges use grades to track how their students do when they transfer to four-year institutions (and he noted that many community college graduates perform better than students who started at four-year institutions). In addition, he noted that because community colleges admit students with a range of academic backgrounds, accurate assessment is seen as important to help students enter the best possible programs and to track their progress.

"Community colleges want the rigor to be sufficient, so that our students can not only prosper in the world of work, but seriously compete with students at the senior level institutions," Chipps said.

At a reception for college composition instructors Wednesday night in San Francisco, professors from community colleges were not surprised that grade inflation seemed less present at their institutions than at four-year institutions -- and they were proud of their standards too.

Sandie McGill Barnhouse, chair of the Two-Year College English Association, who teaches at Rowan Cabarrus Community College, said that community college professors see it as part of their missions to teach students of a "diversity of entering skills," so there is no assumption that everyone in the class will do well. She said that many community college students haven't had great high school experiences and so aren't those demanding an A on everything.

Sharon Mitchler, associate professor of English and humanities at Centralia College, a community college in Washington State, said that she thinks grading at community colleges may be more honest because that's the way students want it. Her students, she said, are focused on how improving their writing will help them professionally, and they want to see that the course will give them new skills they can use, not a letter grade.

"If I gave out all A's, my classes would think I'd lost my mind," she said.

Most Students in Remedial Classes in College Had Solid Grades in High School
Nearly four out of five students who undergo remediation in college graduated from high school with grade-point averages of 3.0 or higher, according to a report issued today by Strong American Schools, a group that advocates making public-school education more rigorous.
Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5145/most-students-in-remedial-classes-in-college-had-solid-grades-in-high-school-survey-finds

The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Question
If median grades for each course are made publically available on the Internet, will students seek out the high grade average or low grade average courses?
Examples of such postings at Cornell University are at http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html

Hypothesis 1
Students will seek out the lower grade average courses/sections thinking that they have a better chance to compete for high grades.

Hypothesis 2
Students will seek out the higher grade average courses/sections thinking that particular instructors are easier graders.

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.
"Easy A's on the Internet:  A surprising Cornell experiment in posting grades; plus a look at recent research into ethical behavior, service charges, and volunteer habits," by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, December 11, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2007/bs20071211_885308.htm?link_position=link2 

In a striking example of unintended consequences, a move by Cornell University to give context to student grades by publicly posting median grades for courses has resulted in exactly the opposite student behavior than anticipated.

Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences originally set up a Web site in 1997 where median grades were posted, with the intention of also printing median class grades alongside the grade the student actually received in the course on his or her permanent transcript. Administrators thought students would use the information on the Web site to seek out classes with lower median grades—because, they reasoned, an A in a class that has a median grade of B-minus would be more meaningful than say, an A in a course where the median was A-plus.

Course Shopping Leads to Grade Inflation

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.

This "shopping" in turn led to grade inflation, Vrinda Kadiyali, associate professor of marketing and economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, one of the authors, explained in an interview. The study, which is undergoing peer review, has not yet been published.

So far, however, the university has posted the median course grades only on the Internet and has not yet put those grades on transcripts. According to an article in the Cornell Daily Sun, the school will start posting the grades on transcripts in the spring. School officials were not immediately available for comment.

The research team hopes the school follows through on its plans. "That will allow Cornell to hold itself to a higher standard because it lets potential employers know where students stand relevant to other students," says Kadiyali.

The presence of the median grade data is well-known to students but less well-known to faculty. The researchers themselves were prompted to do the study when one of them learned of the Web site from a student questioning grades in her course.

Kadiyali says the formula the researchers used to come to these conclusions could easily be applied to Internet teacher rating sites, such as ratemyprofessors.com. It's something educators should consider, she adds, to find out how these posts affect the decision-making of students and, thus, professors and their courses.

Jensen Comment
The problem is that, in modern times, grades are the keys to the kingdom (i.e., keys unlocking the gates of graduate studies and professional careers) such that higher grades rather than education tend to become the main student goals. A hundred years ago, just getting a degree could open postgraduate gates in life because such a small proportion of the population got college diplomas. With higher percentages of the population getting college diplomas, high grades became keys to the kingdom. In many colleges a C grade is viewed as very nearly a failing grade.

At the same time, formal teaching evaluations and teacher rating sites like ratemyprofessors.com have led to marked grade inflation in virtually all colleges. The median grades are often A, A-, B+, or B. The poor student's C grade is way below average. Just take a look at these course medians from Cornell University --- http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Grades/MedianGradeSP07.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation and dysfunctional teaching evaluations are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

"Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check:  The notion of a decline in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," by Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Does Florida State University have a grade-inflation problem?

The numbers are certainly suspicious. A decade ago, only 19 percent of the students who took an oceanography class earned A's. Last fall it was 57 percent.

Or take mathematics. Ten years ago, 27 percent of math students at Florida State failed. Last fall it was 10 percent. With a few exceptions, the same trend holds in other departments.

But what does that mean? At the provost's request, a committee of deans is trying to figure out why grades have gone up and what, if anything, should be done about it.

Grade inflation is among the oldest and thorniest problems in higher education. In 1894 a committee at Harvard University reported that A's and B's were awarded "too readily." But after more than a century of fulmination, there is little agreement on the cause or how to fix it.

There is even contentious debate about whether the phenomenon of grade inflation exists at all. It is the question at the center of a new collection of essays, Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (State University of New York Press).

Those who believe that grade inflation exists say that when colleges do try to hold grades in check or make professors accountable, they usually fail.

Among the contributors to the new volume is Mary Biggs, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, who sees little hope for those trying to stem the tide.

"Once grade inflation has taken hold," she says, "it develops its own constituencies and acquires a heavy weight and powerful momentum of its own."

No Consensus

Those who see grade inflation as a serious concern often have a hard time getting taken seriously. In part that is because not everyone is convinced that grade inflation actually exists — or that it's necessarily such a bad thing.

Among the agnostics is Maureen A. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at Kennesaw State University, who recently participated in a debate on the topic at a conference sponsored by the American Psychological Association. While it may be true that college grades have generally trended northward in the past 20 years, she points out, so have scores on more "objective" forms of assessment, like the SAT and IQ tests.

Today's students may legitimately be achieving more than their parents' generation, she argues. "So in that sense, do we even have grade inflation? I'm not certain."

Still, many find the numbers on grade inflation, like those at Florida State, hard to ignore. And evidence such as the exposé published by The Boston Globe in 2001 on Harvard University's grading practices add more ballast to the argument that grade inflation is a serious problem. The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum laude. (The university has since placed a limit on the number of seniors eligible for Latin honors.)

While complaints about grade inflation date back more than a century, according to Ms. Biggs, lax grading and slipping standards were much-discussed in the 1960s, when grades began to rise noticeably. That's when critics coined the term "grade inflation."

Scholars of the phenomenon also point to other reasons that it not only exists, but is so powerful. A reputation for giving low grades creates problems in recruitment and retention. In addition, because grading is considered part of a professor's academic freedom, regulating the distribution of A's and B's can be tricky.

For faculty members, the pressure to grade generously comes not only from anxious students and "helicopter" parents, but also from promotion-and-tenure committees that look carefully at end-of-term student evaluations.

"It's easier to be a high grader," says Ms. Biggs. "You can write that A or B, and you don't have to defend it. You don't have students complaining or crying in your office. You don't get many low student evaluations. The amount of time that is eaten up by very rigorous grading and dealing with student complaints is time you could be spending on your own research."

Leaders Needed

Could those reasons account for Florida State's rising grades? Sally McRorie, dean of the College of Visual Artists there, leads the committee that is looking into the issue. The group plans to quiz grade-inflation experts and talk to professors and department chairmen. "There are a lot of factors at play," she says.

Among them are the Bright Futures scholarships. Most Florida State students receive some money from the lottery-supported program, which requires them to maintain a certain grade-point average, though it varies depending on the amount of the scholarship. It's no secret that students often beg professors for better grades, citing the possible loss of their scholarships.

If Florida State is serious about tackling grade inflation, observers say, the university will need strong leadership in doing so. And sometimes even that isn't enough.

In 2006, Hank Brown, then president of the University of Colorado, waged a public campaign against grade inflation. Calling it a high priority of his administration, he proposed adding class rank to transcripts to give employers a better sense of students' achievements.

The top-down policy proposal was unpopular with faculty members, however, and in the end the regulation of grades was left up to individual colleges and departments.

The flagship campus's College of Arts & Sciences, for example, chose to promote "academic rigor" through other measures, such as disseminating data on grade distribution and working to standardize teaching practices among sections of large lecture classes, says the provost, Philip P. DiStefano.

These efforts have had modest success in reining in grades, he says: The college has brought down its grades five-hundredths of a percentage point, from an average of 2.99, in 2004, to 2.94, in 2007.

Move to the Median

Cornell University has tried something similar. In 1996 officials there decided to make median grades for each class available on the university's Web site. The aim was to make grades more meaningful by putting them in context and thus preventing grade inflation.

But the plan seems to have backfired, according to a recent paper by three Cornell professors. Students, not surprisingly, tended to choose classes with higher median grades. The scholars also found that overall grades at Cornell have risen since the information was made public.

"The hope was that this would encourage students to go into tougher classes because they would be recognized for taking them," says Talia Bar, an assistant professor of economics and one of the paper's authors. "We're not seeing that effect."

Some faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill think the cure for grade inflation may be a mathematical formula.

Spurred by a report in 2000 that showed a steady rise in grades at Chapel Hill, a faculty committee proposed a GPA alternative called the Achievement Index, a weighted class-ranking system that measures a student's academic performance relative to those of classmates.

Andrew J. Perrin, a professor of sociology who is one of the system's backers, likens the index to the "strength of schedule" system used in basketball to compare teams from different leagues on the basis of wins and losses against common opponents. Similarly, he says, the Achievement Index formula takes into account not only how a student performs vis-à-vis others in the course section, but also how those classmates fare in all of their courses.

The index is a resurrected version of a 1997 proposal by a Duke University statistician, Valen E. Johnson, who found that positive student evaluations correlated with lenient grading. The algorithm he devised was intended to neutralize differences in professors' grading practices and remove incentives for students to choose easier courses to inflate their GPA's.

Duke's faculty rejected a proposal to use Mr. Johnson's formula in lieu of the GPA a decade ago. Proponents of the weighted class-ranking system at Chapel Hill have been only marginally more successful. In 2007 a plan to put Achievement Index information on students' transcripts alongside GPA's, and to use the formula to determine student honors, was narrowly voted down by the faculty council.

Some students objected that the index would stoke competition. But the main problem, faculty members felt, was that the solution was just too complicated. Grade-point averages are intuitive and easy to calculate. The Achievement Index requires advanced math and can be computed only with full access to the registrar's data. "The biggest concern was that this was a black box," says Mr. Perrin, "and that we didn't really understand what it would do."

Still, the sociologist is hopeful that he and his colleagues will get the go-ahead from Chapel Hill administrators to run a pilot version of the Achievement Index. Under the revised plan, index information won't appear on transcripts, but students who log onto the registrar's site to check their end-of-term grades will also be able to see their index-based rankings. Mr. Perrin hopes that distributing the Achievement Index results will help both faculty members and administrators understand how it works and convince students that it's a fairer assessment measurement than the straightforward grade-point average ranking.

Formula for Success?

Perhaps the most successful attempt to combat grade inflation has been at Princeton University, which was singled out as one of the worst Ivy League offenders in this regard. In the fall of 2004, Princeton approved a policy of grading expectations.

It's simple enough: All departments are expected to keep the number of A's down to 35 percent. In any one class, of course, that number might be considerably higher (or lower), but the idea is that the expectation will create consistency across departments.

The idea seems to be working. From 2004 to 2007, the percentage of A's in undergraduate courses was 41 percent, down from 47 percent during the previous three years. Princeton isn't hitting its target yet, but it's getting closer.

All of which pleases Nancy W. Malkiel, dean of the college at Princeton. "We think it's really important to use grades to signal to students the difference between their very best work and their good work," she says. "Otherwise how do they know how to stretch themselves if they don't have clear signals?"

Whether such guidelines would work at a university like Florida State is uncertain. Deans there are still trying to determine whether they have a problem and, if so, what's causing it.

According to Joseph A. Travis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, officials are determined to do something — they're just not sure what. "Things like this creep up on you," he says. "No one's sanguine about it. No one is saying 'Oh, yeah, this is fine.'"

September 2, 2008 reply from Richard C. Sansing [Richard.C.Sansing@TUCK.DARTMOUTH.EDU]

--- David Albrecht wrote:

Where, oh where, has accepting personal responsibility gone?

--- end of quote ---
This reminds me of one of my favorite Doonesbury cartoons. A professor is talking to the university president, whose last name is King.

Professor: King, the world you and I grew up in his crumbling. Students were once asked to take responsibility for their own performance. But today, if a student fails a course, it's OUR fault. That moment of accountability-- bringing home a report card--is not as we knew it, old friend.

Last panel is of a child showing his report card to his father.

Dad: Son, I'm very, VERY disappointed in your teacher.

Son: Me too, Dad.

*********************
Richard C. Sansing
Professor of Accounting
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth 100 Tuck Hall Hanover, NH 03755

 

Questions
How well do student evaluations of instructors predict performance in subsequent advanced courses?
Are popular teachers necessarily the best teachers?
Are students misled by grade inflation?

One of the major points of the study was its look at the effectiveness of student evaluations. Although the evaluations can accurately predict the performance of the student in the “contemporaneous” course — the course in which the professor teaches the student — they are “very poor” predictors of the performance of a professor’s students in later, follow-up courses. Because many universities use student evaluations as a factor in decisions of promotion and tenure, this “draws into question how one should measure professor quality,” according to the report.
See below

"Evaluating Faculty Quality, Randomly," by James Heggen, Inside Higher Ed, July 11, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/11/evaluation

The question of how to measure the quality of college teaching continues to vex campus administrators. Teaching evaluations, on which many institutions depend for at least part of their analysis, may be overly influenced by factors such as whether students like the professors or get good grades. And objective analyses of how well students learn from certain professors are difficult because, for one, if based on a standardized test or grades, one could run into problems because professors “teach to the test.”

A new paper tries to inject some rigorous analysis into the discussion of how well students learn from their professors and how effectively student evaluations track how well students learn from individual instructors.

James West and Scott Carrell co-wrote the study, which was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors” examines students and professors at the U.S. Air Force Academy from fall 1997 to spring 2007 to try to measure the quality of instruction.

The Air Force Academy was selected because its curricular structure avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional evaluation methods, according to the report. Because students at the Air Force Academy are randomly assigned to sections of core courses, there is no threat of the sort of “self-selection” in which students might choose to study with easier or tougher professors. “Self-selection,” the report notes, makes it difficult to measure the impact professors have on student achievement because “if better students tend to select better professors, then it is difficult to statistically separate the teacher effects from the selection effects.”

Also, professors at the academy use the same syllabus and give similar exams at about the same time. In the math department, grading is done collectively by professors, where each professor grades certain questions for all students in the course, which cuts down on the subjectivity of grading, according to the report. The students are required to take a common set of “follow-on” courses as well, in which they are also randomly assigned to professors.

The authors acknowledge that situating the study at the Air Force Academy may also raise questions of the “generalizability” of the study, given the institution’s unusual student body. “Despite the military setting, much about USAFA is comparable to broader academia,” the report asserts. It offers degrees in fields roughly similar to those of a liberal arts college, and because students are drawn from every Congressional district, they are geographically representative, the report says.

Carrell, an assistant professor economics at the University of California at Davis, attended the academy as an undergraduate and the University of Florida as a grad student, and has taught at Dartmouth as well as the Air Force Academy and Davis. “All students learn the same,” he said.

For math and science courses, students taking courses from professors with a higher “academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status” tended to perform worse in the “contemporaneous” course but better in the “follow-on” courses, according to the report. This is consistent, the report asserts, with recent findings that students taught by “less academically qualified instructors” may become interested in pursuing further study in particular academic areas because they earn good grades in the initial courses, but then go on to perform poorly in later courses that depend on the knowledge gained from the initial courses.

In humanities, the report found no such link.

Carrell had a few possible explanations for why no such link existed in humanities courses. One is because professors have more “latitude” in how they grade, especially with essays. Another reason could be that later courses in humanities don’t build on earlier classes like science and math do.

One of the major points of the study was its look at the effectiveness of student evaluations. Although the evaluations can accurately predict the performance of the student in the “contemporaneous” course — the course in which the professor teaches the student — they are “very poor” predictors of the performance of a professor’s students in later, follow-up courses. Because many universities use student evaluations as a factor in decisions of promotion and tenure, this “draws into question how one should measure professor quality,” according to the report.

“It appears students reward getting higher grades,” Carrell said

Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations and assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

"Great, My Professor," by JJ Hermes, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 22, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3027/great-my-professor?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Partly because he was fed up with childish comments on Web sites where students rate their professors, a business-school professor at Temple University has created an online forum for students who want to sound off. So as not to mislead students, the site’s title suggests its intent: “Thank You Professor.”

“There are so many vehicles for students to express their opinion,” says the site’s creator, Samuel D. Hodge Jr., chairman of the business school’s legal-studies department. “But there’s nothing really at the school where the professor can get a letter directly from the student.”

When the site went live on May 1, Mr. Hodge says, he expected about a dozen comments in the first week. Instead, more than 200 flooded in. He converts each note into a letter to the faculty member being praised, then makes sure the business school’s dean gets a copy.

Mr. Hodge moderates the comments, but so far there haven’t been any negative posts on the site, he says.

For example, the four “thank you notes” left on the site so far for Rob B. Drennan Jr., an associate professor of risk, insurance, and health-care management, have been uniformly laudatory (three were signed, and one was anonymous). “I truly enjoyed his class,” wrote one student, Tom Coia. “Difficult and challenging, but isn’t that what we want from school?” Contrast that to an anonymous comment concerning Mr. Drennan that a student left last spring on RateMyProfessors.com: “BOOOOO!!!!!”

Mr. Hodge, incidentally, has appeared on an MTV Web site of faculty members who “strike back” against comments on RateMyProfessors.com. He says Ohio State University is the only other institution he knows of that gives students a way to thank their professors on the Web.

Temple may extend the site to the whole university, he says: “It’s such positive reinforcement."

Upward Trend in Grades and Downward Trend in Homework

Business ranks at the bottom in terms of having 23% of the responding students having only 1-5 hours of homework per week!
This in part might explain why varsity athletes choose business as a major in college.

President Obama's American Graduation Initiative
Some states and schools and unions are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public

Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?

But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

From the Creative Commons on July 15, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15818

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this goal.

A significant component of the initiative is the plan to “create a new online skills laboratory.” From the fact sheet,

“Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.”

It is important to note here the difference between “open” and simply accessible “online”. Truly open resources for education are clearly designated as such with a standard license that allows not only access, but the freedoms to share, adapt, remix, or redistribute those resources. The educational materials that make up the new open online courses for this initiative should be open in this manner, especially since they will result from a government plan. We are excited about this initiative and hope the license for its educational materials will allow all of these freedoms. Catherine Casserly, formerly in charge of open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (now at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), writes,

“Today at Macomb College, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative: Stronger American Skills through Community Colleges. As proposed, the courses will be freely available for use as is and for adaption as appropriate for targeted student populations. The materials will carry a Creative Commons license.”

You can read the official announcement at the White House site on their blog and visit the briefing room for the full fact sheet.

Jensen Comment
Given the troublesome fact that 80% of U.S. college graduates seeking jobs could not find jobs requiring college degrees, there is much more needed that getting more students in the U.S. to graduate form college.

July 15, 2009 reply from AMY HAAS [haasfive@MSN.COM]

Excuse me for bringing up an often overlooked point, but getting students into community colleges is easy. Getting them to do the college level work needed to graduate is not! As a instructor at an urban community college for more than 16 years I find that they typical community college student lacks study skills and or the motivation to succeed. They will come to class but getting them do actually work outside the classroom, even with tons of online resources available is often like "pulling teeth". They do not make the time for it.

Amy Haas

July 15 reply from Flowers, Carol [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

I am in agreement with Amy. This piece that Bob published implies to me that EVERYONE should have a college education. I think that is the problem with education. This mentality creates, once again, entitlement, not motivation. Society has taken the motivation that individuals once had, away. Why work for it when it, when it can be given to you! There is an old adage................you can lead a horse to water, but.......................................!!!

I see this as more tax dollars going to waste. I have robust epacks and online classes, and do students take advantage of it.....some do, most "don't have the time" -- they are attempting to carry full loads at two schools and work a full time job. Maybe, we should be funding time management and realistic expectations programs.

The two examples I had this Easter, were doing poorly -- one was carrying two full time jobs and a full school load; the other, two full time school loads and 1 1/2 work load . Both felt I was requiring too much and should drop my standards because of their poor time management. I worked full time and carried 12 units (no social life).............why not more units or work, because I wanted to be successful. If school takes longer than 4 years to complete, so be it. I received no help. My family couldn't afford it, so I realized if I wanted it I had to do it myself. I think many of us can tell the same story and don't feel it diminished but enhanced our motivation.

July 15, 2009 reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

The "time" factor is another issue entirely, I think. Many of my students (at a 4-year private university) also have jobs, ranging from 10-hour work study to fill time or nearly so, to afford our astronomical tuition. That's become life. Should there be more options for them? Yes, I think so. Many of them are very motivated - one of my summer term students is working full time while attending school ... and has a 4.0 GPA! Her mom is a single parent with limited means, so she has to help because she wants to be at this school. My own adult daughter is back in school. Her financial aid is not full tuition. She also works nearly full time - and remains on the Dean's List. I am meantime trying to figure out this year where my husband and I will find the money to meet the rest of the tuition, because I don't want her to have to drop out. So I completely understand students who are pressed for time because of work obligations. But the ones who really want to be there find a way to use the resources available to them to succeed. For the others, the lack of time to use what you provide is an excuse, nothing more. They need to find a better reason for not doing well.

July 15, 2009 reply from Ed Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU]

Amy et al.,

I kind of like Zucker’s article that I may have mentioned before:

http://www.ams.org/notices/199608/comm-zucker.pdf 

Ed

Ed Scribner New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM, USA

Some states are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public
Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?
But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

"Second City Ruse:  How states like Illinois rig school tests to hype phony achievement," The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124786847585659969.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.

Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."

Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.

The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.

Chicago students fared much worse on national exams that weren't designed by state officials. On the 2007 state test, for example, 71% of Chicago's 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in math, up from 32% in 2005. But results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a federal standardized test sponsored by the Department of Education, show that only 13% of the city's 8th graders were proficient in math in 2007. While that was better than 11% in 2005, it wasn't close to the 39 percentage-point increase reflected on the Illinois state exam.

In Mr. Duncan's defense, he wasn't responsible for the new lower standards, which were authorized by state education officials. In 2006, he responded to a Chicago Tribune editorial headlined, "An 'A' for Everybody!" by noting (correctly) that "this is the test the state provided; this is the state standard our students were asked to meet." But this doesn't change the fact that by defining proficiency downward, states are setting up children to fail in high school and college. We should add that we've praised New York City test results that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute also claims are inflated, but we still favor mayoral control of New York's schools as a way to break through the bureaucracy and drive more charter schools.

And speaking of charters, the Chicago study says they "provide one bright spot in the generally disappointing performance of Chicago's public schools." The city has 30 charters with 67 campuses serving 30,000 students out of a total public school population of 408,000. Another 13,000 kids are on wait lists because the charters are at capacity, and it's no mystery why. Last year 91% of charter elementary schools and 88% of charter high schools had a higher percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards than the neighborhood schools that the students otherwise would have attended.

Similar results have been observed from Los Angeles to Houston to Harlem. The same kids with the same backgrounds tend to do better in charter schools, though they typically receive less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools. In May, the state legislature voted to increase the cap on Chicago charter schools to 70 from 30, though Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has yet to sign the bill.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deserves credit for hiring Mr. Duncan, a charter proponent. But in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, Mr. Daley stayed mostly silent during the debate over the charter cap. That's regrettable, because it's becoming clear that Chicago's claim of reform success among noncharter schools is phony.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Minimum Grade School Policies

Question
Should a student who gets a zero (for not doing anything) or 23% (for doing something badly) on an assignment, exam, or term paper be automatically (as a matter of school policy) upgraded to a 60% no matter what proportion the grade is toward a course's final grade?
Should a student get 60% even if he or she fails to show up for an examination?

"Time to Add Basket Weaving as a Course," by Ben Baker, The Irascible Professor, June 22, 2008 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-22-08.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Every Student Suddenly Gets an A+
Canada's main faculty association has set up an independent committee to investigate a series of clashes between the University of Ottawa and a senior tenured professor who was suspended last month and barred from the campus, apparently because of a grading dispute in which he gave all students in a class an A+ last spring after being refused permission to make the course pass/fail.The professor, Denis Rancourt, is a noted physicist who has worked at the university for 22 years. He is also an activist blogger, particularly on issues of pedagogical reform and university governance. His advocacy of "greater democracy in the institution," he says, could be the real reason why the university is trying to push him out.
Karen Birchhard, "Canadian University Apparently Tries to Oust Professor Over Grading Policy," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/01/9310n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I wonder if he gave examinations and if he gave full credit for any answer to a question or problem on each and every examination? I know of one instance where students strongly suspected that a professor was giving A grades without even reading the blue books. Some brave souls even gambled by writing nonsense after the first few pages of their blue books. They, like the other students, received their A grades. The professor was forced to resign from the faculty (there were also other incidents that forced his resignation).

A university has to be concerned about extremes in generous grading. At some point the university would lose its integrity if there is no differentiation in performance. Also to the extent that grades motivate students to learn the material, that motivation factor is destroyed. Diploma mills often give all A grades, but who has any respect for a diploma mill?

At RateMyProfessor.com, it surprises me how many times students report that an instructor gives an A grade to all students who regularly attend class --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

Our Compassless Colleges

The problem is that our students choose very bland, low nourishment diets in our modern day smorgasbord curricula. Their concern is with their grade averages rather than their education. And why not? Grades for students and turf for faculty have become the keys to the kingdom!
Bob Jensen

"The Next Big Thing: Crisis and Transformation in American Higher Education," by John V. Lombardi, Inside Higher Ed, August 3, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/reality_check#

"Decline of the Humanities," by Stephen Hsu, MIT's Technology Review, September 25, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=24172&nlid=2385
From an essay by William Chace, professor of English and former president of Wesleyan and Emory. The American Scholar essay  --- http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/

... Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

... Alexander W. Astin’s research tells us that in the mid-1960s, more than 80 percent of entering college freshmen reported that nothing was more important than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, reports that “being very well off financially” was only an afterthought, one that fewer than 45 percent of those freshmen thought to be an essential goal. As the years went on, however, and as tuition shot up, the two traded places; by 1977, financial goals had surged past philosophical ones, and by the year 2001 more than 70 percent of undergraduate students had their eyes trained on financial realities, while only 40 percent were still wrestling with meaningful philosophies.
 

Regarding the last paragraph, while there has undoubtedly been a general cultural shift, it is also true that a much larger fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of average cognitive ability. Perhaps the elite of the 1960s had the luxury and cognitive ability to concentrate on their philosophy of life, as opposed to earning a living; students today do not.

For more see here:

Education and Verbal Ability over Time: Evidence from Three Multi-Time Sources

Nie, Golde and Butler

Abstract: During the 20th century, there was an unprecedented expansion in the level of educational attainment in America. Using three separate measures, this paper investigates whether there was a concurrent increase in verbal ability and skills. Changes in verbal ability in the general population as well as changes in the verbal ability of graduates of different levels of education are investigated. An additional investigation of how changes in the differences between males' and females' educational attainment are associated with changes in differences between their respective verbal abilities follows. The main finding is that there is little evidence that the large increase in educational attainment has resulted in an increase in any of the measures of verbal abilities and skills.

College students are not as intelligent
Where as college grades are being inflated, intelligence of students in college is being deflated with rising numbers of college admissions. A much larger fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of average cognitive ability.
"College students are not as intelligent" --- http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/college_students_are_not_as_in.php

September 28, 2009 reply from 'will@willyancey.com'

Bob,

I am confused. Are you saying students should talk on more debt and take more time to study topics that will be not help their employment? Are you saying the government should subsidize activity that students do not want to pay for?

If English and humanity departments are not able to attract enough students, then perhaps the departments are too large and should be reduced. It appears to me that young people are very interested in communication whether that is by reading, internet, text messaging, websites, church activities, etc. They can get a lot of that communication without paying for college tuition. I am one of those old-fashioned people that believe that in the long run markets work and people make rational decisions.

I agree that verbal skills have declined. Perhaps we need better verbal skills development to take place within the business, math, and science courses. Why should English departments have a monopoly on teaching communication?

Will

September 28, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Will,

This all gets very complicated, and perhaps the reason is that the 1960s general education model no longer fits the 21^st Century. I firmly believe that the difference between education and training is education’s scholarly foundations in humanities and science. I also believe that the present general education model is a mess --- at Harvard all first and second year students simply take small discretionary samples from a large smorgasbord.

The University of North Texas experimented (on an AAA Accounting Education Change Commission grant) by having accounting and humanities professors jointly teach accounting courses. The UNT, by the way, has one of the strongest humanities faculty systems in the University of Texas system of universities.

It is rumored that the UNT AECC experiment was pretty much a failure, although I’ve not studied this experiment myself. Apparently, when given choices between all-accounting sections versus accounting-humanities sections, the students overwhelmingly chose all-accounting sections. Once again this is only what I heard from one insider, a big insider accountant and scholarly opera buff, in the UNT accounting program.

I don’t have any answers to the liberal-core curriculum dilemma. At Trinity we once had a Quest program where all first year students took the same overview course on history, religion, philosophy, etc. That did not meet evolutionary success and gave way to categories of courses in things like “Western Civilization” and a number of other categories for qualified general education courses. That is pretty much the system still in place, but it has become more and more like a Harvard smorgasbord.

The trouble with smorgasbord humanities is that there’s literally no consistency between graduates in terms of what they learned about humanities. Another problem is the turf wars that go on between humanities departments. If you don’t have any majors (e.g., Southern Mississippi has something like three economics majors) then departments fight for survival by attracting general education course enrollments. The Economics Department at Southern Mississippi is currently on the chopping block. Really!

Bob Jensen

Question
If your budget forces you to drop the Department Bad Luck that has one or more required courses in the general education curriculum, what department should be eliminated?
Hints:

• That department may also have one or more courses required of all accounting, finance, and general business majors.
• That department may also have one or more courses required of all social science majors.
• That department is quite popular in many colleges for students planning on entering MBA programs and law schools. . But that department may not be quite as popular at Southern Mississippi as it is in most colleges.
• That department teaches subject matter closest to astrology.

"So, Department Bad Luck was right in line with Accounting, Management, and Marketing for [Credit Hour Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that produced over 300 graduates last year compared to 3 for Department Bad Luck," Nail wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed.

"Cruel Irony," Inside Higher Ed, by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/economics

Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the University of Southern Mississippi is poised to eliminate -- of all things -- its economics department, faculty were informed this week.

The elimination of economics, along with five tenured and four tenure-track faculty positions, is part of a plan to reduce spending by $11 to $12 million, universitywide, within a year. While university officials stress the plan isn't yet final, they are slated to decide by September 1 whether to go forward with the proposed cuts, according to a news release. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are legally required to a year's notice prior to termination, and economics faculty say they've already received such notice.

The proposal was crafted by a provost-led committee, which also included faculty. The committee’s proposal recommends 12 tenured or tenure-track positions be cut across the university, and three quarters of those will come from economics.

George Carter, a professor of economics at Southern Mississippi, sent a letter to colleagues proclaiming that “USM will stand alone as a major university without an economics faculty.” He went further, attesting that “due process has been denied” to economics professors who were unrepresented on the budget committee and kept in the dark about its deliberations throughout the process.

Much of the justification for eliminating the economics department was tied to student demand. An outline of the plan drafted by the committee notes that the program has “less than five graduates per year,” but that number is in dispute. Until recently, the department housed the university’s international business program, which produced 17 graduates in 2007-8. If those graduates were added to the total, economics would have produced 20 graduates that year.

Even with the international business graduates included, however, economics trails all other departments in the college in the number of degrees awarded. The highest degree producer in 2007-8 was Management and Marketing, which had 293 graduates. The second-lowest was Tourism and Management, which had 29 graduates -- nine more than economics, even with international business included in the tally.

While faculty in the department acknowledge the need to boost degree numbers in core economics programs, they note that the economics courses they teach support many other majors.

“We actually have, I believe, the highest student credit hours per [full-time equivalent faculty member] in the College of Business, and maybe one of the highest at the university," said Mark Klinedinst, a professor in the department. "[Administrators] were constantly complaining 'Oh, we're overstaffed.' How can we be overstaffed if we teach one of the heavier course loads at the college and the university?"

Southern Mississippi did not provide universitywide data on teaching loads requested by Inside Higher Ed, but the teaching loads economics faculty carry are actually relatively close to two of the four other departments within the college, according to data provided by the faculty and Lance Nail, dean of the college. About 275 credit hours were produced by each full-time equivalent economics faculty member in 2007-8, according to slightly differing data supplied by both the dean and faculty. That ratio is similar to the load carried by the Department of Accountancy and Information Systems -- 310 credit hours per FTE -- and Management and Marketing -- 307 per FTE, Nail's data show.

To Nail, the credit hour data illustrate that faculty in other departments are producing just as many credit hours, while also producing more degrees than economics.

"So, ECON was right in line with Accounting, Management, and Marketing for [Credit Hour Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that produced over 300 graduates last year compared to 3 for ECON," Nail wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed.

Dean's Process Criticized

Economics faculty are still smarting that the international business program was moved to another department, but their primary complaint is about the process by which that change took place. The move was part of an overall redesign proposed by Nail, who went ahead with the plan over the objections of the university’s Academic Council, December meeting minutes indicate. While the council acknowledged that it did not have governing authority over the redesign, it nonetheless voted against the proposal in a symbolic gesture. The Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning, however, endorsed the redesign, and it went forward.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Economics faculty are among the most articulate faculty  and trench fighters on campus. My guess is that this "just ain't going to happen." Otherwise Southern Mississippi will become the most frowned upon university in the world.

What would corporations do when faced with such fiscal emergencies? Many will turn to what accountants call zero-based budgeting --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Based_Budgeting
Given only the facts in the article, it would seem that zero-based budgeting alone may point to ECON as the bad luck department because of having almost no majors. But this is precisely the mistake that zero-based budgeting can make in the academy since the academy is much more than a business.

Years ago, Colorado College dropped Accounting (and I think the entire department of Business Administration).. But in fear of losing a huge number of applicants to the university, a sufficient number new accounting courses were offered in the Economics Department such that graduates became eligible for sit for the CPA examination in Colorado --- ergo old wine in new bottles. I don't think there was any difference between Intermediate Accounting and the Economics of Intermediate Accounting. I think Colorado College soon afterwards brought back accounting, finance, and business administration.

Economics is probably more vulnerable than Business Administration in terms of appeal to applicants seeking careers, but economics is so part and parcel to business education and research, I just cannot imagine having a business administration department that is not served by economics courses in one structure or another. If the Department of Economics is eventually dropped at Southern Mississippi, watch for new courses called Finance of Economics Principles, Finance of the Macro Economy, Principles of Microeconomics in Business, etc.

The bit about astrology was just a joke (... er... well sort of anyway).

New undergraduate business or finance certificate programs added on to arts colleges at Princeton, Northwestern, and Columbia

New undergraduate courses (but not degrees) are being offered at colleges like Dartmouth

Some like the University of Pennsylvania have long-standing undergraduate business degree programs

"Business: The New Liberal Art:  Interest in business is surging at elite liberal arts colleges, and schools that once shunned the business major are now offering coursework," Business Week, October 22, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/oct2009/bs20091022_146227.htm?link_position=link1 

Ever since fleeing Europe's tyranny for the New World, Americans have established a collegiate system which emphasizes a broad, liberal arts education. Even as larger state schools mimicked European universities and offered undergraduate majors in vocational fields, the Ivy League schools and their peers, for the most part, resisted. "In America, we think more in terms of a broad undergraduate education," says Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile). "Other parts of the world are much more specific. They believe in the benefit of students going directly into their major and taking several years of very narrow, technical work. We don't think of it that way."

But as the financial industry becomes an increasingly sought-after destination for talented undergraduates, some top schools are reconsidering that age-old bias. In the last three years, liberal arts colleges that once shunned the business major have begun making business courses available to undergrads. And with the job market in turmoil, interest in these programs has surged. At Tuck, growing demand has led the school to triple the number of business classes it offers. Columbia, which has seen increased interest among undergrads for the business courses in its catalog, is considering a program similar to one at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management that yields a business certificate upon completion. That program itself has been so popular that it expanded just a year after its inception.

Once wholly committed to their vision of students well-versed in philosophy, history, and science, these schools appear to be changing course. According to Amir Ziv, vice-dean at Columbia Business School (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile), behind this shift in attitude is "a lot of demand from the undergrads to know something about business."

For liberal arts students, a little bit of business knowhow is a powerful thing, giving them the confidence they need to work in a business setting. "It's hard for students coming from a liberal arts education not to feel disadvantaged when they're up against students from, say, the Wharton (Wharton Undergraduate Business Profile) undergraduate program," says Charles Friedland, a senior majoring in economics at Dartmouth. Friedland, 21, accepted a summer internship offer last spring from Bank of America (BAC) without a single credit in business to his name. But as one of the students to enroll in financial accounting, the first Tuck business class ever offered to undergraduate students, he had the credit by his first day of work. "After the first or second day of the internship, it was already evident how much taking the class helped in terms of being comfortable in the atmosphere of a large finance firm," he says.

The last thing highly ranked schools want is for a large number of students to be at a perceived disadvantage when vying for full-time jobs. "Students realize that when they go to their first job they want to know something about business," says Ziv. "If you've had an accounting class, that gives you an advantage. You understand what profit-and-loss sheets are and what balance sheets are. And that helps."

The overwhelming popularity and growing necessity of the finance offerings is forcing schools to expand their assortment of classes. Dartmouth initially introduced just two sections of accounting to undergraduates and already has plans to add two more sections of marketing and eventually two sections of management. Meanwhile, Columbia is considering parlaying its selection of undergraduate courses into a more formalized concentration that upon completion would be recognized on students' transcripts, a program similar to one already offered by Kellogg.

Northwestern Succumbs In 2007, 41 years after it terminated its once well-regarded undergraduate program to focus on building a prestigious graduate business school, Kellogg responded to the unyielding demand for its business classes on the undergraduate level by reopening its doors to college-age students. Many undergrads wanted something formal, perhaps a major to put on their résumés. Kellogg compromised. It began offering an undergraduate certificate to students who fulfill a set of business pre-requisites and earn a B average in four advanced-level business classes.

"We wanted to build on the breadth of the undergraduate program," says Janice Eberly, a Kellogg professor with a hand in establishing the business certificate. "So we made the decision to layer business skills, in the form of a certificate program, on that existing, strong educational foundation that Northwestern students already have." As the economy collapsed, interest in the program has surged—not only are applications up sharply, but a second certificate in engineering and business has been added.

At Kellogg, undergraduate students can access the certificate program classes only via an extensive application process. Once accepted, undergrads have access to many of the same resources that their graduate counterparts do. Classes are taught by Kellogg professors, and a career services counselor is dedicated solely to the undergraduate job search. Among top private schools now offering some business education, it's the closest any have come to an actual business major.

Holding the Line The new and expanding business programs like those at Columbia and Kellogg are valuable for students like Tom Evans. A senior at Kellogg's certificate program, Evans entered Northwestern with a fleeting interest in physics, but within a year came to realize that finance was his calling. He majored in mathematical methods in social science & economics, and applied for the certificate program during the first year of its existence, hoping to get a grounding in the way economic theories play out in the world of business. His only regret: not being able to major in business. "It's very limiting and restricting for schools to stay stuck in their ways," he says. "They should be more conscious of the necessity to accommodate people of varying interests."

While undergraduate business offerings at liberal arts schools are gaining traction, no one expects them to morph into full-blown business majors any time soon. Danos believes that a basic understanding of finance is crucial to any learned young man or woman; from the English majors who aspire to law to the future doctors sitting in an organic chemistry class. And in spite of the steadily rising interest in business at these schools, the intellectual breadth that liberal arts schools aim to offer is as dear to them now as it was when Harvard was founded in 1636.

"The trend is to get some exposure of business," Danos says. "But I don't think that we're going to go the route of the big schools with full, two year majors in business—certainly Dartmouth won't."

Jensen Comment
One of the prestige-university holdouts that resisted a cash cow MBA program (unlike Harvard, Yale, MIT, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Rice, and others) is Princeton University. However, I found that Princeton now offers and undergraduate certificate program in finance --- http://www.princeton.edu/bcf/undergraduate/

The certificate program in finance has four major requirements at Princeton University:

• First, there are prerequisites in mathematics, economics, and probability and statistics, as necessary for the study of finance at a sophisticated level. Advance planning is essential as these courses should be completed prior to the junior year.
   
• Second, two required core courses provide an integrated overview and background in modern finance.
   
• Third, students are required to take three elective courses.
   
• Fourth, a significant piece of independent work must relate to issues or methods of finance. This takes the form of a senior thesis, or for non-ECO or ORF majors only, if there is no possibility of finance content in their senior thesis or junior paper, a separate, shorter piece of independent work is required instead.

Brown University offers a wide range of finance courses coupled with the ability to customized undergraduate majors at Brown --- http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/undergraduate.php

In 2006, several finance related course underwent renumbering.  The following list shows you the old and current numbers of the courses in this area. Current Course Number. Name Pre-1996 Course Number. Name 1710. Investments 1770. Financial Markets I 1720. Corporate Finance 1790. Corporate Finance 1750. Options and Derivatives (Investments II) 1780. Financial Markets II 1760. Financial Institutions 1760. Financial Institutions 1770. Fixed Income Securities 1710. Fixed Income Securities 1780. Corporate Strategy 1330. Econ. Competitive Strategy 1790. Corp. Govern. and Manag. 1340. Econ. Corp. Governance

October 31, 2009 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

This view is not universally held. At my previous school, I suggested in an e-mail to university faculty, that exposure to business classes in the gen ed core might prove to be a good thing for several reasons. One of those reasons is that students might get an exposure to another field of study and would broaden their academic experience. I was panned and mocked by everyone including business faculty, but my idea was received well by music faculty.

November 1, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

The new financial certificate undergraduate programs such as those at Princeton and Columbia will not solve a basic societal problem about ignorance in personal finance and taxation, because these programs reach so few students. The same may be said about colleges having one or more elective finance courses in the general education core.

The overwhelming majority of college graduates (including most PhD graduates, medical school graduates, and law school graduates) is that they do not have a clue about personal finance, investing, personal accounting, financial risk and insurance, business law, and most importantly tax planning. I’ve encountered attorneys that, in my viewpoint, are financially ignorant even though they are advising clients about estate planning and real estate investing.

This ignorance among most of our college graduates has huge societal externalities. The fundamental cause of divorce in society is rooted in personal financial disasters and spending fights between spouses that often carries over into life-long behavioral destruction of children. How much of this could be avoided by requiring that all college graduates have the rudiments of personal financial responsibility?

Many of our graduates do not realize that personal bankruptcy laws have changed. They still believe it is relatively simple to accumulate huge debts and repeatedly declare bankruptcy over and over when needed to clear out their unpaid debts.

I’ve got news for them about Chapter 7 changes that took place in 2005 --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_and_Consumer_Protection_Act 

Partly as a result of their financial ignorance, many college graduates get themselves early-on in financial messes due to student loans they can’t afford, credit card balances they cannot afford, and vote for spending legislation that messes up entire communities or the nation as a whole. They do not understand the rudiments of time value of money and cannot make wise choices about such things as investing in taxable versus tax-free investments.

Unfortunately, the finance certificate undergraduate programs (such as those at Princeton) reach less than one percent of the undergraduate. Even our business and accounting undergraduate degree programs do not reach a majority of the graduating class.

And so my rant for educating all college students about personal finances and taxation goes on and on to deaf ears among higher education faculty and administrators controlling the general education curricula. There may be innovative ways to educate students along these lines. Firstly, I would try to educate the faculty about personal finance and taxation since these faculty members most likely advise students in ways that affect the lives of those students. Secondly, it may be possible to require these items as “training” requirements much like colleges require physical education by whatever name.

Bob Jensen’s personal finance helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

Who the hell cares?
That lack of basic knowledge (among students)  is not necessarily calamitous. Basic knowledge can be acquired, even at the college level. The more critical problem is the high percentage of high school graduates who will read about the connection between Caesar and Kaiser and Czar and think, "Who the hell cares?" In other words, you can teach facts. You can teach skills. But you can't teach intellectual curiosity. If students haven't caught the bug after twelve years of elementary and secondary school, if they don't prize knowledge for its own sake, nothing their college professors do or say is going to remedy that lack. The phrase "college material" has an antiquated sound. That's not such a bad thing, on the one hand, since it reeks of a time when women and ethnic minorities were kept out of elite universities by gentlemen's agreements. On the other hand, students who enter a degree-granting college with core-curriculum requirements who don't possess even a cursory measure of intellectual curiosity are, in the long run, only wasting their time. They're not college material.
Mark Goldblatt (English teacher), "Who Is College Material?" American Spectator, September 28, 2009 ---
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/28/who-is-college-material
Jensen Comment
Perhaps the students have fundamentally changed between 1960 and 2000, but I think it's more apt to be that our humanities teachers have changed by focusing on topics that really don't turn students on to history, literature, and language. In accounting we have an advantage because students want to learn accounting for their careers. Many humanities many teachers have a harder time teaching inspiring personal agendas (feminism and racial studies) to students who might indeed find it more inspiring to the study the "connection between Caesar and Kaiser and Czar."

What are the causes for this decline?
There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
William Chace, professor of English and former president of Wesleyan and Emory, The American Scholar essay  ---
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/

Sigh:  You can lead some horses to water but not make them drink:  College students are not as intelligent
Where as college grades are being inflated, intelligence of students in college is being deflated with rising numbers of college admissions. A much larger fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of average cognitive ability.
"College students are not as intelligent" --- http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/college_students_are_not_as_in.php

September 28, 2009 reply from Barbara Scofield [barbarawscofield@GMAIL.COM]

The University of Dallas has a BA in Business Leadership that integrates with a Master of Science in Accounting that provides the closest experience to a liberal arts education that meets the Texas CPA candidacy requirements in 5 years that I have ever seen. I taught in this program for 4 1/2 years and I can't tell you the how much superior these students were in writing and critical thinking to my students at UTPB.

The University of Dallas undergraduate core is has a common core of Great Books that are used in English, History, Philosophy, and Theology (Catholic school). The students have choices in their foreign language (but they must have a foreign language), the level of mathematics, the type of fine arts, and the type of science, but the humanities core is in common. UD is a small college and the students interested in this accounting program are few, but they have jobs two years ahead of graduation.

The undergraduate business program at UD was added after a long history of liberal arts education, rather than trying to impose liberal arts after a long history of practice-oriented education, so the students were surrounded by fellow students, faculty, and administration supporting the liberal arts model -- and there was no alternative once a student was at UD.

Most of my accounting students at UD were in the MBA/MS Accounting joint program because they had a variety of non-business undergraduate degrees and now were interested in becoming accountants.

Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Chair of Graduate Business Studies Professor of Accounting
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
4901 E. University Dr. Odessa, TX 79762
432-552-2183 (Office) 817-988-5998 (Cell)
BarbaraWScofield@gmail.com

Jensen Comment
That's good to know Barbara. I might add that the AACSB took a move in the right direction by allowing accredited business schools to define their own missions rather than put straight jackets on curricula and courses. This removed one of the huge barriers to liberalization of business education. But there are huge remaining barriers remaining such as student preferences for courses that fit more directly to their career goals in business.

One thing I noted at Trinity University, which has a strong Modern Languages Department, is the increase in joint majors in accounting and a foreign language. Particularly popular has been joint majoring in Chinese and Spanish for the obvious reason that some accounting graduates have interests in getting assignments in China and Latin America. For a time, joint majoring in Russian was popular but I think perceived career opportunities in Russia dried up due to Russian crime and anti-business initiatives of the current regime.

Sometimes the unexpected happens such as having a Russian student majoring in Chinese --- http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/thinkmap/index.htm

Read about dual majoring in physics and accounting --- http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/thinkmap/index.htm

I actually had a student years ago who won the first-year prize as Outstanding Physics Student who eventually changed to a dual major in accounting and computer science. The student, Igor Vaysman, went on to earn an "accounting" doctorate at Stanford University, but he mostly studied advanced mathematics under game theorist Robert Wilson at Stanford. Igor later had faculty appointments at UC Berkeley and the University of Texas before moving on to INSEAD --- http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/ivaysman/ .
His brilliance in some ways may have stood in his way in life because, in my opinion, he spread himself a bit thin by wanting to learn more and more about virtually everything.

Igor is the smartest student I ever advised or had in class. He earned a minimum of 18 credits per semester and also earned all A grades except for one A-. He's the second closest person I ever met with a nearly-photographic memory (the number one person in that regard was a mathematics professor that I had at Stanford who earned a Harvard PhD in mathematics when he was 17 years old).

While a student carrying 18 hours a semester Igor also worked half time as a computer systems engineer. In high school he was a Master Chess Player, all-star soccer player, and an extremely successful judo expert.

"What Will They Learn?" by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, August 26, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/08/26/what_will_they_learn 

When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50 thousand this fall for a year's worth of college room, board and tuition, it might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return? The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) ask that question in their recently released publication, "What Will They Learn: A Report on the General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities."

ACTA conducted research to see whether 100 major institutions require seven key subjects: English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and science. What ACTA found was found was alarming, reporting that "Even as our students need broad-based skills and knowledge to succeed in the global marketplace, our colleges and universities are failing to deliver. Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become mere options on far too many campuses. Not surprisingly, students are graduating with great gaps in their knowledge -- and employers are noticing."

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that only 31 percent of college graduates can read and understand a complex book. Employers complain that graduates of colleges lack the writing and analytical skills necessary to succeed in the workplace. A 2006 survey conducted by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management found that only 24 percent of employers thought graduates of four-year colleges were "excellently prepared" for entry-level positions. College seniors perennially fail tests of their civic and historical knowledge.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni graded the 100 surveyed colleges and universities on their general education requirements. Forty-two institutions received a "D" or an "F" for requiring two or fewer subjects. Twenty-five of them received an "F" for requiring one or no subjects. No institution required all seven. Five institutions received an "A" for requiring six general education subjects. They were Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Texas A&M, University of Arkansas (Fayetteville), United States Military Academy (West Point) and University of Texas at Austin. Twenty institutions received a "C" for requiring three subjects and 33 received a "B" for requiring four or five subjects. ACTA maintains a website keeping the tally at Whatwilltheylearn.com.

ACTA says that "paying a lot doesn't get you a lot." Generally, the higher the tuition, the less likely there are rigorous general education requirements. Average tuition and fees at the 11 schools that require no subjects is $37,700; however, average tuition at the five schools that require six subjects is $5,400. Average tuition fees at the top national universities and liberal arts colleges are $35,000 (average grade is "F").

Dishonest and manipulative college administrators might try to rebut the report saying, "We have general education requirements." At one major state university, students may choose from over 100 different classes to meet a history requirement. At other colleges, students may satisfy general education requirements with courses such as "Introduction to Popular TV and Movies" and "Science of Stuff." Still other colleges allow the study of "Bob Dylan" to meet a literature requirement and "Floral Art" to meet a natural science requirement.

ACTA's report concludes by saying that a coherent core reflects, in the words of federal judge Jose Cabranes, "a series of choices -- the choice of the lasting over the ephemeral; the meritorious over the meretricious; the thought-provoking over the merely self-affirming." A general education curriculum, when done well, is one that helps students "ensure that their studies -- and their lives -- are well-directed."

ACTA says that a recent study reports that 89 percent of institutions surveyed said they were in the process of modifying or assessing their programs. What these and other institutions need is for boards of trustees, parents and alumni to provide the necessary incentive to administrators and there's little more effective in opening the closed minds of administrators than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

At the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business (McCombs Undergraduate Business Profile), the minimum GPA in 2009 for undergraduate students, resident or nonresident, who wanted to transfer into the business school was 3.6, according to the school's admissions Web site. Back in 2005, the minimum GPA for an internal transfer was 3.4 for residents and 3.5 for nonresidents.

"Business: Big Major on Campus:  A flight to safety is driving up enrollment at many undergraduate business programs, but that's making it tougher to get in," by Alison Damast, Business Week, September  24, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090924_680815.htm?link_position=link1

Every fall, Linda Salchenberger, dean of Marquette University's College of Business Administration (Marquette Undergraduate Business Profile), meets with parents of freshman students to welcome them to the school and gauge their expectations for the years ahead. This year, she stood in front of a group of 400 of them and posed a question she thought would receive a lukewarm response in today's challenging economic climate.

"I asked, 'How many of you are optimistic about the job prospects for your students four years from now,' and I'd say easily three-quarters of them raised their hand," she says.

That was just the first bit of good news Salchenberger received. Enrollment in the freshman class is up 7% over last year and the school just welcomed its largest ever freshman, sophomore, and junior classes to campus, she says.

This is a scenario being played out on the campuses of many colleges and universities across the country this fall. Driven by the recession and one of the largest incoming freshman classes in the nation's history, the business major is experiencing a surge in popularity among students. Dozens of business schools, including Emory University's Goizueta Business School (Goizueta Undergraduate Business Profile), Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business (Santa Clara Undergraduate Business Profile), and the University of Scranton's Kania School of Management (Scranton Undergraduate Business Profile) are reporting an uptick in their entering freshman classes, with many boasting record enrollment and interest from high school graduates. At some schools, enrollment is up by as much as 10% or 15%, stretching them to capacity and, in some cases, forcing admissions officers to be more selective and tighten their criteria.

Starting Salaries Take a Hit

Deans and admissions officers say students and parents are increasingly viewing the business major as the most practical major in this economy, one that will put them in the best position to land a job after graduation. Increasingly, many who intended to become liberal arts majors are switching gears to business, or double majoring, pursuing a degree in history, for example, at the same time as one in finance, administrators say.

Many of these students are positioning themselves for what they hope will be an economic recovery down the road. However, their confidence in a business degree as the key to jump-starting their careers may be misplaced, especially if they graduate in the next year or two. Business graduates have been as hard hit by the downturn as most majors, a trend that shows no signs of abating, and their salaries are not faring much better. According to a July report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for 2009 college graduates with bachelor's degrees in business increased less than 1%, to $47,239. Some business majors fared especially poorly. Business administration majors saw their salaries sink 2.1%, to $44,944. Meanwhile, economics graduates saw their salaries dip by 1.3%, to $49,829, according to the report.

Even so, business has always been a popular major among undergraduates. In academic year 2006-07, the largest number of bachelor's degrees conferred was in business (21%), followed by social sciences and history (11%), education (7%), and health sciences (7%), according to the most recent figures available from the Education Dept.'s National Center for Education Statistics. Fueling that trend, many students enter college already knowing they want to become business majors; nearly 17% of full-time freshmen at four-year colleges across the country said they planned to major in business in the fall of 2008, according to data from the latest national student survey conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles' Higher Education Research Institute.

Majoring in Business as an Investment

Though enrollment figures for fall 2009 are not yet available, John Fernandes, president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a leading accreditation group, says he expects that trend to continue its upward spiral this academic year. He says he's heard anecdotally from a number of schools that business is the most popular major this year on campus, with many students even choosing to pursue double majors within the business school, such as a finance-and-accounting combination. That's a strategy students believe will give them more concrete skills and an edge when they enter the job market, Fernandes says.

"Any time the economy looks difficult, that means undergraduates will look towards a degree that they can more quickly apply to a job. And students see business as the major with the greatest likelihood of getting one," Fernandes says.

That's the case for Christopher Paschal, 18, a freshman at Santa Clara, who intends to double-major in accounting and political science. Paschal says he is not certain yet whether he'll pursue a career in politics or business but notes that with the recession he felt it was more important than ever to have a business foundation, no matter what path he ends up pursuing.

"It is a safe choice. I knew business would help set me up for a good career, even if the economy is good or bad," he says.

Another reason he's taking a closer look at the business field? Paschal says he was strongly urged by his mother, who works at IBM (IBM), to consider a business major. That's a conversation that more and more parents are having with their children these days before sending them off to college, says Drew Starbird, acting dean of Santa Clara's Leavey School. He believes it is one of the reasons Leavey's enrollment is up 13% this year, with 320 students majoring in business.

"Higher education is an expensive proposition for families and many families look on it as an investment. It can pay off in a lot of different ways and one of the ways it pays off is in a job and higher salary down the road," he says. "Especially now, the families who send their kids to college are doing that calculation."

That mindset among families is also evident at Scranton's Kania School, where freshman enrollment is up about 10% over last year, says Dean Michael Mensah. Meanwhile, total undergraduate enrollment at the business school continues to rise. Back in academic year 2006-07, there were 816 students enrolled at the school; this fall, enrollment tops off at 891 students.

Mensah says the school's curriculum—which has an emphasis on ethics and responsibility—is helping draw students. But that's only part of the appeal, he says.

"Business graduates usually get a chance at a good career much faster than any other majors and this is a time when people would probably like to stay away from additional education, or at least recoup some of their undergraduate investment before pursuing some other path," Mensah says.

Raising the Standards

On some campuses, the increased fervor for the business major means it is becoming more competitive to get into B-schools. For example, applications have been so strong recently at some universities, especially large state ones, that they are increasing their minimum grade point averages (GPA) to 3.2 or higher to narrow the field of candidates, AACSB's Fernandes says.

At the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business (McCombs Undergraduate Business Profile), the minimum GPA in 2009 for undergraduate students, resident or nonresident, who wanted to transfer into the business school was 3.6, according to the school's admissions Web site. Back in 2005, the minimum GPA for an internal transfer was 3.4 for residents and 3.5 for nonresidents.

Continued in article

Big Four Firm Get Top Spots in Business Week's “2009 Best Places To Launch A Career, The Big Four Alumni Blog, September 10, 2009 --- http://www.bigfouralumni.blogspot.com/

BusinessWeek just released its 2009 rankings of its much-anticipated “2009 Best Places To Launch A Career” list and for a second year, Big Four firms completely dominate the list, capturing the top four spots in the rankings. This year, only 69 companies made the list compared to 119 in 2008 due to more stringent criteria, making the 2009 list “both more exclusive and more competitive.” Thus, this year, there was more relative competition to make the list and this year’s rankings are at least 40% tougher than the previous year.

Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG are respectively ranked 1st to 4th on the list, beating out such leading contenders as Google (not even ranked), Goldman Sachs (2009 rank 6, 2008 rank 4), General Electric (2009 rank 16), Booz Allen Hamilton (2009 rank 63) and Microsoft (2009 rank 18).

Other notables associated with the Big Four firms are Accenture (2009 rank 11, up an astonishing 36 ranks from 2008 rank 47), Protiviti (2009 rank 49, remarkably up 46 ranks from 2008 rank 95).

Two of the Big Six Accounting firms also make the list. Grant Thornton (2009 rank 51, 2008 rank 76) and RSM McGladrey Pullen (2009 rank 66, 2008 rank 104).

Continued in article

Last year's rankings were similar --- Click Here
http://bigfouralumni.blogspot.com/search/label/Best Places to Launch a Career

 

Accounting Majors in Demand
Even when the economy is down, there is room for top students in the profession.   The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2009 Student Survey found that, even though students in the class of 2009 were graduating with fewer jobs available, accounting majors are still in high demand. Accounting and engineering graduates were among those majors most likely to have already found jobs.   Accounting majors expect to earn an average starting salary of about $45,000, while engineering grads expect to earn $58,000.
Journal of Accountancy, July 2009 --- http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2009/Jul/AccountingMajors.htm

Do We Need Changes in J-Schools and B-Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JSchools

So much learning now takes place online, including faculty office hours, study groups, and lectures.
What extra value are you going to need to offer to bring the students of the future to your college?
Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle Research Services.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,

“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”

A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”

Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”

The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.

Good Luck Jack (and Suzi):  You're Going to Need All the Luck You Can Get

"Jack Welch Launches Online MBA:  The legendary former GE CEO says he knows a thing or two about management, and for $20,000 you can, too," by Geoff Gloeckler, Business Week, June 22, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2009/bs20090622_962094.htm?link_position=link1

A corporate icon is diving into the MBA world, and he's bringing his well-documented management and leadership principles with him. Jack Welch, former CEO at General Electric (GE) (and Business Week columnist), has announced plans to start an MBA program based on the business principles he made famous teaching managers and executives in GE's Crotonville classroom.

The Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI) will officially launch this week, with the first classes starting in the fall. The MBA will be offered almost entirely online. Compared to the $100,000-plus price tag for most brick-and-mortar MBA programs, the $600 per credit hour tuition means students can get an MBA for just over $20,000. "We think it will make the MBA more accessible to those who are hungry to play," Welch says. "And they can keep their job while doing it."

To make the Jack Welch Management Institute a reality, a group led by educational entrepreneur Michael Clifford purchased financially troubled Myers University in Cleveland in 2008, Welch says. Welch got involved with Clifford and his group of investors and made the agreement to launch the Welch Management Institute.

Popularized Six Sigma For Welch, the new educational endeavor is the latest chapter in a long and storied career. As GE's longtime chief, he developed a management philosophy based on relentless efficiency, productivity, and talent development. He popularized Six Sigma, wasn't shy about firing his worst-performing managers, and advocated exiting any business where GE wasn't the No. 1 or No. 2 player. Under Welch, GE became a factory for producing managerial talent, spawning CEOs that included James McNerney at Boeing (BA), Robert Nardelli at Chrysler, and Jeff Immelt, his successor at GE.

Welch's decision to jump into online education shows impeccable timing. Business schools in general are experiencing a rise in applications as mid-level managers look to expand their business acumen while waiting out the current job slump. The new program's flexible schedule—paired with the low tuition cost—could be doubly attractive to those looking to move up the corporate ladder as the market begins to rebound.

Ted Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, agrees. "I think it's a good time for someone to launch a high-profile online degree," Snyder says. "If you make the investment in contentthat allows for a lot of interaction between faculty and students and also among students, you can get good quality at a much more reasonable tuition level."

Welch's Secret Weapon That being said, there are challenges that an online MBA program like Welch's will have a difficult time overcoming, even if the technology and faculty are there. "The integrity and quality of engagement between faculty and students is the most precious thing we have," Snyder says. "Assuming it's there, it dominates. These things are hard to replicate online."

But Welch does have one thing that differentiates his MBA from others: himself. "We'll have all of the things the other schools have, only we'll have what Jack Welch believes are things that work in business, in a real-time way," he says. "Every week I will have an online streaming video of business today. For example, if I was teaching this week, I would be putting up the health-care plan. I'd be putting up the financial restructuring plan, talking about it, laying out the literature, what others are saying, and I'd be talking about it. I'll be doing that every week."

Welch and his wife Suzy are also heavily involved in curriculum design, leaning heavily on the principles he used training managers at GE.

Continued in Article

Jensen Comment
There are enormous obstacles standing in the way of the super-confident Jack Welch on this one. I should mention that I've never been a Jack Welch fan and am especially disturbed that he is the world's leader in platinum retirement perks that, in my opinion, go way beyond his value in the past and future to GE. But I will try to not let my prejudices bias my remarks below.

• This raises the question of why students choose one MBA program over another after being admitted to several. For example, suppose a student has not yet made a decision about accepting MBA program offers at Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Claremont, or the Jack (and Suzi) Welch Management Institute. Assume location and climate are of no concern in this choice. Some years back the relatively new Claremont MBA program assumed that the worldwide reputations of faculty were the most important draw for new students. So they hired at least one big name in each of the business disciplines, the most notable of which was the famous Peter Drucker.
  
  I won't go into details here and Claremont has a very respected MBA program, but it has had huge problems attracting enough top students. The reason quite simply, in my viewpoint, is that students choose MBA programs for reasons other than reputations of faculty. Of course they assume that a top MBA program has hired top faculty, but reputations of individual faculty are not why they choose Stanford over Harvard or Wharton over Claremont. The choose MBA programs for many of the reasons that led to top MBA programs in U.S. News or the WSJ. They want high paying opportunities for fast track wealth, and they assume the last five decades of established success in that regard makes an MBA program the best for them. They also want to be among the best students and alumni in the world, because they feel that networking with current students and active alumni is a leading, if not the leading, factor for career advancement opportunity.
  
  Having a few big names on the faculty just does not cut it relative to the more important factors when top students seek out an MBA program. The same can be said to a somewhat lesser extent when choosing a doctoral studies program. In the latter case, an applicant is often heavily influenced by a current or former Professor X who recommends the doctoral program at University Y because Professor Z happens to be a leading research advisor at University Y. This is not the case for MBA students in most instances.
  
   
• If you're starting up an MBA program, an online MBA program is probably a good idea. This will attract some high GMAT applicants who, for whatever reason, just cannot leave town to become a full-time student in another locale. But at the same time, an online MBA program is a turn off to other top prospects. Some of the reasons were mentioned above. In addition, online degree programs still have a stigma that online degrees are inferior (even though many studies, such as the SCALE Experiment at Illinois, suggest that online learning may be better if online instruction is excellent. Equally important is that potential employers generally recruit more aggressively in reputable onsite MBA programs. Jack Welch will have more success if he can get inside tracks for his graduates to roll into the top jobs. Somehow I doubt that he can do this for more than a handful of graduates vis-a-vis the competition from the top 50 MBA programs ranked by U.S. News and the WSJ.
  
   
• The timing could not be worse for starting a MBA Program. Top programs at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, etc. are having trouble placing their students, including their top students after Wall Street virtually imploded and we're in probably the worst job market since the 1930s. This June, 80% of the nation's undergraduates seeking employment could not find jobs for which a college education is required. I suspect the situation is even worse for the nation's MBA programs in terms of graduates who did not already have satisfactory jobs before entering an MBA program. Some enter such programs with jobs such as when a career military officer decides to go for an MBA on the side.
  
   
• It is hard to compete without accreditation with MBA programs that are accredited. Hundreds of MBA programs around the world have struggled desperately to get AACSB accreditation. I doubt that the Jack Welch name trumps accreditation.

In any case it will be interesting to track the progress of the Jack Welch Management Institute. I would applaud if it becomes one of the best online degree programs in the world, because I highly support the development of more and better online training and education programs in the world --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

The Official Website of the Jack (and Suzi) Welch Management Institute is at http://www.welchway.com/

The competition is listed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

More on the greatest swindles of the world
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...
Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Question
How would you advise Jack and Suzi to modify the program for greater assurance as to success?

Answer
My advice would be to make this a GE Executive MBA Program. The business model would be to gear it to GE professionals, especially newly hired engineers that are strong on technical ability and weak on managerial skills, financial management, marketing, and accounting.

The key to success would be to have GE pay the tuition as a fringe benefit to the winning employees selected to get an MBA from Jack and Suzi. This may not be too difficult since there are shrines throughout the world in GE facilities where Jack Welch is worshipped as a God.

Some of the advantages of this business model are as follows:

• A major advantage of this MBA program is that students do not expect the program to help find them careers in leading corporations. The students would already have promising careers in GE or other corporations who partner with GE in sending employees to the JWMI. The JWMI, therefore, would not have to invest in a heaving marketing program to attract students. Students would be more or less handed to the degree program on a silver platter. The program would also not have to invest heavily in a graduate placement program. Graduates are already employed.
  
   
• The JWMI would be assured of cream-of-the-crop student talent. Firstly, the students obtained their jobs in a highly selective GE or other corporate hiring process that only extends job offers competitively to the best undergraduates in the world. Secondly, the students would have to meet added filters of being worthy of obtaining a "free" MBA degree.
  
   
• The JWMI can hire all its new faculty from the start on the basis of their extensive corporate experience and teaching skills. The program would not be burdened with research faculty that are under severe pressures to conduct research and publish papers in academic journals. Other MBA programs in the world often have non-tenured faculty who have little choice but to give primary time and attention to research. Teaching classes must become a secondary priority until reaching tenure. And then the pressure to continue research and publication does not end.
  
   
• Assuming tht JWMI will not be granting tenure to faculty, every faculty member in the JWMI (full-time or part-time) will have contract renewal based upon teaching performance. Lower performers can be shown the door at any time.

There are successful business models of this nature already in existence, although in most instances the corporation or other organization selected an AACSB-accredited institution to devise a special curriculum for employees seeking degrees in that institution. A few examples are summarized below.

• For many years the Terry School of Business at the University of Georgia has been running a special-curriculum online MBA program for employees of the accounting firm PwC. The PwC employees in this program mostly have degrees in computer science, engineering, or other technical specialties outside business disciplines. Although PwC is generally known as a global accounting firm and auditing firm, employees selected for the Terry School MBA program are mostly on career tracks in the consulting division of PwC. The objective of this program is not to qualify graduates to sit for the CPA examination. The objective is to give these students career advancement skills in management, marketing, finance, and accounting.

  • Customized delivery of a graduate program can be just as important to the employer–and as beneficial for the student–as tailored content. PricewaterhouseCoopers wanted to offer an M.B.A. program to up-and-coming employees of its management-consulting services group, who travel four or five days each workweek. But "having to be in town each weekend or a certain weekday evening just wouldn't work for them," says Don Burkhard, a director of the company's Learning and Professional Development Center. Burkhard came to an agreement with his own alma mater, Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, to provide a two-year M.B.A. program to consultants that relies heavily on distance learning. http://www.justcolleges.com/mba/customized-mba.htm

     

• Ernst & Young partnered with Notre Dame and the University of Virginia to offer a special-curriculum online (will some full time intervals) program leading to a masters degree in assurance services --- Click Here
  http://snipurl.com/eymasters 
   

  • The Facts

    • During the first summer, you will attend classes for 5 to 10 weeks at one of the participating universities. You will be eligible for E&Y benefits and will be paid a $1,000/month starter stipend.
       
    • After the first semester, you will begin full-time client service as an Assurance and Advisory Business Services professional, while taking one class fall semester via distance learning.
       
    • You will return for a second summer of classes at the university to complete your master's degree.
       
    • All costs associated with tuition, books, room and board, and transportation are covered by E&Y. A portion or all costs associated with the program may be taxable to you as the participant.

    
     

• The University of Texas offers a special MBA program for Dallas-based executives of Texas Instruments. Babson College has a masters degree program for Lucent employees. And the list goes on and on --- http://www.justcolleges.com/mba/customized-mba.htm
  
   
• Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an online MBA program for Deere employees. Deere pays the fees. See "Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html
  
   
• US Military --- Over 4,000 training and education courses from a variety of sources, including US Air University --- http://www.au.af.mil/au/  "All levels of Airmen, enlisted and officers, and civilians are educated through in-residence or distance-learning courses to meet emerging geo-political challenges faced by the United States. Developing adaptive and innovative students who will produce and disseminate new ideas is crucial to the security of our nation."
  
   
• Army Online University attracted 12,000 students during its first year of operation and doubled in ensuing years. Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal.  There are programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates, associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees.  All courses are free to soldiers.  By 2003, there was a capacity for 80,000 online students.   The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html 
  
   
• The U.S. IRS offers Internet education opportunities. IRS employees who want to get ahead in the organization are heading back to the classroom - 21st century style. College level courses in accounting, finance, tax law, and other business subjects will be available on the Internet to IRS employees. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/46816/101 
  The IRS pays the fees for all employees. The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville ---
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 
  
   
• For example, the IRS online accounting classes will be served up from Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html 
   

"Stanford, Duke, Rice, ... and Gates?," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41a02201.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Dear Bill Gates,

Hi! You don't know me, but I have an idea about how you should spend your hard-earned money. I'll bet you get a lot of that these days.

It's an old idea, a 19th-century idea. But I think its time has come again. Two words: Gates University.

What does that mean? Just what it sounds like! You should build a brand-new university, a great 21st-century institution of higher learning. A university unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The time is right — your foundation, the world's largest, recently announced a big push to improve postsecondary education. It's a terrific move. High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy. If our higher-education system doesn't get much better at helping more students earn them, your good work in improving elementary and secondary education will be for naught.

But you've also learned from your decade of pushing schools to improve. It's really hard! As you said in your annual letter in 2009, "We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school."

Well, high schools are a breeze compared with colleges, which are both more apt to resist change and more skilled at doing so successfully.

You need to prove that newer, better ways are possible. Fortunately, that part is easier in higher education. The problem with high schools is that there are tens of thousands of them, all serving local regions, and they don't pay attention to one another. Higher education is a national market, with only a few hundred elite colleges, in close competition. You won't have to work to get people to watch Gates University. It'll get all the notice it needs — and then some.

What would Gates University look like? To start, it would look like something. It wouldn't be wholly virtual. A university needs a physical center, a beating heart, a place where students and teachers come together and learn.

Admission to Gates U., the place, would be selective — but without the bribery and latent classism that still stain our so-called best colleges. No legacy admissions, once you start having legacies. No buying one's way in, no gentleman's agreements with wealthy private high schools that admit the "right" kind of students. No bias against striving ethnic groups, no special considerations for senators' sons.

And no preferences for athletes, because Gates University won't be running a pro football team on the side. (Seattle already has one, last I checked.)

Who would work at Gates University? Anyone who could do a great job. Maybe professors will have Ph.D.'s, maybe they won't. If a really smart person drops out of college, founds a phenomenally successful business, and decides to turn toward education as a way of giving back, he or she would be welcome to apply for a job. You, for example, would be qualified to teach at Gates U.

There would be no tenure, obviously. I assume you never thought it was a good idea at Microsoft — why have it here? Nor would you sequester faculty members into departments organized around academic disciplines. The world can get by without one more English department or college of business. Gates's programs would cross traditional disciplines, organized around goals for what students need to learn. Faculty time, pay, and status would center on the primary teaching mission.

How would you grant credits at Gates University? You wouldn't. At least not the way colleges normally do, based on time in contact with professors. No credit hours at Gates U., no degrees based on the number of years enrolled. Instead you'd describe in great, public detail all of the knowledge, skills, and attributes that students pursuing a given course of studies would need to acquire. You'd be very open about how you teach those things and how you assess what students have learned. Then you'd grant credentials when students met those academic standards — regardless of how long it takes.

How many students would you serve at Gates University? As many as you can. That, more than anything, would truly distinguish the university from all others.

Many public and nonprofit universities are trying to expand distance education over the Internet. But they're often constrained by their brands, their culture, their fealty to tradition. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and others are pioneering "open courseware" — well-developed materials available free of charge to individual learners and instructors — many colleges' online divisions are mere appendages, ways to make money and survive. Traditional colleges tend to look at the Internet and say, "How can we use this to keep being what we've always been?" Gates University would use the Internet to be what no university has ever been.

For-profit universities, meanwhile, are surging into the online market. Some provide valuable services, while others are ripping off students and taxpayers. But on some level they all want to provide as good an education as necessary for as much tuition as possible. Gates University would provide as good an education as possible for as much tuition as necessary, to as many students as it can reach.

How many students is that? You made a vast fortune with information technology and economies of scale. More people weren't an obstacle for you — they were an opportunity. How does Microsoft think about the number of people it could sell software to? That's how you should think about the number of people Gates University could serve.

Gates University, the place, would be the center of a global, Web-based institution of higher learning. In the same way that your foundation works to provide low-cost pharmaceuticals and vaccines to developing nations, your faculty members would work hand-in-hand with colleagues around the world to develop curricula, enforce academic standards, and experiment with novel new ways to use technology to help as many students as possible earn high-quality, low-cost degrees.

Because Gates University's standards would be open, the job market would have no trouble accepting its degrees. And I don't think you'll have any problems attracting students. Your name is global currency. People of every nation and culture need higher education, and they would jump at the chance to earn credentials with your imprimatur. Because Gates U. would be nonprofit, you'll price those degrees at cost. Since you'll have no money-losing sports teams, huge libraries full of books, bloated administrative structures, or unproductive professors, I'm guessing that will be far less than what other elite institutions now charge.

And for low-income students learning online, the charge will be even less. Technology and economies of scale are creating huge, largely untapped opportunities to lower the marginal cost of higher education. People all over the world have the talent, motivation, and will to earn degrees from world-class universities. But many of them are poor and isolated and far away. Gates University's mission would be to find those people, wherever they are, and give them the chance to learn.

These are big changes. Some might put you in conflict with accreditors, which are still too focused on fitting universities into a precast mold. But that's OK — it's a fight worth having, and one I think you would win. Indeed, the whole process of building Gates University would generate a conversation about postsecondary education that is sorely needed.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Given Bill Gate's pattern of giving away billions of dollars, my guess is that the money would go toward schools, probably K-12 schools, in Africa. His philanthropy seems to be more focused on global needs. Thus far he's focused more on health needs, but eventually he perhaps will be equally focused on learning needs of young minds.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future

Why the huge student demand for the expensive Singularity University?
"What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist's University," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2009 --- Click Here

"We're going to be unapologetically interdisciplinary," said Neil Jacobstein, chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, during one of the first lectures at Singularity University. "That's not because it's fashionable, or because the faculty took a vote, but because nature has no departments."

The students burst into applause.

That dig against traditional institutions was par for the course at the unusual new high-tech university, which wrapped up its first nine-week session at NASA's Ames Research Center here last month. Students were asked to come up with technological projects that would help at least a billion people around the world, reflecting the techno-utopian vision of the institution's founders.

Those founders had a bigger stamp on the curriculum than would any traditional university president or chancellor. They are Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who believes artificial intelligence soon will exceed human thinking, and Peter H. Diamandis, a successful entrepreneur devoted to helping humans colonize other planets.

Mr. Kurzweil helped popularize the term "singularity," used to describe the moment when thinking machines transcend their creators.

Mr. Diamandis co-founded a company that was the first to take a tourist to the international space station and is best known for creating the X Prize, which offers multimillion-dollar prizes to motivate people to solve grand challenges, like making commercial spaceships.

Absorbing Genius Both men are known for thinking big about the future and for starting companies that capitalize on their predictions. And both are, well, out there in their views of how radically different things will be in just a few years. Mr. Kurzweil, for instance, just co-wrote Transcend, a book in which he argues that technology will soon allow us to replace our DNA with tiny computers that we can reprogram to help fight off diseases.

Many of the 40 students who made up the inaugural class said they agreed with some (though not all) of the founders' beliefs, but they appeared far more interested in learning what makes them tick as entrepreneurs. Spending quality time with Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Diamandis—and with the famous professors on the summer program's roster—was a key reason several students cited for shelling out the $25,000 for tuition.

As one participant put it: "This is what we're actually aiming for—to absorb as much of the genius as we can."

Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.

It's all evidence that the university has touched a cultural nerve, playing on hopes and anxieties about how technology is changing society—and tapping into an urge to more actively shape that future.

Those same forces are leading professors at traditional universities to explore similar questions. A high-profile meeting of computer-science professors this year, for instance, explored the potential long-term dangers of computer technologies, with an eye toward shaping policies to avoid the worst-case scenarios popular in Hollywood movies like The Terminator.

Singularity University is itself an innovative approach to education, bearing more in common with a fast-paced start-up company than an ivory-tower university. Some of the professors here—many of whom teach at traditional colleges during the year—said traditional higher education can learn from the entrepreneurial venture.

A Different Culture During Singularity University's orientation in June, a cellphone taped under one of the students' chairs suddenly started ringing. Students gradually realized that each of their chairs concealed a new G1 smartphone—a gift from Google, which makes the software that runs on the phones, and which is a corporate sponsor of the university.

It was the first of many corporate-sponsored surprises that made the university's proceedings feel, at times, like a reality-TV show packed with product placements. (Many sessions were in fact, filmed, and leaders say some of the lectures will soon be made available free on the university's Web site.)

Among them:

n When one homework assignment was due, the first student to turn it in got an unusual perk—a ride in an electric sports car made by Tesla Motors. All the students received a "lecture" about the car by a company spokesman, as part of a session on emerging trends in energy technology.

n During the first week of classes, the university held a "spit party," where students submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced by a company called 23andMe. The students were later given their results as part of a discussion about trends in genetic research.

n And several students participated in an optional field trip into zero gravity (for an extra fee), in an airplane that made violent maneuvers to create short periods of weightlessness for its passengers. The trip was operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, which was co-founded by—you guessed it—Mr. Diamandis. The students dressed up in evening attire (with women wearing shorts underneath) and called it the first-ever cocktail party in weightlessness.

The summer session was divided into three parts: In the first three weeks, students sat through marathon lecture sessions by experts from business and academe. During the next three weeks, each student chose one of four areas of focus for more in-depth study. And during the final three weeks, students broke into groups to work on those world-changing student projects.

At times the proceedings had a chaotic feel, with leaders adding new speakers at the last minute and making other changes in the schedule, according to some instructors. But students say they were given an unusual amount of influence in how things progressed. Halfway through the first full day of lectures, for instance, students were asked to rate the quality of the presentations with a show of hands. Most students gave them a six or seven out of 10 and said they wanted more time for questions—a request that leaders pushed future speakers to meet. At many traditional universities, student evaluations occur only after a course is over. Singularity students, many of them entrepreneurs themselves, were also not shy about trying to change the agenda.

"Students would just say I would really like to see this, so I'm just going to do it," says Neil Thompson, a student who at one point organized a lunch meeting between a few students and an expert the group wanted to meet.

The bulk of the sessions dealt with the good that technology could do for the world—and many students described themselves as firm optimists.

But in one two-night session, the students listed the 10 most difficult challenges posed by the coming "singularity."

But even that ended on an upbeat note, according to Marianne Ryan, a student at the university who is now headed back to a doctoral program at the University of Michigan's School of Information. "On the second night," she said, "we brainstormed solutions to them."

Other Studies of the FutureOther Meetings Just a few months before Singularity University opened, another big meeting of the minds convened to talk about the future of technology. Eighteen top computer scientists from college and business laboratories attended the invitation-only event, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

This one was held at a conference center at Asilomar State Beach, in California, the location of a famous gathering in 1975 of scientists to discuss social and policy implications of genetics research.

Participants in the meeting, which lasted two days, discussed three major topics: concern about the pace of technological change, shorter-term technological challenges, and ethical and legal issues. Most disagreed with Ray Kurzweil's scenario of the future, though his worke clearly shaped the discussion.

"There was overall skepticism about the prospect of an intelligence explosion as well as of a 'coming singularity,' and also about the large-scale loss of control of intelligent systems," said a draft report from the meeting, released last month. "Nevertheless," the report said more research should be done to "minimize unexpected outcomes."

A few universities have departments or centers devoted to "futures studies," to tackle just such concerns and to make forecasts about what's to come. Such centers flourished in the 1970s, in the wake of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. "They were like mushrooms after the rain," says James A. Dator, director of the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies, at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. "But very few of them remain."

Mr. Dator says there is a rise in interest these days, though, and he sees Singularity University as an example of that. He points to courses in futures studies that have started at Anne Arundel Community College, the University of Notre Dame, San Diego City College, and other institutions in the past few years.

The benefit of futures studies, he says, is to question the assumptions of universities themselves, which he sees as offering a "pro-growth perspective" rather than recognizing that our uses of fossil fuels may not be sustainable, or other scenarios.

Peter C. Bishop, an associate professor of human development and computer science at the University of Houston, agrees that interest in futurism is on the rise. He is a founding board member of the Association of Professional Futurists.

He says that though Mr. Kurzweil is the most popular futurist of the moment, he is unusual in his certainty about how things will pan out. Most futurists try to imagine many possible outcomes, Mr. Bishop says, rather than describe a single vision. "Being certain about what's going to occur gets you lots of attention, but we don't think that's the right way to approach the future," he added.

Mr. Bishop was an early adviser to Singularity University, but says he did not have time to participate further.

Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster who is a consulting professor at Stanford University, chaired the futures-studies track of Singularity University. He says technology has become "an elemental force that, more than any other single factor, is changing our lives," and so should be considered by students in all disciplines. He praises Mr. Kurzweil's books for giving context to the new university, and for helping people understand just how fast change may come as technology improves at an exponential rate.

He says one thing he has been surprised at is how little higher education has changed as a result of technology. "Compared to most other markets, higher education in particular really hasn't felt the earthquake," Mr. Saffo says. "It hasn't had the, 'Oh my god, the world is different from now on.' Higher education is still pretty much the way it was in the 1950s."

The Singularity University model offers "some interesting lessons for academics," Mr. Saffo says.

Connecting DisciplinesOrigins Mr. Diamandis says he dreamed up the idea for Singularity University while trekking in Chile during a vacation. He had brought along Mr. Kurzweil's hefty book, The Singularity Is Near, which boldly pronounces a timeline for drastic technological change over the next few years. Mr. Diamandis says that he felt it suggested a need to study the many technological areas identified as exhibiting exponential change, and that his first thought was to start a university to do just that.

Mr. Diamandis has created an academic institution before. In 1987 he cofounded the International Space University, which has become a leading training ground for officials in space programs around the world. The university has a campus in France, where it teaches a master's-level program, and holds a summer session here at NASA Ames.

Just a few months after thinking of the idea, Mr. Diamandis rounded up some heavy hitters from business and academe for a planning meeting last summer.

Mr. Saffo, the Stanford University futurist, remembers the gathering. "We all said, 'What year are you thinking of starting?' And they said 2009, which was just a few months away," he says. "We said, 'You've got to be kidding!' I mean, I start planning my course for 20 students at Stanford a year in advance."

Continued in article

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on available online training and education programs are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Also see http://www.convergemag.com/workforce/47240132.html

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on July 16, 2009

$1 Trillion Deficit (across the first six months) Complicates Obama's Agenda
by John D. McKinnon
The Wall Street Journal
Jul 14, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com

TOPICS: Governmental Accounting

SUMMARY: "The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday said the government's annual deficit reached almost $1.1 trillion by the end of June, a once-unthinkable level that could threaten any nascent economic recovery by undermining the dollar and driving up interest rates."

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Introducing the overall U.S. federal budget as well as the implications of the current recession can be accomplished with this article.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) Define the terms budget deficit and surplus.

2. (Introductory) What revenues and expenditures make up the U.S. federal budget?

3. (Advanced) Refer to the chart associated with this article. When was the last time the U.S. federal government saw a surplus?

4. (Introductory) Compare the deficit accumulated so far in 2009, and projected for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2009, to fiscal 2008.

5. (Advanced) What expenditures account for this increasing deficit? What revenue issues are also driving the problem?

6. (Advanced) What factor has allowed the U.S. government to finance deficit spending at a reasonable cost? What may change that situation?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

This suggests that education and research must consider evolution in brains when reaching out to the Y Generation and beyond

We are indeed getting smarter. Further, it has been suggested that the data deluge now available via the Internet makes the scientific method obsolete and reduces enormously our dependence on models versus the real, measurable world.
"Yes, the Web Is Changing Your Brain," by Kim Solez, Internet Evolution, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=567&doc_id=173469&

More than a year ago on ThinkerNet, I described a new kind of human intelligence particularly suited for the digital age.  It involves strong multitasking ability, rapid switching between tasks, logical statements, and an ability to identify and take advantage of potential connections, to separate information into transformable chunks, and to reassemble these chunks for new purposes. 

Today, my question is whether digital intelligence, and intelligence in general, is something innate and determined by our genes -- or whether, as some suggest, Internet stimuli and other aspects of our  environment actually change the wiring in our brains to increase or decrease intelligence.

Put another way, will there be more geniuses, more Renaissance men and women, more big conceptual breakthroughs, because of easier access to information and knowledge via the Internet? Or is mankind limited by the number of people with high IQs, which will not change until our biology changes via genetic evolution?

To begin with, the idea of measuring IQ may be misleading.  New forms of intelligence require new types of intelligence tests.  The original assertion by Nicholas Carr in last summer's Atlantic that the Internet is making us stupid just reflects the fact we may be testing the wrong thing, thinking the wrong way about brain functioning.

As new intelligences suited for this new age we live in evolve, performance on old-fashioned IQ tests may decrease exactly because of distraction and task switching, which are disadvantageous for the old IQ test but advantageous in everyday life in 2009 and beyond.

We also tend to view the Internet's effects negatively. The Internet is changing us, but the changes are positive: Use of the Internet makes our brains more active, with more neurons firing. It stimulates parts of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. It is hard to imagine that that is a bad thing!

In a study in which people's brains were observed reading a book vs. searching the Web, language and visual centers were stimulated in both, but decision making and complex reasoning centers were stimulated only in the Web group and not in the reading group.

At the same time, thinking deeply, while still of value, is needed less in day-to-day living.

When a common situation was a lack of information and no possibility of getting more, then deep contemplation of the limited knowledge we had seemed reasonable. Now we are more likely to find an answer and move on.

It is not that we have lost the ability to read War and Peace, it is just that in the modern world we would seldom opt to spend a long period reading one book. It is more practical to carry out other, shorter tasks, to divide things up, and that is what we mostly choose to do.

There have always been attempts to resist the inevitable pace of progress and human evolution.  Recent books like Enough and In Praise of Slowness are two examples.  But we cannot really slow the pace of evolution of our species -- nor should we want to!

As I observed in an earlier blog, it was probably always man's destiny to have the kinds of communication devices we have now and the even better ones we will have in the future as extensions of ourselves.  It is not predominantly a shifting of cognitive responsibility from our biological brains to the silicon extension of those brains, but rather an augmentation of overall cognitive capacity. 

We are indeed getting smarter. Further, it has been suggested that the data deluge now available via the Internet makes the scientific method obsolete and reduces enormously our dependence on models versus the real, measurable world.

So yes, the Internet does make us smarter.  We just need to pause every now and then to contemplate and enjoy it!

— Kim Solez, MD, Director of NKF cyberNephrology at the University of Alberta

"The Next Big Thing: Crisis and Transformation in American Higher Education," by John V. Lombardi, Inside Higher Ed, August 3, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/reality_check#

Data Tables
"Asian Universities on the Rise: a Comparison With U.S. Institutions," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/article/Asian-Universities-on-the/48691/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Asia Rising: Countries Funnel Billions Into Universities," by Mara Hvistendahl, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2009 --- Click Here

Across East Asia, governments are funneling resources into elite universities, financing basic research, and expanding access to vocational and junior colleges, all with the goal of driving economic development.

Hong Kong and Singapore, compact port cities that have lost their traditional importance as logistics and manufacturing centers, are rushing to turn themselves into centers of innovation.

China has invested in a group of select universities that it hopes will become globally renowned hubs of technological and scientific research, while in South Korea, leaders are spending billions of dollars on projects designed to spawn top-notch laboratories and attract foreign universities as partners. And as Taiwan's economy loses ground to China, it is trying to draw top talent through aggressive international recruitment.

Asia's approach to higher education contrasts markedly with that of the United States, where, even before the global recession hit, the percentages of state budgets dedicated to higher education have been in steady decline.

"Out here the government is looking at education as a driver of the country's future, so it isn't last in line," says Rajendra K. Srivastava, provost of Singapore Management University, who spent 25 years at the University of Texas at Austin.

In Texas, he recalls with dismay, "when they were allocating the state budget, education was one of the last things to get approved."

But while the government-led push is quite different from America's decentralized approach, Asian college and government officials say they are taking cues from the United States. Specifically, they hope to replicate America's post-World War II path to growth.

"Asians have studied very carefully the reasons why Western populations are now successful," says Kishore Mahbubani, a dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. "They realize that unless you create good universities and attract the best minds in the world, you can't move into the next phase of development."

All this is against the backdrop of declining American dominance in global research. A 2008 National Science Foundation report found that patents filed by inventors living in the United States had dropped from 55 percent in 1996 to 53 percent in 2005. The foundation attributed the change to an increase in filings by Asian inventors.

The U.S. share of "highly influential" papers published in peer-reviewed journals also fell, from 63 percent in 1992 to 58 percent in 2003—a drop that reflects the rise of China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, the report's authors noted.

"Innovation and its handmaiden, R&D, is driving the global economy," they continued, "and we are seeing more nations recognize this by creating their own version of U.S. research institutions and infrastructure."

The United States continues to lead the world by most measures, including financial support for higher education, top scholarly work, and the production of patents. But Asia is emerging as an increasingly strong competitor.

"It's not so much that the U.S. is on the decline but that the Asian universities are rising," says Gerard A. Postiglione, an expert on Chinese education at the University of Hong Kong. "They're rising along with their economies."

A Shift in Power Those economies, like their Western counterparts, have foundered in the past year. The South Korean won plunged to an 11-year low in March. Singapore's economy is in a crippling slump, with its Trade and Industry Ministry predicting a contraction of 4 to 6 percent by the end of the year. Hong Kong will probably show a similar drop, and Taiwan has seen a double-digit dip in exports over the previous year. Only China posts continued growth, but the country's future is uncertain, with development likely to augur the death of its manufacturing economy as China prices itself out of the cheap-labor market.

But while many U.S. states slash their higher-education budgets, East Asian countries have faced the crisis by funneling more resources into the future. Certainly the stimulus bill approved by the U.S. Congress this year earmarked millions of dollars for higher education. But that money will run out in the next couple of years.

In contrast, recovery financing in China, South Korea, and Singapore supports basic research and the creation of programs in key fields for innovation. The assumption is that such projects will boost economic growth.

"What we see out here is that if we can get a better educated population it will attract the higher-value industries," says Mr. Srivastava. "We're trying to move up the growth ladder."

Inviting Partners Whether investment in higher education directly translates into a robust economy, which also depends on factors like tax and trade policies, and an overall culture of innovation, is debatable. But Asia is steaming ahead on faith.

Intent on repositioning its economy around biotechnology and medical sciences, Singapore has invited graduate programs from leading American universities, including the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Duke University, to set up in the tiny city-state, housing them in campuses near state-of-the-art science parks to facilitate the development of spin-off companies.

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"America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes," by Karen Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2009 --- Click Here

Although the situation has been grimmest in California, higher education across the United States is in a period of retrenchment. That decline has been greeted with dismay by many higher-education experts, who say the United States can ill afford to scale back investment in colleges when Singapore and many of its Asian neighbors are plowing money into higher education and research.

The recent economic crisis, they say, at once exacerbates and masks a continuing and more systemic problem: While the United States remains a world leader in virtually every measure of academic and research quality, its dominance is eroding.

The American share of "highly influential" papers published in peer-reviewed journals fell to 58 percent in 2003, from 63 percent in 1998. Just 4 percent of American college graduates major in engineering, compared with 13 percent of European students and 20 percent of those in Asia. The United States ranks 10th in the proportion of its adults ages 25 to 34 who hold at least an associate degree, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Despite the disturbing trends, many observers fear that there is little appetite to confront the challenges facing U.S. higher education. Even before the current financial troubles, public colleges were chronically at the back of the budgetary line, among the first to be cut in difficult times. What's more, with 50 state systems and 4,400 public and private institutions, responsibility for dealing with problems like college access or completion is diffuse, and finding a comprehensive approach to tackling such issues can be difficult, if not impossible.

Whether the current system, if unchanged, can weather recessionary storms and increased competition from overseas is an open question. Unlike their counterparts in Asia, Americans have simply not felt the same sense of urgency to reinvigorate and reinvest in higher education as a means of better positioning the country in a competitive and shifting global economy, says Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"China, Korea, Singapore—they're going for broke because they're hungry. They know they have to do it," says Mr. Vest, who served on a national panel that produced a widely cited report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which warned that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology.

"I'm worried we won't realize what's at stake until it's too late, that we'll be too slow on the draw. Look what happened in the manufacturing sector when the Japanese got serious. We've only partially caught back up."

From Upstart to Superpower It was not long ago that the United States was the hungry one. Already an accomplished upstart, the country cemented its position as an academic superpower in the years after World War II, its laboratories staffed by European scientists who fled the conflict and its classrooms filled with former GI's. Research spending, spurred by wartime defense needs, shot up again after the Soviet launch, in 1957, of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Federal support for academic research quadrupled in the seven years following Sputnik, while doctoral ranks swelled, from 8,611 degrees awarded in 1957 to 33,755 in 1973.

In many ways, the United States remains pre-eminent: Its scholarly papers are still the most cited, and it remains the top destination for foreign students. American universities dominate international college rankings.

When countries like China, Korea, and Singapore seek to build up their higher-education systems, their model is the United States. "The United States is overwhelmingly the reference point for what they want to happen," says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, who has advised both states and countries on educational reform.

Indeed, some observers say warnings that the United States is losing its global standing are unduly alarmist. Some measures, such as the numbers of engineers produced in India and China, are overstated, they say, because the course work there often does not meet American standards. They say that, as a whole, indicators suggest that other countries have raised their performance, not that the United States is slumping.

"It's not a zero-sum game," says Philip G. Altbach, director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education. "It's not as if they grow, we get weaker. It's good for the world for more countries to do better."

Thus far, in fact, the United States has largely been a beneficiary of the educational advances made in Asia and elsewhere. Half of all students who earn doctorates in key science and technology fields come from overseas. (Two Chinese universities, Tsinghua and Peking, supply more students to American Ph.D. programs than any other institution, foreign or domestic.) A quarter of American college faculty members today are foreign-born.

But educators worry about what will happen if more top international students elect to remain in or return to universities in their home countries, as those institutions improve. Deepening their concern is evidence that the American talent pipeline has sprung leaks, and in many places: American high-school students post below-average scores on international science tests. Those who do well are less likely today to go to college—just half of low-income high-school seniors who were "highly qualified" in mathematics enrolled in a four-year institution in 2004, twenty percentage points lower than the Class of 1992.

Even at the graduate level, many students who start doctoral programs, particularly women and members of minority groups, fail to finish.

Part of the problem, says Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, based in California, is that the U.S. system was never designed to educate most Americans. That orientation leads Americans to measure success based on the performance of its institutions. But attention to evaluations like college rankings, Mr. Callan argues, deflects the focus from the very real weaknesses in the system's foundation.

"We're still stuck on having the best higher-education system of the 20th century, when it's almost a decade into the 21st century," says Mr. Callan, whose nonprofit group publishes a biennial report card on the higher-education performance of the states and the country as a whole.

By contrast, he says, "many of the countries that have made the biggest gains are those that see institutions as a means to an end, of achieving social and economic policy."

There are some signs of a shift in American thinking. The economic-stimulus bill approved by Congress this year included money for student aid and academic research. "Economists tell us that strategic investments in education are one of the best ways to help America become more productive and competitive," stated a summary of the plan distributed by Congressional leaders.

In a speech to Congress, President Obama urged all Americans to pursue "a year or more" of higher education, or career training, and set a goal for the nation to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. Education, said Mr. Obama, who has proposed spending $12-billion to improve programs, courses, and facilities at community colleges, is one of "three areas that are absolutely critical to our economic future."

In state capitals, governors and legislatures also are embracing the concept that higher education can be an economic driver. A panel appointed by New York's governor called for establishing a $3-billion academic-research fund to support economic development. North Carolina's public universities have adopted economic outreach as a central mission.

International Competition Still, economists and others say the belief, embraced in Asia, that educational investment leads to economic growth is overly simplistic and fails to account for other ingredients, like fiscal and trade policies, that nourish a financial system. The Soviet Union produced a lot of scientists, notes Michael S. Teitelbaum, a program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "but it was hardly a productive economy."

What's more, the United States has never set economic-development or educational policy at the national level, seeing each as falling under state or local purview. Indeed, many Americans have a profound mistrust of federal involvement in education, at both the secondary and postsecondary levels.

But as countries in Asia and elsewhere improve their universities and modernize their economies, that approach can undercut America's standing. "These are national concerns," says Irwin Feller, an emeritus professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, "but we're not having a national discussion about what the stakes are for the country as a whole."

As a result, Mr. Feller says, the competition is not just international, but internal, as states and institutions vie with one another for talent and resources. Universities in states that are weathering the current recession, for example, may take the opportunity to poach top researchers from institutions in hard-hit states. Such actions might benefit individual states but not the country's relative position.

The mobility of talent also can act as a disincentive for states to spend more to train the next generation of Ph.D.'s, says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. "Every university's economic-impact statement talks about the economic benefit of their graduates," says Mr. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics, "but the argument doesn't really hold if the graduates don't stay in the state."

And whatever rhetorical support higher education receives risks being undermined by fiscal reality. Even before the current recession, public colleges have been among the last to get increases and one of the first to be cut, as federal and state requirements put other government programs, like Medicaid and elementary and secondary education, largely off-limits to reductions.

Over time, shaky state support for higher education could weaken American universities, says Mr. Feller. "It's like deferred maintenance—one day the roof caves in," he says.

There's evidence that that has already happened. James D. Adams, an economist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has documented the link between a slowdown in scientific publications by American researchers and sluggish growth in state appropriations to public research universities. No other variable accounted for the fact that growth in papers by researchers at public universities came to a standstill in the 1990s, the period Mr. Adams studied, despite the fact that scientists at these institutions pulled in more new federal research dollars than their private-college counterparts.

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Jensen Comment
Be that as it may, China still faces huge obstacles in attracting foreign students. Corruption at all levels of society is still rampant in China. Living conditions are overcrowded, and the language barrier is formidable. In some areas of study like MBA degrees, China is experimenting with islands of Western education where reputable instructors from outside China conduct classes in English and foreign students are given financial incentives to study in China.

Meanwhile, greatly increased numbers of Chinese are coming to America for college education.
"'The Chinese Are Coming'," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/28/china

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

The Mystery of Research Having Higher Priority Than Teaching in Performance Evaluations
But research expectations have grown at many institutions where the missions -- at least until recently -- have been primarily focused on teaching. And as Dahlia K. Remler and Elda Pema note in a provocative new paper, the emphasis extends beyond research that pays for itself . . . Remler, associate professor of public affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and Pema, an assistant professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, decided to review the literature and economic theories that might explain the reasons more colleges and departments are encouraging their faculty members to focus on research, at the expense of teaching time. And they found an abundance of theories, some of which may overlap and some of which may conflict with one another. The authors suggest that higher education would benefit from figuring out just why this phenomenon has taken place, given its expense in money and faculty time.
Scott Jaschik, "The Mystery of Faculty Priorities ," Inside Higher Ed, May 28, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/28/nber

The NBER Report is at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14974

"The Relevance of the Humanities," by Gabriel Paquette, Inside Higher Ed, January 22, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/22/paquette

The deepening economic crisis has triggered a new wave of budget cuts and hiring freezes at America’s universities. Retrenchment is today’s watchword. For scholars in the humanities, arts and social sciences, the economic downturn will only exacerbate existing funding shortages. Even in more prosperous times, funding for such research has been scaled back and scholars besieged by questions concerning the relevance of their enterprise, whether measured by social impact, economic value or other sometimes misapplied benchmarks of utility.

Public funding gravitates towards scientific and medical research, with its more readily appreciated and easily discerned social benefits. In Britain, the fiscal plight of the arts and humanities is so dire that the Institute of Ideas recently sponsored a debate at King’s College London that directly addressed the question, “Do the arts have to re-brand themselves as useful to justify public money?”

In addition to decrying the rising tide of philistinism, some scholars might also be tempted to agree with Stanley Fish, who infamously asserted that humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” Fish rejected the notion that the humanities can be validated by some standard external to them. He dismissed as wrong-headed “measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perception, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination.”

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"Our Compassless Colleges," by Peter Berkowitz, The Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2007; Page A17 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118895528818217660.html

At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being.

To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission? Many American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts, rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a major. But this veneer of structure provides students only superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person. Certainly this was true of the core curriculum at Harvard, where I taught in the faculty of arts and sciences during the 1990s. And it remains true even after Harvard's recent reforms. Harvard's aims and aspirations are in many ways admirable. According to this year's Report of the Task Force on General Education, Harvard understands liberal education as "an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility." It prepares for the rest of life by improving students' ability "to assess empirical claims, interpret cultural expression, and confront ethical dilemmas in their personal and professional lives." But instead of concentrating on teaching substantive knowledge, the general education at Harvard will focus on why what students learn is important. To accomplish this, Harvard would require students to take single-semester courses in eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and The United States in the World. Unfortunately, the new requirements add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education. For starters, though apparently not part of the general education curriculum, Harvard requires only a year of foreign language study or the equivalent. Yet since it usually takes more than a year of college study to achieve competence in a foreign language -- the ability to hold a conversation and read a newspaper -- doesn't Harvard, by requiring only a single year, denigrate foreign-language study, and with it the serious study of other cultures and societies? Furthermore, in the search for the immediate relevance it disavows, Harvard's curriculum repeatedly puts the cart before the horse. For example, instead of first requiring students to concentrate on the study of novels, poetry, and plays, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on "literary or religious texts, paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, film, dance, decorative arts" that involve "exploring theoretical and philosophical issues concerning the production and reception of meanings and the formation of aesthetic judgment." Instead of first requiring students to gain acquaintance with the history of opinions about law, justice, government, duty and virtue, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on how to bring ethical theories to bear on contemporary moral and political dilemmas. Instead of first requiring students to survey U.S. history or European history or classical history, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses that examine the U.S and its relation to the rest of the world. Instead of first teaching students about the essential features of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on almost any aspect of foreign societies. Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same material. Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum -- same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know. Of course, if parents, students, alumni donors, trustees, professors and administrators are happy, why worry? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers. The reason to worry is that university education can cause lasting harm. The mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, and judge matters to be true or false, fair or inequitable, honorable or dishonorable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for public and private life. Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals fit for freedom. The nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to -- realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal education. Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today's university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses. Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances