Higher Education Controversies
Bob Jensen
at
Trinity University
Introductory Quotations
Largest
Universities Worldwide
Our Compassless Colleges:
What are students really not learning
Test Drive Running a
University
Grade Inflation and Dysfunctional Teaching
Evaluations (the biggest scandal in higher education)
Micro Lectures and
Student-Centered Learning:
The panacea for dealing with student attention deficits and budget deficits
Upward Trend in
Grades and Downward Trend in Homework
How to Find the Cheapest
Textbooks
Social
Networking: The New Addiction
The Critical Importance of
Metacognition and Retrieval For Learning
Academic Whores
Some states are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the
public
Minimum Grade Policies
Where Highest Ranked Colleges Don't Excel
Barf MBA: The
Shorter, Faster, Cheaper MBA Accelerated MBA programs
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!
Controversial Changes in Financial Aid: Some Colleges Cut Back Merit Aid
How to recognize
and avoid Advanced Placement (AP) credits
Fraudulent Advanced
Placement (AP) Credits
Students
Don't Particularly Want to Read and Write Well When it Takes Effort
Too Much Need for
Remedial Learning in College
What is "negative learning" in college?
Class Size Matters, But
the Importance of This Factor is Highly Variable
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?
Failure to Utilize Retirees
Playbook: Does Your
School Make The Grade? Here are four things to consider when applying to an
undergrad business program
Tracking undergraduates into graduate school
and into adult life
ROTC and Military Recruiting and the Solomon Amendment
Academic Standards Differences
Between Disciplines
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
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 open sharing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on the Downsides of
Open Sharing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/Theworry.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#TeachingStyle
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
Bob Jensen's home page ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
My communications on
"Hypocrisy in Academia and the Media" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm
My “Evil
Empire” essay ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm
My unfinished essay on the "Pending Collapse of the United
States" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm
Bob Jensen's various threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Campaign 2008: Issue Coverage
Tracker ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/issues/
Message to America's
Higher Education Faculty
You are the reason the colleges are
proud of what they do and your accomplishments represent the
performance that colleges and universities point to in developing
and justifying their reputation. Reputations are not developed in a
vacuum. You, your parents, your children, your colleagues and your
peers are the living remnants of the college experience. Your
success justifies the massive resources poured by private Americans
into supporting colleges and universities. And your success
validates the vocation that characterizes the role of so many
faculty members. There is something special about American higher
education, which continues to produce some of the world’s greatest
scientists and engineers, thinkers and scholars. There is something
unique in the education we offer, which provides a breadth, an
intellectual depth to accompany the skills and aptitudes of the
specialist. And there are the human successes in sectors whose
mission is to produce an involved, thinking efficiency... Not
everyone agrees that American higher education is characterized by
success. Numbers are quoted indicating that the quality of graduates
is not what it used to be. But they forget that sometimes the
numbers go down as the numbers go up. As American higher education
welcomes people less prepared, less gifted and often less motivated,
as the atmosphere at some colleges becomes less rarified by the
proliferation of remedial education, the average accomplishment will
go down.
Bernard Fryshman, "Grasping the Reins of Reality," Inside Higher
Ed, August 16, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/16/fryshman
Therein lies the real trouble.
Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can
change that. It can’t. No technology ever has. Gutenberg’s press
only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and
understand them.
Peter Berger,
"The Land of iPods and Honey," The Irascible Professor,
February 26, 2007 --- at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-26-07.htm
I wonder whether
in the rush to celebrate the virtues of openness and the fun of
group learning, we’re forgetting the virtues inherent in learning in
private, in reclusive Walden-like settings.
Luke Fernandez,
Weber State University as quoted by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of
Higher Education July 29, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3202&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The Biggest Scandal in Higher Education
On the other hand, that professor who
challenges the student because he or she wants that student to be
stronger than he or she now is sends a powerful message of respect
to the student. (Why am I even writing such a comment? Isn't this
obvious? Unfortunately, no. I write this because I have seen far too
many people in charge of universities -- professors, people on
staff, administrators -- who could not wrap their minds around this
simple concept. Such a stance seemed "tough" to them, not "nice."
Such a stance seemed "unfriendly," not "sweet and welcoming." Let's
face it: such a stance is no come-on to the weakest prospective
students who might well be lured to a university by every appeal
that makes the place sound like a resort instead of a boot camp.)
The professor who believes in challenging the student says this: you
are not nothing, and, beyond that, you can achieve so much more than
you already have. You may someday thank me for these challenges I
present to you along with my willingness to work to help you succeed
in your own right. I know from experience that some students will
appreciate that work in the moment, some a decade or two later; some
may never appreciate it. But a student's appreciation of the teacher
has never been the real issue anyway, nor is it the mark of
authentic teaching.
Doyle Wesley Walls,
"How Will You Go to College?" The Irascible Professor,
October 25, 2008 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-10-25-08.htm
Bob Jensen's commentary on how teaching evaluations cause grade
inflation (the biggest scandal in higher
education) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Administrators, at their worst,
merely count beans. Are the residence halls full? Is everyone
wearing a happy face, accentuating the positive? Professors, at
their best, are determined that their students, like Thoreau, should
know beans. On occasion, a student will leave a classroom in a huff
or even leave the university. No one will be smiling all the time if
real work is going on. Plenty of people at the university stand
ready to fluff pillows. Only a very few people at a university are
hired to fluff those metaphorical pillows; however, when the
fluffing of pillows begins to feel like genuine concern for the
educational needs of the student, then the university is lopsided,
way out of balance. Such misplaced concern can weaken students; it
does not prepare students because it fails to make them stronger.
Students, think ahead about transforming your life, or forget the
idea of a liberal arts university altogether. If what you really
want is a country club, then join one; they have alcohol and golf
and tennis and swimming and dances, and they cost only a fraction of
a liberal arts education. If you really want a university, then come
prepared to hear me challenge your attitudes about booze and sports
and socializing.
Doyle Wesley Walls,
"How Will You Go to College?" The Irascible Professor,
October 25, 2008 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-10-25-08.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
East coast or West coast.
Private or Public. Urban or rural. Go to any so-called "best school"
the wrong way and you will have gone nowhere -- and wasted valuable
money and time and potential.
Doyle Wesley Walls,
"How Will You Go to College?" The Irascible Professor,
October 25, 2008 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-10-25-08.htm
The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall
victim to a big lie than to a small one.
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Speaking of students, though, there’s an awful lot of money being
spent to drive tuition revenue. $879 million was spent by U.S.
colleges and universities on advertising in 2008, according to TNS
Media Intelligence. Of that amount, $294 million was loaded into TV
advertising; $282 million was invested in online advertising; print
garnered $154 million; $90 was pumped into radio; outdoor
advertising raked in $59 million. Now all of a sudden my annual
five-dollar loss in the NCAA March Madness basketball pool at my old
firm doesn’t seem so bad.
Rob Nance, Publisher AccountingWEB, Inc.
“How many professors does it take to change a light bulb?”
Answer: “Whadaya mean,
“change”?”
Bob Zemsky, Chronicle of
Higher Education's Chronicle Review, December 2007 ---
Click Here
As David
Bartholomae observes, “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to
articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work.
We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be
difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and
legislators.” If we do not try to find that public language but
argue instead that we are not accountable to those parents and
legislators, we will only confirm what our cynical detractors say
about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our
intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those
secrets and measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes
assessment helps make democratic education a reality.
Gerald Graff,
"Assessment Changes Everything," Inside Higher Ed, February
21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Illinois
at Chicago and president of the Modern Language Association. This
essay is adapted from a paper he delivered in December at the MLA
annual meeting, a version of which appears on the MLA’s Web site and
is reproduced here with the association’s permission. Among Graff’s
books are Professing Literature, Beyond the Culture Wars
and Clueless in Academe: How School Obscures the Life of the Mind.
Today the
United States ranks ninth among industrialized nations in
higher-education attainment, in large measure because only 53
percent of students who enter college emerge with a bachelor’s
degree, according to census data. And those who don’t finish pay an
enormous price. For every $1 earned by a college graduate, someone
leaving before obtaining a four-year degree earns only 67 cents.
Jensen Comment
These income statistics are misleading. For example, the reasons
that make a student drop out of college may be the same reason that
dropout will earn a lower wage. In other words, not having a diploma
may not be the reason the majority of dropouts have lower incomes.
Aside from money problems, students often quit college because they
have lower ambition, abilities, concentration, social skills, and/or
health quality, including drug and alcohol addictions. These human
afflictions contribute to lower wages whether or not a student
graduates, and a higher proportion of dropouts have such afflictions
versus students who stick it out to obtain their diplomas. Nations
who rank higher than the U.S. in higher-education attainment do so
because they have higher admission standards for the first year of
college.
Almost 20 years after the
first edition came out, the editors of
The Academic’s Handbook
(Duke University Press)
have released a new version — the third — with many
chapters on faculty careers updated and some
completely new topics added. Topics covered include
teaching, research, tenure, academic freedom,
mentoring, diversity, harassment and more. The
editors of the collection (who also wrote some of
the pieces) are two Duke University professors who
also served as administrators there. They are A.
Leigh Deneef, a professor of English and former
associate dean of the Graduate School, and Craufurd
D. Goodwin, a professor of economics who was
previously vice provost and dean of the Graduate
School.
Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2007/01/10/handbook
Find out what changes in the last ten
years of academe are the most significant!
We ultimately get satisfaction from our relations
with family and friends, the love we give or
receive, the meaning we find in work, service,
religion or hobbies.
Robert J. Samuelson,
"The Bliss We Can't Buy For better or worse, there
are limits to re-engineering the human spirit.,"
Newsweek, July 11, 2007 ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19709408/site/newsweek/page/0/
Cunningham and other Maryland
administrators can follow the lead of my favorite
university UNC-Greensboro (sarcasm = on). UNCG
recently decided to pay a $3000 honorarium for a
speech on the “Art of Kissing.” This is a clear
improvement over their decision to host a speech (in
2004) on “Safe Sodomy.”
Mike Adams,
Kiss Me in the Morning," Townhall, April 6,
2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeAdams/2009/04/06/kiss_me_in_the_morning
Independent analysts have
found higher education in Russia to be a part of
society experiencing particularly rapid rates of
growth in corruption, with bribes common to secure
spots in classes or good grades,
The St. Petersburg Times
reported. Senior faculty
members generally do not take bribes directly, but
do so through intermediaries, the report said.
Inside Higher Ed,
July 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/qt
Jensen Comment
Purportedly Vladimir Putin not only plagiarized his
doctoral thesis, but he may not have even read it
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
Historian Professor Dyhouse
shows that students have always gained different
advantages from their degrees depending on their
gender and background. Since they were first
admitted to universities in the late 19th century,
women have benefited less in straight economic terms
from their degrees than men, but have still
considered the experience "a gift beyond price".
Professor Dyhouse's study, which is published on the
History and Policy website, traces the history of
university funding from grants to top-up fees. She
shows how the university experience has changed over
the past century; one hundred years ago the
'typical' student was a full-time male
undergraduate, now female part-time students are
more representative.
"History shows degrees are worth more
than a bigger pay packet: Ten years after the
Dearing Report, which paved the way for tuition
fees, a new University of Sussex study challenges
the current 'market place' approach to higher
education policy," PhysOrg, August 6, 2007
---
http://physorg.com/news105630476.html
In one century we went from
teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering
remedial English in college.
Joseph Sobran
as quoted by Mark Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-27-07.htm
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
A new booklet from the National Academy of Sciences
and the Institute of Medicine offers an overview of
research on evolution and creationism, finding that
the former is sound science and the latter is
anything but.
“Science,
Evolution and Creationism”
won’t surprise many scientists, but its intended
audience is the public, where debates continue to
flare. The booklet argues that religious faith and
belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. But
teaching creationist beliefs in the classroom is a
problem, the booklet says. “Teaching creationist
ideas in science class confuses students about what
constitutes science and what does not,” the booklet
says.
Inside Higher Ed, January 4, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/04/qt
My favourite French
philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, once in
exasperation asked:
now that the learned men have arrived, where are all
the honest men gone?
Jagdish Gangolly
Historically, the evangelical
colleges that comprise the
Council for Christian Colleges and Universities
have not been magnets for
many black students.
A new analysis from The
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education suggests
that’s changing, with some Protestant colleges
recording staggering increases in black student
enrollments over the last decade. At Montreat
College, in North Carolina, undergraduate black
student enrollment increased from 3.7 percent in
1997 to 23 percent in 2007, according to the
analysis. At Belhaven College, in Mississippi, black
student enrollment climbed from 16.9 to 41 percent.
At LeTourneau University, in Texas, the figure grew
from 5.7 to 22 percent. Overall, the analysis finds
that the number of CCCU colleges where black
enrollments are at 10 percent or higher has more
than tripled to 29 over the last 10 years — even as
a core group of 22 Christian colleges maintain black
enrollments of 2 percent or less (a decrease,
however, from 33 such colleges in 1997).
Elizabeth Redden,
"Christian Colleges Grow More Diverse," Inside
Higher Ed, August 14, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/15/christian
Overview o the
State of Education in the U.S.
From Inside Higher
Ed, May 29, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/29/qt#199988
Women accounted for 57
percent of the bachelor's degrees and 62 percent
of the associate degrees awarded in the 2006-7
academic year. That is one of the figures in
"The
Condition of Education 2009,"
the latest edition of an annual compilation of
statistics released by the U.S. Education
Department. Among the other higher education
findings:
-
The rate of college enrollment immediately
after high school increased from 49 percent
in 1972 to 67 percent by 1997, but has since
fluctuated between 62 and 69 percent.
-
About 58 percent of first-time students
seeking a bachelor's degree or its
equivalent and attending a four-year
institution full time in 2000-01 completed a
bachelor's degree or its equivalent at that
institution within 6 years.
-
The percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds who
had completed a bachelor's degree or higher
increased from 17 to 29 percent between 1971
and 2000 and was 31 percent in 2008.
Highlights ---
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/press/highlights2.asp
Bob
Jensen's Advice to New Faculty ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
Bob
Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's Education
Technology Workshop ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/
Bob Jensen's homepage
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Global Education Digest
2007 ---
http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=7002_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC
Center for Academic
Integrity ---
http://www.academicintegrity.org/
Education Solutions for Our Future ---
http://www.solutionsforourfuture.org
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
|
Largest Universities Worldwide
University (Definition and History) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University
Ten Largest Universities in the United States
From the Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue 2008-9, Page 17:
Ten Largest U.S. Universities in
the Fall of 2006 (Enrollments)
Some of the universities below have more students on a system-wide basis
|
University of
Phoenix (online campus)
Ohio State University
Miami Dade College
Arizona State University at Tempe
University of Florida |
165,373
51,818
51,329
51,234
50,912
|
University
of Minnesota-Twin Cities
University of Texas at Austin
University of Central Florida
Michigan State University
Texas A&M at College Station |
50,402
49,697
46,646
45,520
45,380 |
Twenty Largest Universities in the World ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_universities
(Note that the data below are system-wide and not necessarily the numbers of
enrolled students at one campus)
Explanatory footnotes accompanying each enrollment number are not included in
this message.
| 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.
gradeinflation.com, Copyright 2002, Stuart Rojstaczer,
www.stuartr.com, no fee for not-for-profit use
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
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."
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
"Correcting for Grade Inflation It can't get much more
complicated! "A New Approach to Grade Inflation," by Abbott Katz, Inside
Higher Ed, July 1, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/07/01/katz
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.
"Homework by Major," by Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=422
Stephen’s
post last week
about reading complained that students don’t want any more homework, and
their disposition certainly shows up in the surveys. In the 2006
National Survey of Student Engagement,
almost one in five college seniors devoted five hours or less per week to
“Preparing for class,” and 26 percent stood at six to ten hours per week.
College professors say that achievement requires around 25 hours per week of
homework, but only 11 percent reached that mark.
The 2007 NSSE numbers break responses down by
major, and the homework levels for seniors are worth comparing. Here are
numbers for 15 hours or less.
Arts and Humanities majors came in at 16 percent
doing 1-5 hours of homework per week, 25 percent at 6-10 hours, and 20
percent at 11-15 hours.
Biological Sciences: 12 percent do 1-5 hours, 22
percent do 6-10, and 20 percent do 11-15 hours.
Business: 23 percent at 1-5, 30 percent at 6-10,
and 19 percent at 11-15 hours.
Education: 16 percent at 1-5, 27 percent at 6-10,
and 21 percent at 11-15 hours.
Engineering: 10 percent at 1-5, 19 percent at 6-10,
and 17 percent at 11-15 hours.
Physical Science: 12 percent at 1-5 hours, 21
percent at 6-10, and 18 percent at 11-15 hours.
Social Science: 20 percent at 1-5 hours, 28 percent
at 6-10, and 20 percent at 11-15 hours.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation and teaching evaluations are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
Micro Lectures And Student-Centered Learning:
The panacea for dealing with student attention
deficits and budget deficits
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to
remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
"The Objective of Education is Learning, Not Teaching (audio version
available)," University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton, August 20, 2008
---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm;jsessionid=9a30b5674a8d333e4d18?articleid=2032
"The One Minute Egg(head)," by Carolyn Foster Segal, The Irascible
Professor, March 23, 2009 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-23-09.htm
This exciting new pedagogical development should be
a relief to everyone and has arrived just in time, for it's the perfect
answer to current economic concerns. Instead of cutting course offerings, we
can save our classes by simply cutting 95% of the course content. Students,
who have long complained about tedious class sessions and the price (and
contents) of textbooks, will now be able to complete a traditional four-year
program in just one semester. Administrators will be delighted to find that
enrollments will "quickly balloon." In its second semester, enrollment in
that program on occupational safety "grew to 449." (What is the maximum
capacity for a program on "occupational safety" in cyberspace?) Nor should
faculty members despair -- they should have no difficulty in creating and
executing hundreds of these new online lectures. The article reassures
readers that "course development is relatively quick" as indeed it must be,
since the new verbiage-free micro-lectures should take about as much time to
design and/or deliver as it takes to compose a quick e-mail message. Course
content should be slightly less heavier, in other words, than the home page
of About.com.
In all fairness, as Shieh noted, there was an
earlier precedent: it seems that the University of Pennsylvania has a
60-second lecture series "to showcase its faculty." The Penn organizer does
note that "such short lectures . . . have their limitations." As Special
Agent Gibbs of NCIS would say, "You think?" (The answer to Gibbs's
rhetorical question is that we may not have to require much of that activity
at all.) Administrators and instructors at San Juan "said the format may not
work as well [emphasis mine] in classes requiring sustained discussion or
explanation of complicated processes." You must remember those -- classes
formerly known as college courses. Forget debates about traditional-semester
length courses versus accelerated weekend models; forget debates about the
liberal arts (forget debates on any subject). It's apparently possible to
complete a class session in the amount of time Jeopardy contestants have to
guess the final question. (The time involved for the entire set of lectures
for a three-credit course -- will now be slightly less than the running time
for back-to-back episodes of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.)
I decided to perform an experiment, to see how much
I could cram into a minute. I teach American literature and "creative
writing: poetry," so my test subjects were Walt Whitman (I made it to the
third line of the second of the 52 sections of "Song of Myself") and Emily
Dickinson (I made it through one poem -- #67 -- "Success is counted
sweetest" [12 lines] and 7 lines of a second 12-line poem -- #449 -- "I died
for Beauty." Without the last five lines of that Dickinson poem, however,
much of the irony was lost, and it was soon apparent that for maximum effect
it would be best in all future micro-lectures to paraphrase the first stanza
so that I would have adequate time (15 seconds) to read the last stanza.
After that second trial, I decided to take a lengthy break (5 minutes),
during which time I pondered what exactly the students in "occupational
safety" covered in their 60 seconds.
There is help for those who wish to join the
mini-revolution of the micro-lesson. A sidebar captioned "How to Create a
One Minute Lecture," provides David Penrose's handy five-step guide.
Penrose, according to the head-note, is the course designer for SunGard
Higher Education who designed San Juan College's micro-lectures.
Step one addresses the pesky problem of lecture
content: "List the key concepts you are trying [emphasis mine] to convey in
the [traditional] 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases [emphasis mine]
will form the core of your micro-lecture." My personal best (three attempts)
was 53 minutes and 47 seconds (52 minutes and 47 seconds too long), but then
I kept falling into the trap of using full sentences. And I hadn't even
allowed precious time for Step 2: Write a 15- to 30 second introduction and
conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts! [emphasis and
punctuation mine].
Continued in article
"More Faculty Members Adopt 'Student Centered' Teaching," Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 18, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chart-More-Faculty-Members/48848/
Professors are
warming to new methods of teaching and testing
that experts say are more likely to engage
students, a UCLA survey found last year. Below
are percentages of faculty members who said they
used these approaches in all or most of the
courses they taught. Those trends may continue,
UCLA says, as full professors retire. Assistant
professors were much more likely, for example,
to structure teaching around small groups of
students, while full professors were more likely
to lecture extensively.
| |
2005 |
2008 |
|
Selected
teaching methods |
|
Cooperative learning (small groups of
students) |
48% |
59% |
|
Using
real-life problems* |
n/a |
56% |
|
Group
projects |
33% |
36% |
|
Multiple
drafts of written work |
25% |
25% |
|
Student
evaluations of one another’s work |
16% |
24% |
|
Reflective writing/journaling |
18% |
22% |
|
Electronic quizzes with immediate
feedback in class* |
n/a |
7% |
|
Extensive
lecturing (not student-centered) |
55% |
46% |
|
Selected
examination methods |
|
Short-answer exams |
37% |
46% |
|
Term and
research papers |
35% |
44% |
|
Multiple-choice exams |
32% |
33% |
|
Grading
on a curve |
19% |
17% |
|
* Not
asked in the 2005 survey |
|
Note:
The figures are based on survey
responses of 22,562 faculty members
at 372 four-year colleges and
universities nationwide. The survey
was conducted in the fall and winter
of 2007-8 and covered full-time
faculty members who spent at least
part of their time teaching
undergraduates. The figures were
statistically adjusted to represent
the total population of full-time
faculty members at four-year
institutions. Percentages are
rounded. |
|
Source: "The American College
Teacher: National Norms for the
2007-8 HERI Faculty Survey,"
University of California at Los
Angeles Higher Education Research
Institute |
Downfall of Lecturing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#DownfallOfLecturing
Bob Jensen's threads on metacognitive learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
An Oligopoly
To say they have to be is an understatement. The General Accounting Office says
textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since 1986.
"Textbooks for Tightwads: As classes start, business students are in
for a shock: Textbook prices are higher than ever. A word to the wise: It pays
to shop around," by Rachel Z. Arndt, Business Week, August 26, 2009
---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/aug2009/bs20090826_069900.htm?link_position=link1
Shopping for textbooks can be burdensome at best,
painful at worst. And it's no different for business students. By the time
students get to B-school, they're probably well-versed in the tricks of the
textbook trade. They need to be, with some books required at top B-schools
retailing for well over $200.
Although textbook shopping is as inevitable as
picking classes or group projects, spending tons of money on books doesn't
have to be part of the process. The catch is knowing what you're doing,
which isn't as obvious as it sounds, even for students with top-of-the-line
spreadsheet skills. Of course, you can still look for the least beat-up copy
in the campus bookstore, but that should be just the beginning.
The Web is overflowing with sites claiming to offer
the cheapest textbooks around. So, with book prices rising, the cost of
higher education higher than ever, and a dreary economy to boot, it'll
certainly pay off to spend some time shopping around. Publishers may be
resourceful, but students are, too.
An Oligopoly
To say they have to be is an understatement. The General Accounting Office
says textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since
1986. And today, students spend on average about $700 per year on required
course materials, according to a 2008 survey by the National Association of
College Stores (NACS).
Part of the problem is rising production costs, but
the textbook market itself plays a role. The industry is an oligopoly, says
James V. Koch, president of Old Dominion University, in a 2006 report by the
U.S. Education Dept. Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.
According to Koch, five publishers—Thomson, Wiley, Houghton-Mifflin,
Pearson, and The McGraw-Hill Companies (Businessweek's parent)—control the
market, putting out about 80% of all college texts.
What's more, Koch says, the textbook market is
unique. Unlike markets for most consumer products, where demand is generated
by consumers themselves, textbook demand is created by another group: the
faculty choosing texts for their classes. That makes it possible for
publishers to introduce higher prices without much&mdashlif any—loss in
revenue.
Publishers can also introduce "bundled" versions of
books—books sealed with additional CD-ROMs or other materials—for higher
prices. This means, even if just the book itself is required, students are
stuck buying a more expensive version.
Tricks of the Trade
But the situation for students isn't as dire as it sounds. First of all, as
some economists point out, students are smart and know how to consume. Yes,
textbooks are expensive. But they are expensive at list price—usually the
highest price a student can find. The prices charged by most bookstores,
online retailers, and even online trading posts are well under this
publisher-set price.
As BusinessWeek found out, those retail prices can
vary wildly, which is why it pays to shop around. One of the easiest and
fastest ways to find the best prices is to use a site that aggregates prices
from many retailers. Booksprice.com and allbookstores.com are good places to
start. They both list prices from the most popular Web retailers, such as
alibris.com, half.com, bookbyte.com, and even Amazon.com. If aggregated
searches aren't turning up the results you want, you can go to individual
retailers' sites. Make sure to know the edition, author, and publisher of
the book you're looking for—some books, on topics such as microeconomics,
share the same title for completely different products.
Expect some surprises. Sometimes a retailer will
sell the new version of a textbook for much less than a used copy. Abebooks,
for example, charges $69.99 for a new copy of Jonathan Berk's and Peter
DeMarzo's Corporate Finance and $120.54 for a used one. It's unclear why
this happens, but one possibility might be that the owners of the used books
simply overpriced their product.
Continued in article
How to find the cheapest college textbooks ---
http://www.wisebread.com/how-to-find-the-cheapest-college-textbooks
I’m not in college any more, thank goodness, but I
remember every penny-pinching moment. Some days I hardly had enough money
for food, mainly because the materials and textbooks I had to buy ripped a
hole in my pocket the size of the Grand Canyon. And so I’m always on the
lookout for ways to help out college students. Today, I found two.
There are numerous methods available to search for
textbooks, including the ever-popular “shopping” search option in Google.
But if you want to go deeper, a few of my favorite sites in the past have
included:
Abebooks.com
Addall.com
Amazon.com
Alibris.com
Craigslist.org
Bizrate.com
Half.com (which is part
of eBay)
Textbooksnow.com
No doubt you’ve used one or two of these already.
But it’s a pain to search each one and compare results. Usually, you find
the book you want, ponder the price and then pay. Not good enough for me. I
want to help students, who are suffering like the rest of us in this hellish
economy, to get the absolute rock-bottom price on any book they’re looking
for.
So I did a little more hunting around and found
some much more powerful search engines, devoted to scouring multiple books
sources at once. The two I like the most are
CAMPUSBOOKS.COM and
BIGWORDS.COM. And
they really are the ultimate search engines for books, especially textbooks.
All you need to know are a few basics about the
book you’re searching for. The easiest way is to have the ISBN number
readily at hand. If that’s not available, you can search by keyword, author,
title, the usual search engine options. And as you can see, the results from
both sites are impressive. Here are two searches I did for an advertising
book I love called “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This.”
Community
College Open-Textbook Project G
Especially note the open sharing sources being used
The
Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting
in California," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 29, 2008 ---
Click Here
At the
meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing
open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and
sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four
providers of free online educational resources:
Connexions,
run by Rice University;
Flat World Knowledge,
a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin
offering free textbooks
online next year;
the University of California’s
UC College Prep Online,
which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the
Community College Consortium for Open Educational
Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community
College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.
One of the most popular sites for textbooks is Bigwords ---
http://www.bigwords.com/
Be careful, however, when buying cheaper foreign editions such as European
editions of popular textbooks. There are often differences to be aware of such
as different orderings of chapters.
One of the first places to start is to look for used books on Amazon.com and
bn.com
I like buying from Amazon in order to reduce the number of online vendors that
have my credit card numbers. Also Amazon guarantees delivery of used books and
other merchandise from linked vendors.
We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?," by Miguel Helft, The New
York Times, July 4, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html?hpw
Cengage Learning
said Thursday that it would become the first higher
education publisher to let students rent as well as buy print textbooks directly
from the source. Cengage said it would transform its existing online platform,
known as
iChapters, into a broader
site that would allow students to rent print textbooks at 40 to 70 percent off
retail as well as purchase print and digital texts and other materials.
Publishers have been exploring a range of ways to enter the
burgeoning market for renting textbooks.
Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/qt#205700
Jensen Test:
Rent Textbooks from Chegg ---
http://www.chegg.com/
Rental prices are about half the so-called purchase price of a new book.
Buying a used book is probably a better idea since it, in turn, can be sold back
into the used market.
Intermediate Accounting ISBN 0470374942 by Kieso et al.
New (Chegg claims the new price is $209
but the price of hardcover is $177 at Barnes & Noble )
The Amazon Price of a new hardcover is $168 ---
Click Here
Bigwords.com (international edition that differs somewhat in chapter orderings)
lists a price of $53.98
Used prices start at Amazon for about $159 (but watch carefully for the edition
number)
Rent from Chegg ($96.53) ---
http://www.chegg.com/details/intermediate-accounting/0470374942/
Jensen Comment
To get value for my money, I prefer used houses, cars, and books.
Of course, both Amazon and Google are now selling electronic versions of
textbooks. For Amazon you must have a Kindle reader. For Google, all you have to
have is a computer, although to date Amazon has a wider selection of textbooks
available.
American Council of the Blind
filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its
plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind
people cannot use the device as currently configured ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle
March 25, 2009 message from Ramsey, Donald
[dramsey@UDC.EDU]
The cost accounting book I'm using retails for
$190.30. I see on a textbook search website called Bigwords.com that no less
than 9 large dealers are offering it at under $50 for a new copy, including
shipping. How can this be possible?
My concern would be how to get the word to students
early enough so they could (1) not buy books at retail, and (2) get delivery
in time for the first assignment.
Cheers,
Don
March 25, reply from Zane Swanson
[ZSwanson@UCO.EDU]
Convince your university/college/department to go
completely electronic (like Kindle) and the pricing problem would be gone.
This recession may well drive some cost-sensitive programs to go to
electronic books looking for a comparative advantage or a means of covering
a budgetary shortfall. The tipping point will center around the trade-off
costs of the campus book store versus outsourcing the textbooks
electronically.
Zane Swanson
Jensen Added Comment
Universities that are promoting Kindle are running into some resistance from
sight-impaired students. Although Kindle benefits some sight-impaired students
by being able to enlarge fonts, the issue is one of access to Kindle readers and
access to audio versions of the text. Many publishers have audio versions
restricted to sight-impaired students. To avoid conflicts with sight impaired
students, universities might have to offer audio versions to sight-impaired
students at deals as good as Kindle deals to other students.
The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind
filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its
plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind
people cannot use the device as currently configured ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle
PS
I noticed that Bigwords.com is also selling solutions manuals ---
Click Here
http://www5.bigwords.com/search/?z=easysearch&searchtype=ISBN&searchstring=Kieso&Go.x=36&Go.y=28
"Textbooks Offered for iPod, iPhones CourseSmart Applications Will Let
Students Access 7,000-Plus Titles," by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall
Street Journal, August 10, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124985423101217817.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
A provider of subscription e-textbooks for college
students is making its 7,000-plus titles accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone
and iPod Touch as interest heats up in the digital-textbook arena.
The new applications, free for subscribers to
CourseSmart LLC, will let students access their full electronic textbooks,
read their digital notes and search for specific words and phrases.
"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do their
homework, but this does provide real mobile learning," said Frank Lyman,
CourseSmart's executive vice president. "If you're in a study group and you
have a question, you can immediately access your text."
The move comes as Amazon.com Inc. is shipping its
$489 large-screen Kindle DX e-reader, which is aimed in part at college
students. Amazon is overseeing a DX pilot program at seven colleges this
fall involving hundreds of students who will experiment with reading
textbooks digitally. Last week, McGraw-Hill Education, a unit of McGraw-Hill
Cos., said it is making about 100 college textbooks available for use on
Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX.
CourseSmart's titles aren't available on either
Amazon device. Mr. Lyman said he would like to see his books available
wherever college students want them but that the two companies haven't yet
had any conversations.
CourseSmart, which was created in 2007 as a joint
venture of six higher-education publishers, including McGraw-Hill Education
and Pearson PLC's Pearson Education, operates on a subscription model.
Typically students rent a book for 180 days; when their subscription
expires, they lose access to the title.
The company, which doesn't release financial
results, offers its digital books at about 50% of the retail price of the
corresponding physical textbook. Although students can't resell their
e-textbooks, Mr. Lyman said they typically don't get more than 50% of what
they paid for a new book when they resell it.
"Textbooks are the missing link in the e-reader
content base," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research,
Inc. "The problem so far is that college students haven't really been
interested in reading on their laptops. The iPhone will help create
excitement and generate awareness of e-textbooks."
Mr. Lyman said he believes that lack of awareness
has been the largest barrier to students trying e-textbooks.
Albert N. Greco, a professor at the Fordham
Graduate School of Business Administration who studies the book industry,
estimates that sales of printed college textbook this year will reach $5.02
billion, up 3.5% from last year. He expects college e-textbooks to hit
$117.5 million in sales in 2009, up 10.3%. "Once the recession ends, we will
see a major, national push to make all higher education textbooks available
in digital formats, as well as a move in that direction for high-school
textbooks," Mr. Greco said.
Jensen Comment
I am truly amazed at the large number of accounting textbook listings, far
more than are available on Kindle or Google eBooks. Perhaps this is because
books are more difficult to copy books not actually stored on iPods and
iPhones. Many of the books have 2008 and 2009 copyrights such that these are
not obsolete editions. I cannot, however, even imagine reading textbooks on
such small screens. Also the subscription prices seem quite high.
Instructors can request examination copies. For example, enter
"Accounting" into the Instructor's search box at
http://www.coursesmart.com/
August 16, 2009 reply from Gerald Trites
[gtrites@ZORBA.CA]
Bob,
I think the
best way for us as academics to help students with the textbook pricing
problem is to self publish our books. Since we publish the textbooks, we
have some control over that in the longer term, and for those who have not
yet published a text, it could be done in the shorter term.
The current
publishing indistry is an anachronism that survives only through their
marketing system, the entrenched habits of writers, the fixed long term
contracts that they cannot get out of, and the residual attachment of some
prestige (arguably falsely grounded) to the traditional publications means
as opposed to self publishing To use my book as a comparison, it sells for
$125 per copy. The royalty is 20% of net sales. Lets ignore the net aspect
for the moment. That means a royalty of $25 per copy. If I were to publish
this same book through LuLu, for example, the "royalty" would be 80%, which
means I could sell the same book for $31.25 and make the same $25 each. If I
were to sell it through Booksurge, which has some marketing capability
through Amazon and other online outlets, the royalty would be 35%, so the
same book could be priced at $72 to make the 25 each. The fly in the
ointment is that LuLu has no marketing arm cruising around the universities
selling the books or displaying them at conferences. However, if we
academics made a little adjustment in our buying choices, and checked out
sources like LuLu, we could make a difference. It's really all in our hands.
If I could get
out of my existing contract, which I can't, I would love to move it over to
LuLu or Booksurge or an equivalent. I'd price the book at 19.95, giving the
students a break and still getting back some reward for my efforts. I would
also have more control over my book and could still get it reviewed by
colleagues. If I ever write another textbook, it will definitely be done
that way.
We could change
our ways and make life a little easier for the students if we really wanted
to.
Jerry
__________________________
Phone - 416-602-3931
Website -
www.zorba.ca
Blog -
www.zorba.ca/blog.html
August 19, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jerry,
The issue lies in what one
expects from a textbook. I seldom cared much about the text part itself,
because I usually thought I had better text in my course notes, my videos,
and my Websites.
But I almost always
assigned a textbook, and the reason was almost always to provide students
with problems, cases, and other assignments. It just took too much of my
time to develop the end-of-chapter stuff (complete with an answer book) for
my own materials. For example, I think one of the best textbooks ever
written was the one I assigned repeatedly for my accounting theory course
(where I did not assign accounting theory textbooks):
Derivatives: An Introduction (Hardcover)
by
Robert A. Strong
Robert A. Strong
(Author)
Before my students could
begin to comprehend FAS 133 and IAS 39, they had to understand derivatives.
I can, and did, explain derivatives in class. But I could not find the time
to develop assignment material like that found in Strong’s textbook. Nor
could I teach some of the hedging strategies developed by Strong in that
book.
I might add that one of
the huge problems in free textbooks is the loss of incentive to update the
end-of-chapter stuff that, in many cases, is not even written by the
textbook authors. Publishers often outsource the end-of-chapter stuff, and
with a free textbook there’s no longer any incentive to pay a lot of money
for updating the end-of-chapter material so vital to a textbook.
Of course there are many
textbook revisions that badly suffer from having updated the chapters
without updating the end-of-chapter material or only superficially updating
what’s at the end of the chapter.
When a
publisher’s rep sent me a new edition of a textbook to examine, the first
thing I always did is compare the ends of chapters between the old and the
new editions if I was seriously contemplating an adoption of the new
edition. I figure that the revision is a
cheapie if it does not significantly revise what’s at the end of the
chapters.
Bob Jensen
Free online textbooks, cases, and videos ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Teaching Without Textbooks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoTextbooks
Bob Jensen's threads on technologies for aiding handicapped learners ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Social Networking: The New Addiction
I wonder what would happen if students got extra credit from staying away from
porn for three months
There would probably be more female students earning extra credit
Extra Credit for Abstaining From Facebook
Robert Doade, an associate professor of philosophy
at Trinity Western University, in British Columbia, is among those academics who
believe Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other forms of social media may be
distracting students and causing them anxiety. So Doade challenges students by
offering them a 5 percent extra credit bonus if they will abstain from all
social and traditional media for the three month semester of his philosophy
course, and keep a journal about the experience. Out of a class of around 35
students, only about 12 will try for the extra credit and by the end of the
semester only between 4 and 6 are still "media abstinent."
Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/24/qt#204245
Are student usages of FaceBook correlated with lower grades?
Answer: YES!
Concerns About Social Networking, Blogging, and Twittering in Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Jensen Comment
But analysts may be in statistical quicksand by trying to extrapolate
correlation to causality on this one. The students who get lower grades are not
necessarily going to raise their grades by abstaining from Facebook or even
computer vices in general. They are more likely to be "time wasters" who will
find most any excuse not to study. If you take their computers away they will
spend hours arm wrestling, playing Frisbee, playing cards, necking, etc. In some
instances computers and video games are birth control devices.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"The Flaws of Facebook," by Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed,
February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub
An acquisitions editor of a major university press
was nice enough to buy me a cup of coffee and a brioche and listen patiently
as I pitched him my book manuscript during a recent meeting of my
professional association. Things went well enough until, at the end of our
meeting, he surprised me. On our way out of the café, he turned to me and
asked “are you on Facebook?” “I am,” I replied, nonplussed, “but I, uh,
don’t really check it very often.” “Well I do,” he said, tone heavy in
significance, “so friend me.”
My dislike of Facebook is not based on ignorance or
a knee-jerk academic ludism. I understand exactly what Facebook is – it’s an
Internet replacement service that combines e-mail, instant messaging, photo
sharing, social networking, mailing lists, asynchronous gaming, and personal
Web hosting all in one. Crucially, it allows differing degrees of privacy,
so you can blog safely about the antics of your adorable cat or the
incredible evil of your department chair without either of them finding out
unless you add them to your friends list. What bothers me about Facebook —
the dilemma highlighted by my encounter with the editor — is the particular
problem it presents for academics, whose professional career and personal
goings-on are all rolled up together into one big life of the mind.
Teaching is an intensely public activity in a very
simple way: You spend hours and hours having people stare at you. Over time
this simple three-shows-a-week schedule blossoms into something infinitely
weirder. It does not take long for professors to find themselves walking
around a campus filled with half-remembered faces from previous classes —
faces worn by people who remember you perfectly well. If you teach at a
large state university, like I do, it does not take long before random
waiters and pharmacists start mentioning how much they did (or didn’t) enjoy
that survey class you taught. There are even apocryphal stories in Papua New
Guinea — the country that I study — about a man who more or less taught
every social science class at the country’s university during the late 70s.
He spent the rest of his life never having to stand in line or fill out a
form because he had trained the vast majority of the nation’s civil
servants, who all remembered him fondly.
The public created by your teaching is much larger
than just the students in your class. Whether we lament or rejoice in the
purportedly poor state of teacher evaluation, it does happen. Those forms
our students fill out have strange afterlives and become the source of
evaluation by deans and whispering among the senior faculty. The Internet
unleashes these evaluations as well, allowing our classroom antics to be
shared on Ratemyprofessor.com.
So is Facebook a dream come true for academics — a
private social networking site where professors can finally let down there
hair because you control your audience, in the way that the average “I hate
the world” anonymous adjunct blog cannot? I would say No. In the physical
world professors uneasily navigate the uneasy blurring of their public and
private lives, but Facebook doesn’t allow for blurring — you are either
friends or not. This extremely “ungranular” system forces you to choose
between two roles, private and public, that the actual, uncoded world allows
us to leave ambiguous.
Which of the following people would you friend on
Facebook? A friend from graduate school? Probably — Facebook is, for better
or worse, a great way to take the Old Boys Club online. A fellow faculty
member? If you get along with them, why not? Your graduate students? Hmmm...
well I suppose some people have that sort of relationship with their
graduate students. Your undergraduates? I’ve drawn a line in the sand and
said no to that one.
I think these cases are actually pretty easy —
categories like colleague and student are well-defined, as is the
distinction between a “purely” formal relationship and the intimate
friendships that grow up around it. I’m sure that many of the people reading
this got to be where they were today because a professor in our lives went
beyond the call of duty to become a friend and mentor. Facebook makes
handling the formal and the informal tricky, but in all of these examples a
lot of work has already been done for it because the relationships in
question can all be neatly divided into “formal” and “informal” registers.
What Facebook makes particularly uncomfortable are
relationships in which friendship and professionalism are not clear and
brightly bounded, but are tied to real political economic stakes. As a young
professor on the path to tenure, for instance, acquisitions editors have a
certain ominous power over me that compels me to friend them on Facebook
(and I did friend him, by the way) and might even include small favors up to
and including shining their shoes if the end of the deal includes an advance
contract. On the other hand, as someone with a tenure track job, I am also
in a position of diffuse power over people like adjuncts and lecturers, who
I get along well with in my department, but who do not come to faculty
meetings in which we discuss the budget (read: their pay).
The more widely you friend people on Facebook — and
it is a slippery slope — the more and more your Facebook page becomes a
professional Web replacement on Friendster’s slick Internet replacement Web
site. It becomes less and less a “private” space and more and more a place
to show a public face to a very wide audience. In forcing you to craft a
public persona, it raises uncomfortable issues of power and inequality and
lurk under the surface of our actual world interactions — which is probably
a good thing.
Continued in article
Videos
CBS Sixty Minute Module on Facebook ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cEySyEnxvU
Some Sobering Thoughts ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU
Learn About Facebook (in a pretty good song) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpaxaxEWMSA
Facebook Fever ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHi-ZcvFV_0
Facebook Anthem ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Facebook&aq=f
No Cheers for Pornography and Gambling Sites
This may seem a bit off topic, but it may be one of the most valuable links
you can forward to students and others. Besides being a social disgrace,
pornography sites are one of the most dangerous sources of malware that infects
computers along with gambling sites and sites offering malware protection just
after they've infected your computer. In the the case of pornography and
gambling users are being infected in multiple ways. These sites want your money,
your I.D., and your mind.
"Pornography and You," by Rebecca Hagelin, Townhall, September
22, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/RebeccaHagelin/2009/09/22/pornography_and_you
According to Dr. Manning, the type of porn viewed
today, by both adults and children, is "deviant, vile and graphic. Young
people are witnessing rape, torture, and all kinds of degrading material."
Why would anyone gravitate to such horrible inhumane depictions? Dr. Reisman
has carefully studied and documented the effects that exposure to
pornography has on the brain – it acts like a drug and can easily capture
the “casual observer” and result in serious addiction, causing the user to
crave greater quantities of ever more perverse images.
If you suspect someone in your family has a porn
problem, arm yourself with truth. This column is much to short to delve into
all you need to know in order to protect your family. Visit
www.SalvoMag.com
where you can order the "Silent Bondage" issue and equip yourself to combat
pornography's stranglehold head-on.
If you have a pornography addiction, please get
help. At
www.VictimsofPornography.org you can connect with
counseling resources and hear the victory stories of others who have
overcome their bondage. It’s critical to understand that consuming porn is
never just “harmless entertainment.” Your use warps your view of women and
of common decency. It breeds selfishness and unfaithfulness. You might as
well be having an affair with every woman you gawk at in the glow of the
computer or while privately viewing that hotel room porn flick.
Your wife may be silent about your usage, but she’s
probably dying a little each day inside. I’ll never forget the
heart-wrenching words of a wife whose husband regularly viewed porn: “It was
like my husband had a mistress in our home.”
If you use pornography, you use people. You have a
problem. Get help.
"QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE PROBLEM OF COMPULSIVE GAMBLING AND THE G.A.
RECOVERY PROGRAM," Gamblers Anonymous ---
http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/qna.html
"How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why
that's dangerous," by Emily Yoffe, Slate Magazine, August 12, 2009
---
http://www.slate.com/id/2224932
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar
Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it
feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden
by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so
insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google
searches are becoming a cause of
mistrials as jurors,
after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts
for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina
Shen Rastogi confessed in
Double X, "My boyfriend
has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look
up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the
point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the
New York Times said she became so
obsessed with Twitter posts about the
Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days
"refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
We actually resemble nothing so much as those
legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a
little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search
engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that
scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat
skulls.
In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were
working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned.
They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to
a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the
reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place,
and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner
where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was
put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a
lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they
collapsed.
Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the
brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later
experiments done on
humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal
hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.
But to Washington State University neuroscientist
Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center
didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating
rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of
creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The
animals, he writes in
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,
were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were
in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects
described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals
stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp
writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and
Panksepp wasn't referring to
Bing).
It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names
for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy.
He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping
the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals,
and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian
motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to
venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin
writes in
Animals Make Us Human, experiments
show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for
their food than to have it delivered to them.
For humans, this desire to search is not just about
fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get
just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when
we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual
connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are
firing.
The juice that fuels the seeking system is the
neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of
eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love
to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances,
that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of
stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.
Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer
just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only
to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank
dopamine. Our internal
sense of time is believed to be controlled by the
dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of
dopamine in their brains, which a recent
study suggests may be at the root of the problem.
For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas
Carr in
the
Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our
brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a
long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our
next fix.
Bob Jensen's bookmarks on social science tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
The Critical Importance of Metacognition and Retrieval For Learning
From the Financial Rounds Blog on August 14, 2009 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The author is an associate professor of finance who is studying for the CFA
examination. His studies were sidetracked for a period of time while his young son was dying from cancer.
I just read a study that is highly applicable to
anyone who's studying for the CFA exams, since there's a ridiculous amount
of information that must be retained. When people ask me how much they have
to study for the L1 exam, I answer "about 16 pounds", since that's the
weight of the curriculum.
But the study is applicable to students in many other disciplines.
The study is titled "The Critical Importance of Retrieval For Learning" by
Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger, and it's in the February 2008 issue of
the journal Science. They examine the question of how best to improve
long-term recall. Specifically, they tested whether, once a student can
recall a piece of knowledge once, they most improve their long term recall
by repeated studying of the material, by repeated testing of the material,
or both. Here's the abstract:
Learning
is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct
answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition
learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm
of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a
student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was
repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly
tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study
and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed
recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In
addition, students' predictions of their performance were
uncorrelated with actual performance. The results demonstrate the
critical role of retrieval practice in consolidating learning and
show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.
So, the takeaway is that the best way to retain (for
example), the
Black-Scholes option pricing formula isn't to keep
going over the formula once you've gotten it down - it's to repeatedly TEST
yourself on it. I don't necessarily mean a formal test -- just put the
formula on a flash card and periodically (every couple of days at first, but
eventually at longer intervals) try to write it out. After that, check your
results against the flash card.
Of course, if you're studying for the CFA exams, most of the test-prep
companies have test banks with numerous questions on each topic, so using
them would be perfectly consistent with this approach.
I almost forgot - you can read the Science article
here.
Jensen Comment
Studying for memory examinations like the CPA, CFA, CMA, and almost every other
triple imaginable the Karpicke and Roediger approach makes intuitive sense and
is indeed how I studied as a student. But as one gets older and seeks more
breadth of knowledge, it becomes overwhelming to try to keep honing recall in
such the intense manner needed to pass a certification examination. My alternate
solution has been to develop "knowledge databases" for what I learn each and
every day. This started out, believe it or not, with a steel filing cabinets for
IBM Cards. At one time I had over 88,000 cards punched, much of it dealing with
mathematical statistics believe it or not.
Later, I transferred my punched-card knowledge base onto magnetic tape that,
on occasion, I printed out by the ton so I could have hard copy access (before
the days of personal computers and networking). Searching computer tape was slow,
slow, slow.
I immediately jumped on two Web servers and a LAN server once this newer
technology became available at Trinity University. Now my knowledge databases
are pretty much contained in these three servers. You can access my two Web
servers with the following links. Printing out the entire contents would
probably take a million pages of hard copy.
Trinity University Computing Center Web Server:
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Trinity University Computer Science Department Web Server:
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/
The two servers above contain knowledge (including portions of many articles)
that I feel I can legally retain myself and share with the world. My private LAN
server contains my digitized library that I cannot share with the world largely
because I do not have legal authority to share copyrighted material with the
world.
My memory skills thus changed from being a student studying for examinations
to a professor seeking to facilitate learning of my students and to personally
aid me in my own scholarship and research. My memory skills thus shifted from
test-reinforcement skills to knowledge-base searching skills.
But in the process of searching my knowledge bases an interesting thing
happened along the way. For example, I've accessed the Black-Scholes Model so
many hundreds of times over the years I'm actually prepared to take an
examination on its technicalities. Hence, knowledge based searching hones memory
for things frequently searched. And for things not
frequently searched, I can sometimes impress you with what seems to be something
that I recall in my brain but in reality my brain only helps be recall what I've
stored in huge knowledge bases that I maintain.
Also the modules in my knowledge base must be typed or pasted into the
computer. Since I've done virtually all of this input myself, I've honed my
memory skills while inputting the modules.
August 14, 2009 reply (portion only) from Richard Pettway
[richard.pettway@cba.ufl.edu]
Many Finance Ph.D.s also are on a CFA track,
especially if they specialize in investments. They pass the first level exam
after their first year in the program and take the two other levels each
year there after. But they are also required to have three years of
experience, but academic experience is allowed as a substitute. Actually,
getting a CFA was an important part of the Ph.D. program several years ago,
but now the desire is much less. Perhaps, there is a general decline in the
interest in the security business due the excesses of Wall Street's recent
past. However, the data may just be a short-term trend, not a long-term
trend.
Cheers,
Dick
Bob Jensen's threads on metacognition are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
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?
Jensen Comment
This could lead to some strategies like "don't spend any time on the term paper
and concentrate on passing the final examination or vice versa."
Such strategies are probably not in the spirit of the course design, especially
when the instructor intended for students to have to write a paper.
"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 21st
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.
Continued in article
"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.
Continued in article
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.”
Continued in article
"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 |