Changing Higher Education

How can we think about the wave of new innovations in higher education?

Much has been happening recently in higher education - MOOCs, competency based degrees, alternative credentialing, Presidential (of the US, that is) statements that real increases in tuition must stop, etc. This has lead various observers to predict tsunamis, tipping points, crises, and/or disruptions for higher education.

How should one begin to analyze the possible impacts of this seemingly endless set of new "environmental conditions"? I find that a useful starting point is the business model of higher education.  The following picture describing the elements of a business model is taken from a recent publication, Disrupting College,  by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares (CHCS).   

 

This picture emphasizes that there are four key components of a business model, and that all of these components must fit together in an interdependent way in order for the model to be viable. The lock on the picture emphasizes that no one component can be changed without causing significant changes in the other components once the model has reached a viable equilibrium. 

Economic mobility and family income in the US

Economic mobility - children being able to rise to a higher economic position than their parents - is a central part of the American dream. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is less economic mobility in the US than our national narrative supposes. Recently released data on multi year trends in family income suggest that this situation is is not likely to improve in the near future.

Economic mobility in many developed countries was described in a recent OECD report. This report demonstrated that the United States has lower economic mobility than most other members of the OECD:

Is Semester Online the beginning of the revolution?

I was delighted by the Inside Higher Education report that 10 top ranked universities have joined with 2U (formerly 2tor) to form a consortium called Semester Online:

Semester Online is the first-of-its-kind program to offer rigorous, online, for-credit undergraduate courses through a consortium of top-tier colleges and universities. The program will be delivered through a virtual classroom environment and interactive platform developed by 2U, formerly known as 2tor.

Semester Online courses will feature primarily the same faculty and curricula as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Students will experience a state-of-the-art virtual classroom, including live class sessions that connect students and renowned professors; compelling, richly produced, self-paced course materials; and a strong social network that allows students to collaborate and build relationships online.

Students will have the chance to take advantage of unique course offerings from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, courses they would not otherwise have access to. They will be able to work, travel, participate in off-campus research programs or manage personal commitments that in the past would have meant putting their studies on hold.

Credit will be awarded by the consortium member that provides the course, which will also determine admissions requirements for the course.  

The reason that I found this announcement exciting is tied to an article I wrote long ago and far away.

Coursera and MITx - sustaining or disruptive?

Coursera continues to make headlines as additional "top tier" universities sign up to offer courses (16 institutions and 116 courses, at latest count), and hundreds of thousands of students sign up to take those courses. MITx, on the other hand, has not gotten much coverage lately, especially since the creation of EDx. MITx is moving much more deliberately, of course, with only one course up at this point (3 more announced for the Fall of 2012), so we know much less about how MITx will actually look and feel than we do about Coursera. However, Coursera and MITx seem potentially to represent very different approaches to the expansion of online learning, and those differences may be very important in determining the ultimate impact on higher education of online learning. In this post, I will explore some of those differences as I see them, and their potential implications.

How Learning Works

The bad news is that most data seem to show that students are not learning nearly so much in college as we would hope - or as we imagine is happening (see, e.g. Another study showing students are not learning). The good news is that learning research shows us how to improve those outcomes.  However, the additional bad news is that most academics have no idea what  the research says or, more important, what the research says should be done in a real classroom to get better learning. 

One of my collegues recently introduced me to an excellent book that seeks to remedy this last bit of bad news.   The book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, describes seven crucial principles of learning, the research that supports those principles, and their implications for teaching. Each principle is made more concrete by a set of instructional strategies that can be used for its implementation.  The authors of this work are Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett, and Marie Norman.  and the book is based on approaches developed at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon. 

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Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.

HERBERT A. SIMON

edX: a step forward- or backward?

edX, the new distance learning collaboration recently announced by MIT and Harvard, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so:

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced edX, a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

Coming on the heals of the appearance of Coursera, Udacity, and the edX precursor, MITx, this has led numerous commentators to suggest that we have entered a veritable age of aquarius for massively open online courses (MOOCs). All of these efforts involve, to one degree or another, universities of the very top rank and each will offer online versions of university level courses using the most advanced technologies. Further, all will be open to anyone who wants to sign up, and the courses will either be free or involve a very nominal cost for e.g. testing. Importantly, however, none of these efforts will lead to course credit, degree or certificate from the universities involved. Instead, successful students can hope for a signed letter of completion from their well-known instructor or a certificate from the organization

Preliminary results are very exciting, indeed. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, did an online course at Stanford that drew over 160,000 student, and Udacity has over 200,000 students signed up for its first six courses. MITx's first course enrolled about 120,000 students.

Market-leaders can adapt to disruptive innovation!

One of the more striking - and disturbing - findings of Clayton Christensen's original work on disruptive innovation was that market-leaders were almost never able to cope with the attack of a disruptive innovator (see my earlier post). Even in cases in which leadership understood the danger posed by the disruptor, inertia and short-term economic constraints and incentives almost always led the market leaders to maintain their original trajectories. Over time, the disruptors produced better and cheaper products than the market leaders, and correspondingly the customers switched allegiances. The disruptors became the new market leaders, and the former market leaders often simply disappeared.

Since many have suggested that higher education shows all the characteristics of an industry that is ripe for disruptive innovation, this inability of market leaders to adapt in the face of disruption is rather disturbing.  However, there is good news from more recent research by Christensen and his group.

Why manufacturing may be important to innovation

The January/February issue of technology review (TR) and the March issue of the Harvard Business Review  (HBR) both contain fascinating  articles on the relationship between innovation and manufacturing that point out significant problems with the generally accepted view of globalization.  Since both globalization and innovation are important for higher education, this new discussion provides additional background for some of the major issues discussed in this blog.

Globalization, as generally defined, involves modularization of product creation, production and sales, with individual modules being carried out wherever on the globe they can "best" be performed - where "best" will be defined according to different criteria by different companies (see post Globalization and Internationalization). However, in many industries a typical result has been to offshore the manufacturing component of the process in search of production that is cheaper than domestic production.

Too many American companies base decisions about how to source manufacturing largely on narrow financial criteria, never taking into account the potential strategic value of domestic locations. Proposals for plants are treated like any other investment proposal and subjected to strict return hurdles. Tax, regulatory, intellectual property, and political considerations may also figure heavily in the conversation. But executives, viewing manufacturing mainly as a cost center, give short shrift to the impact that outsourcing or offshoring it may have on a company’s capacity to innovate. Indeed, most don’t consider manufacturing to be part of a company’s innovation system at all.

Totally unrelated new data on household income and student loans

Sentier Research recently published a report on Household Income Trends: January 2012. This is regular series that looks at trends in real (inflation corrected) median annual household income in the US. I had discussed an earlier report in my post A bad 4 years for family income, a good 4 years for college prices.

There is a lot of interesting data in this recent report, but one paragraph jumped out at me:

The median annual household income in January 2012 can be  put into broader perspective by a comparison with previous levels of household income dating back to the start of the last decade. The January 2012 median annual household income of $50,020 was 5.4 percent lower than the median of $52,852 in June 2009, the end of the recent recession and beginning of the “economic recovery.” The January 2012 median was 7.8 percent lower than the median of $54,242 in December 2007, the beginning month of the recession that occurred just over four years ago.  And the January 2012 median was 8.7 percent lower than the median of $54,790 in January 2000, the beginning of this statistical series. These comparisons demonstrate how significantly real median annual household income has fallen over the past decade, and how much ground needs to be recovered to return to income levels that existed in earlier years. 

An 8.7 % drop in median family income since 2000 is huge and suggests a pretty significant change in life-style.

Harvard inaugurates its Initiative for Learning and Teaching

ON ONE HAND:

The good news is that Harvard is beginning to play a public leadership role in increasing student learning! The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) had its inaugural event, a symposium, on February 3. HILT was founded as the result of a generous $40M gift from Harvard alumni Gustave and Rita Hauser. The invitation only event brought in several outside luminaries with considerable expertise in learning, such as Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman, and around 300 people from the Harvard community including Harvard's own luminary in the field, Eric Mazur.

The poor state of undergraduate student learning over all has been chronicled in many books and studies (see an earlier discussion here).  One of the most readable of these books was written by Harvard's own Derek Bok - Our Underachieving Colleges, so the issues are not unfamiliar at Harvard itself. As Bok (and many others) pointed out, the problem is not that there aren't many well documented ways to greatly increase student learning, it is that these methods have not been adopted widely by colleges. The powerful forces of the status quo have dominated teaching and learning.  

A valuable new offering at StraighterLine

A key issue for one of our potential disruptors, StraighterLine, has been creating credibility among four-year institutions so that its students can transfer their credits easily when they are ready to enter a bachelor's program.  Although their courses have been blessed by The American Council on Education's College Credit Recommendation Service, with current, input-focused approaches to accreditation, StraighterLine is unlikely to be able to achieve the stamp of approval of accreditation for its courses. Recently, in a very interesting move, StraighterLine has begun an effort to shift the focus away from input-focused accreditation towards student outcomes.

The State of the Union on college costs

So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Barak Obama, State of Union 2012

Does this speech signal that the time has finally arrived when the government - which pays a good part of the bill - will step in to limit the rapid and seemingly never ending growth of tuition? In normal times, the answer would likely be "yes" given that politicians from both sides of the aisle have been introducing bills that would cap tuition in one way or another for almost a decade.  Thus, we might expect to see a quick moving bipartisan effort.

Potential disruptors in the higher education space. II

In an earlier post, I described some potential disruptors in the higher education space. In this post I would like to add another set - several non-profits that are trying to provide essentially free education : the Khan Academy, the University of the People, and the Saylor Foundation  .

Cost and price in higher education, again

These administrators are like cookie monsters… They seek out all the resources that they can get their hands on and then devour them

Ronald Ehrenberg in Tuition Rising

As economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find my many earlier takes on this issue collected here. 

The quote above is basically a brief restatement of what is known as Bowen's Rule, which appeared in one of the earlier (1980) extended studies of cost in higher education. Bowen pointed out that budgeting in higher education is basically the inverse of that which occurs in most industries: first you see how much income you can raise, then you spend it all in pursuit of an elusive goal of "excellence" and brand. I put excellence in quotes because it is a concept that primarily is internally defined by academe itself rather than by its customers.

Interestingly, however, a recent work by Christensen, Horn, Caldera and Soares (CHCS) called Disrupting College showed that many of the cost issues in higher education actually correspond extremely closely to well - studied cost issues in other industries. Turns out there are cookie monsters everywhere!

What will The College of 2020 look like?

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

Niels Bohr

(Note: the following was first published as an invited contribution on The College of 2020 in parts 1 and 2. I reproduce it here for the benefit of my readers by permission of the editors of the College of 2020)

What will the College of 2020 look like? It probably will be similar in at least one way to the College of 2011 -there isn't any one archetypical College of 2011 and there won't be any one archetypical College of 2020 either. US higher education consists of about 4,500 accredited colleges of 2011 with an incredible diversity of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources. I would expect the same to be generally true in 2020, with some important caveats: I think there will be significantly fewer accredited colleges in 2020, and the mix of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources will be quite different from today.

These changes will be driven by two forces that push from different directions, but each leading to increasing fiscal constraints on higher education. On the one side, local and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to support higher education at traditional levels. There a world-wide movement towards decreasing the role of government in providing social goods, and the US reflects that movement. In addition, other governmental costs such as health care, prisons, and retirements are growing rapidly and squeezing out areas such as education. On the other side, all of higher education utilizes a model whose costs over the last 30 years have steadily grown about 3% a year above CPI increase. In the tuition-dependent private sector, tuition has grown apace, i.e. roughly CPI plus 3% every year for the past three decades. The costs of higher education are reaching a point where government, parents, and students are beginning to question if the product is worth the price. The answer is increasingly "no" for private institutions that have lower brand value, but the "no" likely will move upstream in the value ladder over time as costs increase until only a relatively small number of high brand value private institutions are immune. On the public side, the answer is increasingly, "no, not given our fiscal constraints" no matter what the brand value of the institution.

Multiple views of globalization of higher education and of place

I had the pleasure of attending the Laureate International Universities' annual Leadership Summit last June.  As readers of this blog know, Laureate is a for-profit corporation that runs a world wide network of higher education institutions, both brick-and-mortar and online. Laureate is one of my potential disruptors. Not surprisingly, while listening to some of the talks at the Summit, I found myself musing about some of the very different ways that various players in higher education are conceptualizing globalization, and how this was related to the place-based identity of most higher education institutions.

I have written about what I called the place-based identity of higher education institutions, and how it impacts globalization efforts. Most higher education institutions were created in response to local needs, typically with funding either from individuals of the area or local (or state) government.  They initially served primarily students from their surrounding regions. Thus, they responded to the special contexts of their regions - they were place-based both physically through their campus and also programmatically through their focus on response to local conditions and needs . As time went on, the contexts of regions changed and became more complicated, and successful institutions responded to those changes, keeping in step with those changing regional contexts. In addition, some institutions began to view themselves as national, not regional, institutions and so the context to which they were responding became much larger and national in scope. However, the simpler, geographic component - the campus- of place-based identity generally did not change in any significant way. Most institutions continued to maintain one main campus right where it started. If there were offshoots, they were generally small and designed to better serve their region. This maintaining of the original campus as the "main campus" further connects today's institutions to their origins even as they change to respond to new contexts.  

A bad 4 years for family income, a good 4 years for college prices

Gordon Green and John Coder recently published an ominous report entitled Household Income Trends During the Recession and Economic Recovery. In it, they looked at real (inflation corrected) median household income over the period beginning in December 2007 when the most recent recession began, through the recovery which began in June 2009, ending in the near-present, June 2011. Over that period December 2007 until June 2011, median real household income fell  by 9.6%.  I will talk about some of the details below, but would first like to compare what happened to price in higher education over that period.

I have written about what has happened to real average published tuition and fees in private non profit colleges and universities over an extended period ending with the academic year 2010-2011, based on College Board Data. I haven't found data for the AY 2011-2012 from College Board, but NAICU reports from their surveys that the increase for 2012 over 2011 is 4.6% in constant 2011 dollars. Putting this together with the previous College Board data and the CPI increase 2010-2012, one find that the percentage increase in real average published tuition and fees for these institutions going from 2007-2008 until 2011-2012 is 10.6%.

Combining these two data, one sees that the percentage of median real family income required to pay the average real tuition and fees increased over this four year period by 22.3%! 

I have a guest post on The College of 2020 website http://collegeof2020.com/college-of-2020-lloyd-armstrong-1 . The post is entitled "What will the College of 2020 look like?" , and will be published in 2 parts. Check my twitter feed for the appearance of part 2.

An educational system built for another time, another student demographic

Complete College America has just released a very interesting and important report entitled Time is the Enemy: the surprising truth about why today's college students aren't graduating- and what needs to change. The report moves beyond typical IPEDS information that focuses on full time students who enter as freshmen, thus ignoring part time and transfer students. Thirty three states provided information on their public systems that went into this report. A couple of caveats: The data do not track educational pathways of individual students (as is now available in a few instances), but rather use gross data such as entries, graduations, drop-outs, transfers from one part of a state's public system into another part of the same system. Thus, for example, transfers to private (either non- or for-profit) institutions and public systems in another states are not included. In addition, the labels "full" and "part-time" student are defined by the status of the student in the first term of enrollment, which may or may not be descriptive of the way many of today's students follow their education.These and other similar caveats aside, this report provides an excellent first look at a much larger and broader set of students than are described by IPEDS.

The report contains two striking demographic facts that underline problems in the way that we typically view higher education:

• 40% of public college students are able to attend only part time
• only 25% of college students are "traditional" in the sense that they are attending full time, attending a residential college, and have parents that are are paying most of their bills 

Carl Camden and Michael Spence on the future of employment

The most recent McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) has a very interesting pair of interviews entitled The US Employment Challenge: Perspectives from Carl Camden and Michael Spence. Both of these relate to the question I have posed in  several posts - how do we need to be educating our students so that they can excel in this rapidly changing world?  

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Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services brings a though-provoking perspective to the subject of the changing nature of work and employment. He argues that we have generally not recognized the myriad implications of the increasingly short job cycle - the time for a job to appear and disappear, either in terms of a location or a whole category of jobs.  One of the major consequences is an increase in free-agent workers:

So jobs aren’t permanent, locations aren’t permanent, and workers are returning back to what I would call a free-agent type of work style. Independent contractors, part-time employees who move in and out of the workforce, temporary employees, consultants who move in and out of the workforce—that group of individuals in most of the industrialized world is already 25 to 35 percent of the workforce, on its way to becoming 50 percent of the workforce, I think, over the next decade.

Brief update on StraighterLine, one of my potential disruptors

In a recent post, I described several organizations that seemed to me to be potential disruptors on the higher education space.  StraighterLine, which focuses on offering introductory college coursework on line, is one of these.

StraighterLine has now issued its first "report card", a survey of their students. The survey looked at such things as student satisfaction, convenience, perception of course rigor, and whether the student was able to obtain credit from a college of their choice for the StraighterLine course. In brief, the students seemed highly pleased with the courses on all parameters. Importantly, over 90% of those who sought college credit for the course were able to obtain it.  

The response rate to the survey was modest, and it would have been nice to see some validity discussion in the survey. Nevertheless, the report card indicates that StraighterLine is finding strong student approval of its method of offering an inexpensive way to get college introductory courses online, and that those courses are being recognized and accepted by traditional institutions.  Sounds like a good step along the path of disruption! 

Moody's looks at student-debt problems

Moody's Analytics has published a very nice analysis of the student loan situation by Cristian Deritis :

In this study, we examine the rapid growth of the student loan industry over the past few years, the weakening performance of loan portfolios, and what these trends suggest for future performance and lending volumes.

I will not go through the interesting analysis here, but simply show two very powerful graphs from the paper, and jump to the conclusions. The first of these graphs shows the rapidly growing student loans balances, which continue to grow although total loan balances have been shrinking:

The second graph, similar to many I have shown before, demonstrates a major driver behind this growth in loans - higher education tuition increases compared to increases in other sectors:

Always impressive how increases in higher ed costs outpace the rest of the pack!

A New Culture of Learning

What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?

This critically important question provides the impetus for a thought provoking book entitled A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. The authors, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, have the perfect backgrounds and credentials to address this challenging question in a thoughtful, meaningful and provocative way.  Readers of this book will find a well thought out perspective of learning that is very different from the one which dominates all levels of education today. 

The authors start with the obvious - information abounds, it gets easier every day to get it, and the world (and consequently information) is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Along the way, they help us to recognize the multiple ways in which we all learn outside of the classroom through experiences of all kinds, with perhaps a bit of emphasis on play and failure. Through stories, they begin to draw out a description of a new culture of learning, one which involves using the new informational resources in a way that responds to personal needs, and results in sharing that experience in a way that helps to recreate the space of knowledge. 

Potential disruptors in the higher education space

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been using Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation to frame issues in higher education since 2006 (Disruptive technologies: when great universities fail?).  Christensen's work describes corporations (and industries) that are considered to be enormously well run and successful, but are essentially destroyed in a relatively short time by some new competitor that brings a new innovative approach to meeting the needs of the customers. The disruptor's new product is less expensive than the traditional product, and has some attributes that are quite different. Initially, the disruptor's product does not meet the customer's needs so well as the established product. Over time, however, the disruptor's product improves, and customers come to find its additional attributes to be very useful.  Christensen also differentiates between this disruptive innovation and a sustaining innovation. The latter is used to improve established products. Christensen shows that continual application of sustaining innovation often leads to an established product that is "better" than the customer needs -- or wants to pay for. Thus the very quality of the established product may well be one of its weaknesses. Eventually a tipping point arrives, and customers rapidly migrate to the new product that is both less expensive and has additional useful attributes.

Christensen describes characteristics of traditional companies that have fallen prey to a disruptive innovation. I always felt that higher education fits to a T his picture of an industry that has a high probability of suffering a major disruption.  Fortunately, you no longer have to view the issues through the lens of my interpretation of Christensen, because Christensen and co-workers have recently turned their attention higher education. A number of their works have now appeared or will soon appear. I previously did a post on his recent Disrupting College; Christensen and Eyering have a book appearing in August on the Innovative University:Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out; and Michael B. Horn, a regular Christensen collaborator, has recently published an excellent paper Beyond Good and Evil:Understanding the Role of For-Profits in Education through the Theories of Disruptive Innovation.  All highly recommended.

With all of this, I thought it useful to introduce a blogroll on some companies, institutions, think tanks, etc. that seem to me to be doing interesting things that might well turn out to be disruptive for various aspects higher education, and/or sustaining for others. The blogroll will not seek to be all-inclusive. Rather, it will be indicative of areas in which I find that very interesting things are happening. I will  add more sites to the roll from time to time as I see things that attract my interest.

Update on Perspectives on the elephant of college pricing

A year and one half ago I wrote a post called Perspectives on the elephant of college pricing. In it, I looked at the increasing cost of higher education from three perspectives: the public's view; the student and parents view; and the college view.  In all cases, I focused on private, non-profit four year institutions. Given the changes in the economy since that post was written, it seems worthwhile to give a quick update on each of these perspectives.

Data mining higher education records in search of improved outcomes

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just funded a potentially very interesting and useful study at WCET. Unfortunately, I have to go through a few explanatory layers of acronyms in order to explain that sentence, but stick with me. WCET stands for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, while WICHE stands for The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. WICHE was created to facilitate sharing of resources among the higher education systems of the West, and has 15 member states.  

The grant focuses on identifying variables that impact student retention and progression.  The study itself will involve data mining of student records from an interesting mixture of instituions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and University of Phoenix.  The aggregate data to be analyzed contains records of over 400,000 students:

Each of these postsecondary entities has performed extensive research on their own datasets.  The combination of large data sets across a wide variety of types of institutions (public/private, two-year/four-year, traditional/non-traditional) will seek to find patterns identifiable only through analyzing large data sets representing a widely diverse set of students.

What does society have to pay for a student to get a bachelor's degree?

Jorge Klor de Alva and Mark Schneider have just published a paper -Who Wins? Who Pays?: The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelor's Degree- that will certainly cause considerable controversy and discussion. While there are many aspects of the specifics of the study that undoubtedly will be challenged and refined in the future, in a very real sense the great significance of the paper is that it introduces a perspective to the ongoing discussions of higher education that is new and critically important. 

National and state governments obviously are struggling  to come to grips with the new era of constrained budgets.  As they have tried to simply continue the old paradigms of higher education and its support into this era of constraint, results have generally been quite negative.  Resulting higher education cuts have led to significant decreases in the numbers of students who can be accepted and educated in most state systems. Often the cuts have been deepest at institutions that serve primarily lower income students.  On the private side, the recession has pummeled many endowments, and the sector depends on annual tuition increases that average inflation + 3.5%, a model that faces increasing resistance. Federal student aid support to all sectors is facing increasing scrutiny, with some of Obama's goals for increases being scrapped before the budget wars really start.

One of the major problems that all of the individuals, agencies and legislatures face as they seek to find new and sustainable directions for higher education that serves its various constituencies is simply lack of data, which then leads to a lack of understanding of the implications of aspects of current funding paradigms.  

The financial return from attending a more selective college

Stacy Dale and Alan B. Kruger (DK) recently have done a very interesting and important study (Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data) that joins the growing literature estimating the financial return to an individual for attending a very selective college. Whether or not you agree with their very unexpected and counter-intuitive conclusions, their results certainly are thought provoking!

Support for higher education in the public sector

The State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) recently published a very informative report, State Higher Education Finance FY 2010.  This report contains a lot of useful information regarding state support of higher education in public institutions, both nationally and state-by-state. The data analysis take into account a number of variations state to state in cost of living, mix of types of educational institutions, etc. The website of SHEEO contains additional data related to this report. 

Is online education disruptive or not?

Burck Smith, the founder of StraighterLine, has written a very nice piece about Clayton Christensen, et al.'s Disrupting College (see Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education) for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In this article, Smith argues that, in fact, online education is acting as a sustaining, rather than disruptive, innovation at this time:

Yet the effects of disruption—vastly lower prices for consumers, new course providers, struggling old providers, and disaggregation of products—are not evident in higher education. Prices continue to rise and, with the possible exception of for-profit colleges, nobody new has appeared on the education landscape to deliver college courses. In practice, it seems as though online learning is simply a “feature enhancement” (like adding rubber tires to wooden wheels) that allows colleges to make their offerings attractive to more people.