Various thought provokers

There are too many interesting higher education tidbits floating around recently  for me to write a full post on each, so today I will just briefly comment on several fairly recent reports that struck me as interesting.

I found the recent Inside Higher Ed article entitled Australians Open U.S. Med School to be quite fascinating.  The University of  Queensland School of Medicine and the Ochsner Health System of Louisiana have opened the University of Queensland School of Medicine Clinical School at Ochsner .   This new center will enable a clinical program that involves two years of medical school in Brisbane followed by 2 years of clinical training at Queensland”s outpost at Ochsner.  Only American students will be accepted. Graduates will get an Australian medical degree from Queensland.  The UQ School of Medicine bills itself as “Australia’s Global Medical School”, and David Wilkenson, head of the School of Medicine, describes this new joint venture as “a new model for preparing doctors to work anywhere in the world.” A very interesting way for a foreign university to enter the US market- and an interesting take on globalization of higher education!

Continuing with Inside Higher Ed, I really liked the even more recent Views article by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman, Bucking Conventional Wisdom on College Costs. They quite persuasively argue against eight nuggets of conventional wisdom:

Conventional wisdom #1: Spending increases in higher education are inevitable, because there is no way to improve the productivity of teaching and learning without sacrificing quality
Conventional wisdom #2: More money means more quality, and quality means higher performance.
Conventional wisdom #3: Among public institutions, state governments are now minority shareholders in higher education, and as a result public policy goals should take a backseat to market rules to steer institutions.
Conventional wisdom #4: Colleges and universities cannot be expected to invest in change or to pursue state priorities without new money. A corollary is that any reductions in funds must be replaced before funds can be considered as “new.
Conventional wisdom #5: Instructional costs rise by the level of the student taught – e.g., lower-division students are cheaper than upper-division students, graduate students are more expensive than undergraduates, and doctoral students who have been advanced to candidacy are the most expensive of all.
Conventional wisdom #6: Institutions can make up for lost public subsidies by increasing research revenue.
Conventional wisdom #7: An expansive undergraduate curriculum is a symbol of quality, and necessary to attract students.
Conventional wisdom #8: States can improve postsecondary productivity if they direct more students to community colleges

Readers of this blog will recognize that I have written often about many of these points, but Jones and Wellman do a great job of concisely making their point that these are, indeed, false "truths".

Nicholas Allen has a very nice short article entitled The Future of Non-Traditional Higher Education in the United States: A Perspective: Part 1 of 2 on the website of InsideTrack. In the interest of full disclosure, I am on the advisory board of InsideTrack. Allen writes:

Major shifts are taking place that may reshape the higher education industry
as never before, creating both opportunities and challenges for most educational institutions, and for the nation. 

He groups the forces bringing about this change into five categories, and talks about the first two, national needs and critical demographic shifts, in this article. Each of these two points to greatly increasing numbers of non-traditional students, a group that our traditional institutions have not served well in the past. His points generally are not new, but he brings many threads together in a very informative, insightful way.  I look forward to Part 2.

And finally- a ranking of institutions that I can understand and appreciate! Readers of my blog know that I am not fond of rankings of institutions of higher education.  However, Jane Marshall writing in University World News informed me of the 3rd annual (how did I miss the first two?) Professional Ranking of World Universities put out by the French Grande Ecole MINES ParisTech.  This straightforward review takes the CEO's of Fortune Magazine's Global 500 and identifies their degree institutions. Points are then assigned to the degree institutions: 1 point if the CEO had only one degree; 1/2 point to each institution if the CEO had 2 degrees.  The points are added up, and viola!- a new ranking that included 377 institutions of higher education, with Tokyo, Harvard and Stanford at the top.  Now, in many ways, this is as crazy as any other ranking.  For example, there are many sociological reasons why there may be correlations between CEO's and their universities that have little to do with the actual quality of the academic programs.  But it has some benefits.  First, other rankings generally come from a closed academic world - they rank on the basis of various forms of recognition by other academics. This one ranks based on value judgments made by a world outside of academe - a world that ultimately supports academe and thus should be noted.  Second, it is a contemporaneous judgment - that is, it is based on who is succeeding in this world at this moment.  Most other rankings are much more backward weighted (Nobel Prizes from 1920!) and so encourage the ossification of the field. Perhaps the most interesting result for me is not the top "winners", which are all pretty predictable, but the very long tail of the distribution.  Most CEO's don't come from the winners, but from a variety of institutions large and small. It suggests to me that if one's goal is to become the CEO of a Fortune Global 500, one may want to question whether or not it is worth paying for one of the "winners".