Changing Higher Education

The financial return from attending a more selective college

Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger (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.