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Category: Students

Students Aren’t Keen on “Disruption”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the current proliferation of MOOCs is meeting an enormous demand for access to informal learning opportunities.  Millions of people are signing up for courses which interest them, picking a few bits they wish to consume, and, in a few cases, even completing them – all at the low, low, price (to the user) of zero.  Undoubtedly a great development. But for MOOCs to be sustainable they have to eventually generate some revenue, and

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April 18, 2013 1 Comment

Paying For the Party

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality is a quite remarkable new work of ethnography, by sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton.  I recommend it unreservedly for student professionals, or anyone interested in how university affects social mobility. Embedded in a women’s dormitory at a large, unnamed Midwestern flagship state university (which, if I had to guess, is probably either Indiana or Illinois), the authors observed the girls on one floor for a year, and then conducted regular follow-up interviews

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April 11, 2013 No Comments

Comparing Outcomes Across Credentials

I was doing some random websurfing the other day and I came across the BC Student Outcomes Page, which makes freely available an absolute cornucopia of data on its graduates.  BC has a seriously decent survey set-up, in that they do surveys of each graduating class, every year – universities, colleges, apprenticeships, you name it.  Actually, it’s probably overkill, but for data nerds like me it’s absolute heaven. Anyways, BC surveys all its graduates between 9 and 20 months after

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March 18, 2013 3 Comments

Measuring the Effects of Student Loans

Measuring the effects of student loans is brutally difficult.  It sounds simple, but it’s not. Take a recent article called “Gender, Debt, and Dropping out of College“, published in Gender and Society, which made a small wave in access-conscious circles a couple of weeks ago.  Using data form the 1997 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article made two claims: first, that debt was positively correlated to completion up until a certain level of debt, after which the relationship reverses itself

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March 12, 2013 No Comments

Who Wants MOOCs?

Over the past few months, a lot of ink has been spilled, and pixels displayed, on the subject of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs).  For me, three particular types of stories have stood out: two by their presence, and one by its absence. The first kind are those breathless, OTT pieces about how MOOCs are either “changing universities for good” (Don Tapscott), or “definitely a disruptive industry” (Clayton Christensen).  It’s never entirely clear what the factual basis for these claims

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February 27, 2013 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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