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Tag: United States

The End of College? (Part 1)

Over the next couple of days, I want to talk a bit about a new book called The End of College, written by the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey.  It’s an important book not just because it’s been excerpted repeatedly in some major publications, or because the conclusions are correct (in my view: they’re not), but because it has an unerringly precise diagnosis of how higher education came to its present malaise, and the nature of the economic and institutional reasons that

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March 11, 2015 1 Comment

Performance-Based Funding (Part 2)

So, as we noted yesterday, there are two schools of thought in the US about performance-based funding (where, it should be noted, about 30 states have some kind of PBF criteria built into their overall funding system, or are planning to do so).  Basically, one side says they work, and the other says they don’t. Let’s start with the “don’t” camp, led by Nicholas Hillman and David Tandberg, whose key paper can be found here.  To determine whether PBFs affect

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February 18, 2015 1 Comment

Packaging Student Aid

One of the things about student aid that makes it such great fun as a policy area is that it’s as much about framing as it is about actual policy.  For instance, which of the following two policies would you like to have? a)      A policy where students are asked to bear a huge amount of debt – over $100,000 in some cases for an undergraduate degree – over 25 years, and where three-quarters of students will never repay

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January 13, 2015 1 Comment

That Obama Free Community College Proposal

I was going to start on a series about growth in non-academic staff numbers today, but the news out of Washington late last week was too spectacular, so I’m bumping it.  Did Obama really say he wanted to make community college free? Well, yes he did.  But he might not have meant it the way we all heard it.  And whatever happens, it’s unlikely to occur any time soon. Let’s start with what he actually said (White House fact sheet,

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January 12, 2015 No Comments

The History of the Smorgasbord

One of the things that clouds mutual understanding of higher education systems across the Atlantic is the nature of the Arts curriculum.  And in particular, the degree to which they actually have them in Europe, and don’t over here. When students enroll in a higher education program in Europe, they have a pretty good idea of the classes they’ll be taking for the next three years.  Electives are rare; when you enter a program, the required classes are in large part already

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December 10, 2014 5 Comments
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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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