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House PROSPER Act eliminates the concept of distance education from the law.

By: Alana Dunagan

Feb 27, 2018

Distance vs. correspondence? Where federal policy stands today

Distance education was first defined by the Higher Education Act in 1992. At the time, the primary aim of lawmakers was to address waste, fraud and abuse by “correspondence programs”, which sent course materials mainly through the mail. In the 1980s, these had been responsible for an outsized share of student loan defaults. The language developed in 1992—which permissively noted that transmission by microwave was acceptable—excluded correspondence programs from receiving federal funds, but did not anticipate how online learning would develop, and therefore  have proved wholly inadequate to regulate online education.

The key variable separating distance education from correspondence programs was the concept of “regular and substantive interaction” between students and instructors. This has led to a series of Department of Education regulations on what is “regular”, what is “substantive”, and who is an “instructor”. These regulations constrain the ability of online programs to innovate around the instructional model, but they do nothing to ensure strong outcomes for students.

In 1992, online programs were just emerging, but today over 30% of students are learning online. Regulations which encourage innovation—while protecting students—have never been more important for online programs.

[Tweet “Regulations which encourage innovation—while protecting students—have never been more important for online programs.” @alanadunagan @christenseninst]

The normalization of online learning?

The two houses of Congress are taking different approaches to drafting legislation to reauthorize the HEA. The Senate is taking a slower approach and is leaving the door open to drafting a bill with bipartisan support by holding committee hearings every few weeks that focus on affordability and federal financial aid programs. In contrast, with little public debate, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved the PROSPER Act on a party line vote in December.

PROSPER eliminates the concept of distance education (and microwaves) from the law. Online learning is addressed throughout the law as a normal means of conducting education. PROSPER doesn’t create any new or different requirements for online programs. The law also eliminates Department of Education regulations that schools seek authorization in every state in which they serve students, and instead proposes that schools only be authorized in the state in which they are physically located. States had largely resolved this issue themselves through SARA, the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement, but this workaround would no longer be necessary if PROSPER became law.

Innovation is guided by incentives

PROSPER removes a complex and burdensome layer of regulation from online programs and allows schools the freedom to design instructional models that take advantage of advances in technology. But for innovation to thrive in ways that benefit students, the workforce, and society, all colleges need to be incentivized to provide affordable, high quality programs that are aligned to workforce needs.

No one, on either side of the aisle, wants to see the federal government dump cash into low-quality programs that are more focused on revenues than on providing an education that helps students succeed. PROSPER’s authors aim to unleash innovation in higher education, but the guardrails the bill places on the industry are simply too weak. Measures in the bill touted as “risk-sharing” are likely to have adverse consequences, but are unlikely to change institutional behavior in ways that protect students. The bill also requires programs to demonstrate that their graduates maintain a 45% student loan repayment rate, or else be ineligible to continue receiving funds. This is an improvement on prior metrics, but is still a laughably low bar, and fails to take into account the outcomes of students who don’t graduate.

Incentives for student success

Organizations design their business models around incentives. In higher education, institutions are paid to enroll students—they have incentives to expand access, but not to achieve outcomes like completion or career success. As a result, money has flowed relatively freely, quality assurance has been a thorny problem, and affordability is an increasingly pressing issue.

Instead, Congress should adopt regulatory mechanisms that focus on outcomes. Changing the way colleges are funded by creating meaningful alignment with student outcomes could improve quality for the entire industry, not just online programs. This could take the form of meaningful risk-sharing, whereby colleges have to repay some financial aid dollars if students default. It could also include increasing the role of income-sharing agreements, whereby some revenues become contingent on a student’s future earnings. These funding models would incentivize colleges to ensure that their programs are adequately preparing students to succeed in today’s labor market.

Using outcomes to create guardrails against waste, fraud, and abuse is preferable to complex, clunky federal definitions of what is meant by online education. Higher education providers will continue to innovate; the authors of the next HEA reauthorization can’t reasonably be expected to create definitions that will remain relevant through the next decade of technological change and business model evolution. Relying on outcomes gives institutions the flexibility to innovate, while still protecting students and taxpayers.

The House bill drops the outdated distance education definition, but doesn’t sufficiently improve risk-sharing or other mechanisms to align institutional incentives with student outcomes. We hope the Senate bill truly modernizes higher education regulation, not just for online education, but for all programs.


Alana Dunagan

Alana leads the Institute’s higher education research and works to find solutions for a more affordable system that better serves both students and employers. In this role, Alana analyzes disruptive forces changing the higher education landscape

World's Largest Education Company Crashes After Dire Warning, Warns Of "Unprecedented" Business Decline

World's Largest Education Company Crashes After Dire Warning, Warns Of "Unprecedented" Business Decline

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Jan 18, 2017 5:57 AM
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British education group, and the world's largest education company, Pearson PLC lost a quarter of its market cap in an instant this morning after it issued a dire warning about the state of the textbook business, cut profit forecast, and warned of an "unprecedented" decline in its North American business. It also put its stake in the iconic Penguin Random House book business for sale in a bid to raise cash, not long after selling the Financial Times to the Nikkei.

In an unscheduled update ahead of its full-year results in March, the former owner of the Financial Times said it was revising down its prior operating profit goal for 2017 and rebasing its dividend this year after a sharp slump in an arm of its American business. Pearson said its North American courseware market was “much weaker than expected”, with net revenues falling 30 per cent in the fourth quarter, taking the overall yearly decline to 18 per cent. Operating profit in 2017 will be 570 million pounds to 630 million pounds, the London-based company said in a statement, below the average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg of 702.9 million pounds. The world’s largest education company withdrew its profit goal for 2018 after sales of materials for U.S. higher education dropped 30 percent in the fourth quarter.

“Whereas we had previously anticipated a broadly stable North American higher education courseware market in 2017, we now assume that many of these downward pressures will continue”, the company said. Furthermore, while Pearson said it expected 2016 operating profit in line with guidance, it scrapped its 2018 profit goal.

Chief executive John Fallon said Pearson was taking “more radical action to accelerate our shift to digital models, and to keep reshaping our business”.

“The education sector is going through an unprecedented period of change and volatility. We have already taken significant steps on restructuring, reducing our cost base by £375m last year”, said Mr Fallon.


The stunned market reacted quickly, and the company lost about a quarter of its market cap in minutes at the start of Wednesday trading. The shares were then halted on volatility after continuing their decline as analysts peppered executives with questions about their business and the industry on a conference call that extended past an hour. The company’s enrollment projections were too aggressive, Chief Financial Officer Coram Williams said on a conference call. Pearson sank to 585.5 pence in early trading in London, cutting the company’s market value to 4.81 billion pounds ($5.9 billion)


Pearson's sudden capitulation contrasts with months of optimistic statements CEO John Fallon about the challenges Pearson faces in the U.S., where college enrollments and its testing business are down, and textbook sales unexpectedly declined, Bloomberg reports.

“It’s a difficult time for Pearson,” Fallon said on the call. The company is seeking to build a more sustainable and growing digital business, he said. “We’ll manage our balance sheet so we can sustain the company through this challenging transition.”

Despite record amount of student loans in the US, fewer older students are enrolling, community college admissions also are dropping, and more students are renting textbooks.

The company will also issue an exit notice over its 47% stake in publisher Random House to JV Bertelsmann, Europe’s largest media group by sales, “with a view to selling our stake or recapitalising the business and extracting a dividend”. The Penguin stake may raise as much as 1.2 billion pounds, according to Ian Whittaker, an analyst at Liberum Capital. Pearson will use it to strengthen its balance sheet and return excess capital to shareholders, the company said.

The dividend, which amounted to 52 pence a share for 2016, will be cut beginning this year to reflect the lower earnings guidance. The current dividend equals 6.4 percent of Pearson’s share price, the highest yield among companies in the U.K.’s benchmark FTSE-100 Index.

As Bloomberg adds, analysts have been questioning the health of Pearson’s education business since last year. Neil Campling, an analyst at Northern Trust Securities, called the announcement “the warning we’ve been expecting,” in a note on Wednesday. “The higher education business declined further and faster than the company expected in 2016 although in light of the plethora of negative data points we have highlighted throughout the year we are not surprised,” Campling wrote. “The North American higher-education courseware market essentially collapsed in the critical fourth-quarter back-to-school season.”

Pearson combined Penguin with Bertelsmann’s Random House in 2013, leaving the British company owning just under half of the venture, which publishes books from writers including John Grisham, Ken Follett and George R. R. Martin. In 2015, it generated revenue of 3.7 billion euros ($3.95 billion) and operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 557 million euros.

Random House, the world’s largest book publisher. The German company is open to increasing its stake in the venture “provided the terms are fair,” CEO Thomas Rabe said in a statement. “Strategically this would not only strengthen one of our most important content businesses, it would also once further strengthen our presence in the United States, our second largest market,” Rabe said.
Pearson gets almost all its profit from education after already selling the Financial Times and its half of the Economist Group. The company announced a reorganization last year as it seeks to address sluggish demand in its main business.

Jeff Sacks - Smart machines and the future of jobs

Smart machines

and the future of jobs

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Since the early 1800s, several waves of technological change have transformed how we work and live. Each new technological marvel — the steam engine, railroad, ocean steamship, telegraph, harvester, automobile, radio, airplane, TV, computer, satellite, mobile phone, and now the Internet — has changed our home lives, communities, workplaces, schools, and leisure time. For two centuries we’ve asked whether ever-more-powerful machines would free us from drudgery or would instead enslave us.

 The question is becoming urgent. IBM’s Deep Blue and other chess-playing computers now routinely beat the world’s chess champions. Google’s DeepMind defeated the European Go champion late last year. IBM’s Watson has gone from becoming the world’s “Jeopardy’’ champion to becoming an expert medical diagnostician. Self-driving cars on the streets of Pittsburgh are on the verge of displacing Uber drivers. And Baxter, the industrial robot, is carrying out an expanding range of assembly-line and warehouse operations. Will the coming generations of smart machines deliver us leisure and well-being or joblessness and falling wages?

 The answer to this question is not simple. There is neither a consensus nor deep understanding of the future of jobs in an economy increasingly built on smart machines. The machines have gotten much smarter so fast that their implications for the future of work, home life, schooling, and leisure are a matter of open speculation.

 We need to pursue policies so that the coming generation of smart machines works for us, and our well-being, rather than humanity working for the machines and the few who control their operating systems.

 In a way, the economic effects of smarter machines are akin to the economic effects of international trade. Trade expands the nation’s economic pie but also changes how the pie is divided. Smart machines do the same. In the past, smarter machines have expanded the economic pie and shifted jobs and earnings away from low-skilled workers to high-skilled workers. In the future, robots and artificial intelligence are likely to shift national income from all types of workers toward capitalists and from the young to the old.

 CONSIDER ENGLAND’S Industrial Revolution in the first part of the 19th century, when James Watt’s steam engine, the mechanization of textile production, and the railroad created the first industrial society. No doubt the economic pie expanded remarkably. England’s national income roughly doubled from 1820 to 1860. Yet traditional weavers were thrown out of their jobs; the Luddites, an early movement of English workers, tried to smash the machines that were impoverishing them; and poet William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills’’ of the new industrial society. An enlarging economic pie, yes; a new prosperity shared by all, decidedly not.

 Looking back at two centuries of more and more powerful machines (and the accompanying technologies and systems to operate them), we can see one overarching truth: Technological advances made the society much richer but also continually reshuffled the winners and losers. Similarly, one overarching pattern was repeatedly replayed. The march of technology has favored those with more education and training. Smart machines require well-trained specialists to operate them. An expanded economic pie favors those with managerial and professional skills who can navigate the complexities of finance, administration, management, and technological systems.

 Overall, better machines caused national income to soar and the man-hours spent in hard physical labor to decline markedly. Seventy-hour workweeks in 1870 have become 35-hour workweeks today. An average of around six years of schooling has become an average of 17 years. With increasing longevity, most workers can now look forward to a decade or more of retirement years, an idea simply unimaginable in the late 19th century. It’s amazing to reflect that for Americans 15 years and over, the average time at work each day is now just 3 hours 11 minutes. Those at work average 7 hours and 34 minutes, but only 42.1 percent of Americans 15 and over are at work on an average day. The rest of the time, other than sleep and personal care, is taken up with schooling, retirement, caring for children, leisure and sports, shopping, and household activities.

 Smart machines in the 19th century provided massive power (the steam engine), transport (rail, steamships, automobiles), information (telegraph), and material transformation (steel and textile mills), and also, crucially, a more and more powerful substitute for human brawn – that is, backbreaking physical labor — on the farm and in the mines. Seed drills, cotton gins, threshers, reapers, combined harvesters, and by the early 20th century, tractors, not only opened up vast new farmlands but also replaced millions of farm workers by machines. Mechanical cotton pickers in the early decades of the 20th century displaced millions of African-American sharecroppers on Southern farms and contributed to the great African-American migration to northern cities.

 Hard physical labor declined as machines did more and more of this work; but so too did jobs and earnings for lower-skilled workers. Those lucky to get an education could obtain the higher skills needed for the new jobs. Those who could not suffered stagnant or falling wages and a further loss of social status. In the past two decades, more and more low-skilled men have simply dropped out of the labor force entirely.

 The most important policy response is to ensure that students stay in school long enough to achieve the skills they need for the new and better jobs. As long as the national supply of skilled workers roughly keeps pace with the rising demand for skilled workers, while the supply of low-skilled workers declines in line with the decline in the numbers of low-skilled jobs, the gap in earnings between high- and low-skilled workers remains relatively stable. In this way, the rising school attainments of Americans during the 20th century roughly maintained a balance with the shift from low-skilled work to high-skilled work.

 Yet after around 1980, the earnings of highly educated workers (notably, those with bachelor’s degrees and higher) increased sharply relative to less-educated workers (those with high-school diplomas or less). Greater international trade and offshoring probably had a role in this, and so did technology, with smarter machines replacing high-school-educated workers in a widening range of manual and repetitive tasks. The shift of the labor force toward higher-skilled workers wasn’t fast enough in recent decades. Many American lower-skilled workers have been hit hard by lost jobs and falling wages.

 YET TODAY’S smart machines now are not just replacing brawn but also brains. The futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have popularized the term “singularity’’ to mean a time in the near future when machines are simply better than humans at just about everything: moving, assembling, driving, writing, calculating, war-making, teaching (yikes!), and the rest.

 Several recent studies, including at Oxford University and McKinsey, have tried to estimate the share of jobs that are likely to be up for grabs by smart machines in the next 20 or so years. Each occupation is analyzed for the kinds of tasks needed. Are they highly repetitive or highly context-specific? Do they require highly specialized mechanical skills, a high degree of interaction with others, or a high measure of emotional empathy? And so on. From this categorization of job tasks, the researchers estimate the share of jobs that can be substituted by robots and artificial intelligence systems. Their answer: Roughly half of today’s jobs are susceptible to at least some kinds of replacement by smart machines.

 The implications are a bit tricky. On the one hand, smarter machines mean more economic output and, in principle, a larger economic pie to share among the American people. Investing in machines, or in the companies that produce the smart systems that run them, would seem to offer high returns; capital owners would be very likely to benefit. On the other hand, smarter machines could mean a decline in the demand for workers. Young people with labor to sell but little wealth to invest could find themselves on the short end of the economic stick, with lower wages and no grand prospect of benefiting from the higher returns to capital. Older and richer Americans would tend to benefit, younger and poorer Americans would tend to fall behind.

 This would not be the end of the story, however. If today’s young people find themselves without jobs, they not only will be poorer, but will also save less as a result of shrunken incomes. Yes, the smarter machines will offer a higher return to saving, but the supply of national saving will shrink. A careful theoretical analysis reveals a stark truth: Smart machines could actually set in motion a downward spiral, wherein today’s young workers can’t find decent jobs, and thereby cut back on their saving, which in turn leaves the following generation of young workers even worse off.

 This is indeed a frightening vision. And yet the same analysis suggests a way out. If the rich capital owners transfer some of their windfall profits to the struggling young workers, then both the old rich and the young poor would be better off with the smart machines than without them. In effect, the rich older shareholders would compensate the poor younger workers in order to offset the fall in wages.

 There are two ways this “offset’’ could happen. Within families, parents could transfer some of their increased wealth to their children; but alas, that is a solution that is likely to be relevant mainly for richer households.

 For the non-rich, the real solution could and should be achieved through fiscal policy. Rich older shareholders should be taxed in order to make transfer payments to the poorer, young workers.

 Such transfer payments could be carried out in many ways: a cut in payroll taxes; tuition-free higher education; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-wage workers; or a “reverse’’ Social Security system with payments from the old to the young. One policy that has been suggested is a capital grant to every newborn, financed by a wealth tax. In essence, each newborn would receive a robot (or financial claim to one) at birth.

 THE NEW AGE of smart machines has already seen a shift in national income away from wages and toward profits. In automobile manufacturing, for example, where robots have already displaced many assembly-line workers, the share of wage compensation in the industry’s value-added has tumbled from 57 percent in 1997 to 47 percent in 2014. For the economy as a whole, a recent study reports a decline in the labor share of national income from around 68 percent in 1947 to 60 percent in 2013. The shift toward capital income seems to be well underway, and would seem to be a key factor in America’s sharply higher inequality of income. As machines become even smarter in future years, the economy-wide shift from wage income to profit income is likely to continue.

 In addition to income redistribution from capital owners to workers (and from old to young) there are three other steps we should plan to take.

 First, as old jobs disappear and new ones are created, we should emulate Germany’s successful apprenticeship programs, which train young workers in the skills needed in the economy. The President’s Council of Economic Advisers has rightly emphasized the need for scaling up this kind of active training.

 Second, we should prepare for a workforce in which workers will change jobs with much greater frequency than in the past. In an age of disruptive technology, we should plan for disruption. Changing jobs should be regarded as normal; training and skill upgrading should be life long, and health care and other benefits should follow workers, not jobs.

 Third, and finally, let us remember that ever-smarter machines could enable us to enjoy much more leisure time, and more hours of the day at valuable but nonremunerated activities and volunteer work.

 Suppose that singularity indeed arrives, so that robots and expert systems really do perform all the unpleasant and humdrum work of the economy. As long as fiscal policies ensure that everybody, young and old, can share in the bounty, the results could be a 21st-century society in which we have much more time — and take more time — to learn, study, create, innovate, and enjoy and protect nature and each other.

 Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.’’  

Unlocking stackable global credentials

Unlocking stackable global credentials

by Andrew Sears 

 

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It took 912 years from the founding of the first university in Bologna in 1088 for the global higher education system to grow to serve 100 million students annually by the year 2000. Current projections are that by 2025 there will be 263 million students providing 163 percent growth in 25 years: a rate that dwarfs the growth over the previous nine centuries. The vast majority of new students will hail from developing countries. Meeting this increase in demand presents a critical opportunity for disruptive innovation in higher education.

As the demand for higher education dramatically accelerates, so also the supply of modular educational resources is increasing through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like Coursera and EdX, open educational resources (OER) like Khan Academy, and massive adaptive apps like Duolingo. The traditional monopoly that universities once held on delivering learning is coming apart. This new supply has the potential to usher in a new system that makes learning more flexible, affordable, and accessible.

But this new supply cannot meet the demand if our global education system lacks standards for interoperability—that is, modular standards that specify the fit and function of all elements so completely that it does not matter who makes the components or subsystems as long as they meet the defined specifications. For example, engineers have lots of freedom to improve the design inside a light bulb, as long as they build the stem so that it can fit the established light bulb socket specifications. The same company does not need to design and make the light bulb, the lamp, the wall sockets, and the electricity generation and distribution systems.

As Michael Horn has argued, such standards are essential to enable unbundling and rebundling of education, Without this, the growing supply of modular learning opportunities will go unused by students who could benefit from them most. In particular, there is a need for interoperability between these alternative educational providers like MOOCs and the traditional educational system. Right now, there are millions of students in developing countries taking MOOCs and OER courses, but because of a lack of standards they cannot apply credit for what they are learning toward widely accepted credentials like degrees.

What does interoperability—or the lack thereof—look like in practice? As the leader of City Vision University, an accredited online school, I have had the fortune of working with many of the pioneers working to establish interoperability. City Vision partnered with Straighterline to apply for the U.S. Department of Education’s Experimental Sites Initiative last year to enable financial aid access to competency-based education. We worked with Straighterline to get its curriculum approved through the Distance Education Accrediting Commission’s (DEAC) Approved Quality Curriculum (AQC) process. AQC has an effective design, but its primary challenge is that it is not well recognized outside of DEAC schools. By contrast, the American Council on Education’s (ACE) College Credit Recommendation Service is more widely accepted. In 2015, ACE received a $1.89 million grant from the Gates foundation to launch its alternative credit project with more than 100 courses from alternative educational providers like EdX, Straighterline, Saylor Academy, and others. Although this represents an essential step toward establishing the interoperability needed for unbundling, ACE credit is largely only recognized by U.S. schools, so it does not solve the global interoperability problem.

Globally, we lack an international counterpart to ACE credit that could provide interoperability between international alternative educational providers and accredited degree programs. Right now, the best candidate for this global interoperability is the vocational qualifications frameworks like European Qualification Framework (EQF). The Lumina Foundation made a similar argument when it announced its Connecting Credentials Framework based on the EQF standard.

This year, City Vision launched a four-year degree path targeting developing countries that cost only $5,000. As shown in the diagram below, this degree took unbundled OER courses (Saylor Academy) and used modular interoperability qualification frameworks to rebundle it into a City Vision degree with U.S. accreditation (DEAC). The modularity is such that qualifications taken by any provider are stackable to be applied as credits toward more advanced qualifications and degrees at other institutions. This provides modular courses and levels as “Legos” that can be used to build degrees by unbundling courses and qualifications in the same way that Netflix unbundles videos from the cable bundle. Although the coverage of the partnership in Forbes presented this as a workaround to a system that does not want interoperability, the support of DEAC for this degree path showed that accreditors do want interoperability as long as standards are met.

This small-scale experiment lends a hint at what a truly interoperable system might look like down the line. In my next blog post, I’ll discuss some of the most promising strategies U.S. and global providers might consider in order to radically expand access to postsecondary experiences for students around the world.

Andrew Sears

Andrew is the president of City VIsion University. He previously co-founded the Internet Telephony Consortium at MIT with David Clark, one of the fathers of the Internet. For the past 20 years he has been living among the poor running nonprofit organizations that develop educational programs to serve at-risk populations. He completed his doctoral dissertation on Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education, which he has turned into a MOOC on Udemy.

Open source textbooks

Bringing down the high cost of textbooks

Washington Post

By Editorial Board June 26 at 8:07 PM

EVERY YEAR, college students shell out thousands of dollars for tuition. Then they face an additional cost: textbooks. Students spend as much as $1,300 over their college careers on books alone — a burden that falls most heavily on those who have to take out loans to pay. A pilot program from a community college reform group just outside Washington, D.C., could help.

Education advocacy group Achieving the Dream this month announced $9.8 million in grants for developing degree programs that use online, open-source materials instead of pricey printed books. The initiative takes advantage of teaching resources in the public domain to cut costs for at least 76,000 students at 38 community colleges in 13 states. One of those is in Maryland, and six are in Virginia.

Textbook prices have soared in the past decade, rising 82 percent between 2003 and 2013 — almost three times the rate of inflation. It doesn’t help that some publishers release new editions of their textbooks each year, so students looking for a required text can’t buy used. Those financial barriers force students to fall behind in their classes, lowering their grades and raising withdrawal rates.

Textbook costs pose problems everywhere, but they do the most damage at community colleges, which draw a larger share of disadvantaged students. OpenStax, a nonprofit that produces peer-reviewed, open-source textbooks, estimates it has saved more than $66 million for nearly 700,000 students — over half of those in the past year. Though some of those students attend community colleges, the majority study at four-year institutions. By focusing on two-year programs, Achieving the Dream hopes to fix the hole that most needs a patch — not just for the schools it funds, but also for other colleges that adopt the programs its grantees will develop.

It’s important work, and it’s hard: When your product is free, there’s not much opportunity for profit. Achieving the Dream received funding for its grants from a few charitable organizations, but it may need more to scale up the initiative after the pilot program ends. OpenStax also relies primarily on philanthropy, as well as partnerships with publishers who sell value-added services — such as quizzes and problem sets — on top of the free core content. Policymakers could help by providing additional funding. Yet it’s also up to schools to take advantage of the resources already available. By integrating open-source materials into their curriculums, colleges would make learning better and cheaper at the same time.

EduBlock - BitCoin for Education

Rethinking College Admissions

1. Less emphasis on standardized test scores, which largely correlate with family income.
2. Poorer high schools aren’t as likely to offer A.P. courses, and a heavy load of them is often cited as a culprit in sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression among students at richer schools.
3. Discourage manic résumé padding by accepting information on a sharply limited number of extracurricular activities; that they better use essays and references to figure out which students’ community-service projects are heartfelt and which are merely window dressing. 
4. Give full due to the family obligations and part-time work that some underprivileged kids take on.

Rethinking College Admissions
 Frank Bruni

A tour group at Princeton University. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times
Over recent years there’s been a steady escalation of concern about the admissions process at the most revered, selective American colleges. And little by little, those colleges have made tweaks.

But I get the thrilling sense that something bigger is about to give.

The best evidence is a report to be released on Wednesday. I received an advance copy. Titled “Turning the Tide,” it’s the work primarily of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, though scores of educators — including the presidents and deans of admission at many of the country’s elite institutions of higher education — contributed to or endorsed it. Top administrators from Yale, M.I.T. and the University of Michigan are scheduled to participate in a news conference at which it’s unveiled.

“Turning the Tide” sagely reflects on what’s wrong with admissions and rightly calls for a revolution, including specific suggestions. It could make a real difference not just because it has widespread backing but also because it nails the way in which society in general — and children in particular — are badly served by the status quo.

Focused on certain markers and metrics, the admissions process warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy. It jeopardizes their mental health. And it fails to include — and identify the potential in — enough kids from less privileged backgrounds.

“It’s really time to say ‘enough,’ stop wringing our hands and figure out some collective action,” Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s education school, told me. “It’s a pivot point.”

Weissbourd is one of the directors of the school’s Making Caring Common project, which produced the report. He’s also the author of research that was one motivation for it — specifically, a survey of more than 10,000 middle- and high-school students that asked them what mattered most: high individual achievement, happiness or caring for others. Only 22 percent said caring for others.

The new report contemplates how the admissions process contributes to that psychology and how it might be changed. Some of those alterations would simultaneously level the playing field for kids applying to college from less advantaged backgrounds.

“Colleges spend a huge sum each year sending signals that influence the behavior of millions of students,” the report notes. Why not rethink those signals to reshape that behavior?

The report recommends less emphasis on standardized test scores, which largely correlate with family income.

It asks colleges to send a clear message that admissions officers won’t be impressed by more than a few Advanced Placement courses. Poorer high schools aren’t as likely to offer A.P. courses, and a heavy load of them is often cited as a culprit in sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression among students at richer schools.

The report also suggests that colleges discourage manic résumé padding by accepting information on a sharply limited number of extracurricular activities; that they better use essays and references to figure out which students’ community-service projects are heartfelt and which are merely window dressing; and that they give full due to the family obligations and part-time work that some underprivileged kids take on.

Stephen Farmer, the vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, praised the report as consistent with his school’s desire “to be humbler and more alert to the many ways in which people can stake a claim on a place here.”

He said that the school had already, for example, downgraded the importance of “A.P. everything,” which doesn’t necessarily measure true ability or intellectual hunger.

“Just making people jump through hoops because we can — we don’t want to do that,” he told me, especially when some hoops are so arbitrary that “we might as well be admitting these people on the basis of their height or the size of their neck.”

“Turning the Tide” follows other reexaminations of the admissions process. A growing number of colleges have made the SAT or ACT optional. And late last year, more than 80 colleges, including all eight in the Ivy League, announced the formation of the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, which is developing a website and application process intended in part to diversify student bodies.

Colleges are becoming more conscious of their roles — too frequently neglected — in social mobility. They’re recognizing how many admissions measures favor students from affluent families.

They’re realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions. And they’re acknowledging the extent to which the admissions process has contributed to this.

But they still need to stop filling so much of each freshman class with specially tagged legacy cases and athletes and to quit worrying about rankings like those of U.S. News and World Report. Only then will the tide fully turn.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 20, 2016, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Rethinking College Admissions . Today's Paper|Subscribe

MOOCs will replace APs

·         ·        More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years of the “modern” MOOC movement (which started in late 2011—when the first Stanford MOOCs took off).

·         ·        Coursera accounts 35% of all MOOC users, EdX 18%, Canvas 7%, Future Learn 6%, most others on radar account for 1-4%

·         1,800 new courses in 2015
·         Edu and teaching accounts for 9.5% of classes
·         Newest trend in business model has been MOOC providers creating their own credentials as main source of revenue
·         Avg coursera certificate course is $56, EdX $53
·         Large increase in self-paced courses
·         Providers targeting high school market for stake in college readiness

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-12-28-moocs-in-2015-breaking-down-the-numbers

SUNY Offers Badges

The State University of New York will soon offer "micro-credentials" to more students, chancellor Nancy Zimpher will announce Thursday at SUNYCON in Manhattan.

Micro-credentials, also known as "badges," are digital documents that demonstrate a student has a specific competency. SUNY piloted the program at Stony Brook University, which offers badges to education and business majors with descriptions such as Investment Analysis, Diverse Literatures and Teaching Students with Special Needs.

The program will soon expand to more SUNY campuses and to more majors, Zimper will announce on Thursday. SUNY will form a task force made up of of faculty, administrators and workforce experts to plan for the systemwide expansion.

Alexander Cartwright, SUNY provost and executive vice chancellor, said the badges will help prepare liberal arts graduates to demonstate their employability.

"For a lot of people who have liberal arts degrees, long-term they do incredibly well because they have such a rich skill set that they learned in college - about learning, about logic, about arguing, about how you actually have a good life," Cartwright said in a phone interview. "Where they struggle a little bit is getting that first job."

Cartwright also said the badges might help encourage other students to graduate, thereby improving SUNY's completion rates.


"It has to do with whether [students] believe they can complete their degree or not," he said. "So, can we give them something that says you've demonstrated competency in a specific area that gives you a qualification that is on the path to something much bigger?"

Nudges Help Poorer Children

There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children kindergarten less prepared than their classmates.

How can we close the gaps thes? Contentious, ambitious Reforms of the education system crowd the headlines: the Common Core, the elimination of teacher tenure, charter schools. The debate is heated and sometimes impolite (a recent book about education is called "The Teacher Wars").

Yet as thes Debates rage, Researchers have been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have identified behavioral "nudges" that prod Students and their families to take small steps that can make big differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so that schools could use them Nonprofits Immediately.

Let's start with college. At every step of the way, low-income Students are more likely to stumble on the path to higher education. Even the summer after high school is a perilous time, with 20 percent of those who plan to attend college not actually enrolling - a phenomenon known as "summer melt." Bureaucratic barriers, like the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid, explains some of the drop-off.

While they were graduate students at Harvard, two young Professors Students designed and tested a program to help them stick to the college plans. Benjamin L. Castleman, now at the University of Virginia, and Lindsay C. Page, at the University of Pittsburgh, set up a system of automatic, personalized text messages that Reminded high student, about the their college deadlines. The texts included links to required forms and live Counselors.

The result? Students who received the texts were more likely to enroll in college: 70 percent, compared with 63 percent of those who did not get access them. Seven percentage points is a big increas in this field, similar to the that cost Gains Produced by Scholarships Thousands of dollars. Yet this program cost only $ 7 per student.

The same Researchers also tested a texting program to keep students from dropping out of college. The problem is importante because the graduation rate of low-income college students is dismally low; two-thirds leave without a degree. Community college students received their texts reminding them to complete the re-enrollment forms, Particularly aid applications. Among freshmen who received the texts, is 68 percent went on to complete their sophomore year, compared with 54 percent of those who got no nudges. This, too, is a big impact - especially for a program that cost only $ 5 per student.

We know because they were Evaluated These programs worked, like all the innovations cited in this column, using a randomized, controlled trial. Randomized trials, once rare in education research, are Increasingly common. The What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews and rates the quality of education research, lists 242 randomized trials.

Continue reading the main storycontinu reading the main storycontinu reading the main story
Students were randomly assigned to receive or not receive texts I thee. Because the two groups were randomly defined, they were basically indistinguishable at the start of the study. They diverged as the texts altered the behavior of those who got them compared with those who did not.

Text messaging will not help everyone get through college, and cheap Interventions will not solve every problem. But they solve some problems for some students The, freeing up time and financial Resources for those who need other kinds of help.

Some Students need personal counseling to help them balance the Demands of school, family and work. Unfortunately, Counselors are stretched thin, often carrying caseloads of Thousands of students.

Continue reading the main story
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Two Researchers at Stanford University, Eric P. Bettinger and Rachel Baker Analyzed an innovative program in which a professional academic counseling at-risk students The coach calls to talk about time management and study skills. The coach might help a student plan how much time to spend on each class in the days approaching finals, for example. The results are impressive, with coached Students more likely to stay in college and graduate. This program is more expensive than texting - $ 500 per student, per semester - but the effects persist for years after the coaching has ended.

Can nudges help younger children? Susanna Loeb and Benjamin N. York, both also at Stanford, developed a literacy program for preschool children in San Francisco. They sent texts describing simple Activities that parents develop literacy skills, such as pointing out the words that rhyme or start with the same sound. The parents spent more time with them receiving the texts are on thes Aciviies and their children's children were more likely to know the alphabet and the sounds of letters. It cost just a few dollars per family.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Toronto are also working on Methods to develop literacy. Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer families and Philip Oreopoulos you with tips about how to read texts with their preschoolers. The result was that the substantially parents spent more time reading with their children.

Researchers are also testing the effect of giving parents more information about their children's Efforts are in school. A school in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Peter Bergman of Columbia University, personalized text messages sent to parents of middle and high school students. The texts told their parents when the children did not hand in homework assignments, listing page numbers and specific problems for students to complete. The parents and students The Responded: Completed homework grades and test scores went up 25 percent and rose. Other forms of communication between the school and parents who improved, too, with parents are twice as likely to reach out to their children's teachers.

These light nudges can not solve every problem by a long shot. But at a low cost, they can help many students.

Why are not schools, districts and states rushing to set up the measures thes? Maybe because the programs have no natural constituency. They are not Labor- or capital-intensive, so they do not create lots of jobs that are lucrative contracts. They do not create a big, expensive initiative that a politician can point to in a stump speech. They just do their job, effectively and Cheaply.

Susan is a professor of economics Dynars that, education and public policy at the University of Michigan. She has advised the Obama administration on the findings of each student-aid policy research. Follow on Twitter atdynars of each.

The upshot Provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

higher ed study

http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2014_Results/pdf/NSSE_2014_Annual_Results.pdf#page=8

Quick Takes
• While aggregate results generally reveal that underrepresented
and underprepared students rate the quality of their interactions
with others on campus lower relative to their peers, these groups
evidenced no relative disadvantage at an appreciable subset
of institutions.
• Average levels of students’ experiences with faculty—effective
teaching practices and student-faculty interaction—varied notably
from one institution to the next, even when examined within
selectivity strata.
• When examined at the institutional level, engineering was highest in
collaborative learning overall and showed relatively little variability
among institutions—suggesting that collaborative learning is a widely
adopted pedagogy in engineering education. Considerably greater
variability among institutions in collaborative learning resulted for
business and social service professions, suggesting less influence
of disciplinary norms.
• The number of meetings with an academic advisor was positively
linked with perceptions of a supportive campus environment.
This finding was remarkably consistent across racial/ethnic
groups, indicating that all student groups benefit from the
advising relationship.
• One in three first-year students rarely met with an advisor. The
proportion who rarely sought advice was higher among commuting,
nontraditional-aged, and part-time students—suggesting the need
for special outreach efforts for such students.
• Information literacy instruction varied by institutional type, and these
differences corresponded with students’ information-use behaviors.
• While it was common for institutions to use social media to help
students connect with student groups, organizations, and other
students, institutions less often used social media to provide
students information about educational or career opportunities,
financial aid, or to help students connect with faculty.
• About two in five first-year students and a third of seniors said
social media substantially distracted them from coursework.
• First-year students who earned higher grades than they had
expected were more engaged in learning strategies, reported
greater faculty use of effective teaching practices, and studied more
compared to students who performed below their expectations.
• The more time faculty spent trying to improve their teaching, the
less time they spent lecturing in their courses and the more time
they spent engaging students in discussion, small-group activities,
student presentations or performances, and experiential activities.
• Faculty who spent more time working to improve their teaching
interacted more with students and attached greater value to a
supportive campus environment. They also had significantly higher
learning expectations for their students and more often used
effective teaching practices.

Haber on Financial Aid

Degree of Freedom News -
October 14, 2014

Apologies for the month-long hiatus between newsletters.  But as some of you may know, I recently started a new gig as the Inaugural Visiting Fellow at HarvardX which is giving me the chance to actually contribute to the growth and development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), rather than just benefit from and write about them.

And for my second bit of time-consumption news (i.e., a second excuse for procrastination), my book on MOOCs is back from the printer.  The publisher, MIT Press, tells me that MOOCS: The Essential Guide will start to show up on store shelves (and be available from the Amazon warehouse) towards the end of October.  All good news, other than the time preparing for that release has taken away from continuing the story of how to get into and pay for a traditional college education (at least until MOOCs or some other free option sweeps the entire higher ed system away – something I’m not anticipating happening by the time my own kids hit college age).

So let us continue…

Where We Left Off

In a previous newsletter, I took a look at what the total cost of college was likely to be for my two kids (currently 15 and 12 – so add or subtract if they’re standing in for your own children) to determine the range of $$$s that would ultimately be needed to send them off to a four-year residential degree program (the most likely choice for them).  This exercise also determined when those bills would need to be paid (in our case, they start three years from now and end seven years after that).

These numbers are pretty big, even if the boys end up attending their in-state public university.  But understanding what these bills will look like and when they will come due is the first step to preparing to pay them in ways that don’t end up harming other family interests (such as retirement) or saddling our kids with debt.

While I’m about to start a description of what it’s like inside the financial aid rabbit hole, the first and best option for paying for college is to start saving for it as early as possible since (as one writer I read over the summer put it) those who understand compound interest are likely to earn it just as those who don’t understand the concept are likely to pay it.  And in our case, while we haven’t been saving since before our children were born, we have made it a point to sock money away as it became available into savings accounts specifically set aside for anticipated big-ticket tuition bills that would one day come due.

In a subsequent newsletter, I laid out a set of poor metaphors that can lead to errors during the college selection and application process, and one better metaphor (that of the “big-ticket purchase”) that students and parents should embrace BEFORE exploring schools and financial-aid options.   For just as knowing numbers and dates will help prepare you financially and psychologically  for what is to come, treating higher education as a major consumer purchase – similar to buying a house or car – facilitates the creation of a hierarchy of options, each of which should be informed by both educational and economic reality.
 

The Financial Aid System

Keeping all that in mind, the financial aid system that has developed in the US over the decades tends to reward three categories of people:

* The needy
* The gifted
* Those who understand the ins and outs of the complex process itself
 
Now I’m not going to get into the many controversies surrounding how this system works or doesn’t work (including its wackier loopholes: my favorite being the one that gives financial advantages to 18-year-olds who marry perfect strangers to create a new low-income family for the duration of their college years).  For any system meant to standardize something as complicated as college financials across millions of families and thousands of diverse institutions is destined to create anomalies and absurdities.  And, for all its faults, the system does fulfill one of its primary goals: making it possible for high-achieving/low-income students to attend a school that matches their ambition and ability level.

Regarding that second category (“the gifted”), these are students who are likely to receive merit scholarships, regardless of their financial situation.  Some of these are awarded for general academic achievement while others are handed to students who demonstrate excellence in a specific area (such as excelling in math or being a stupendous violin player).  And while it’s flattering to be considered worthy of something called a “merit scholarship,” you should treat such offers as what they are: a discount off the list price that (like the price break an auto dealer offers to get you to buy today) reflects the level of interest a school has in your child.

Moving onto that third bullet point, the reason knowing the system is so important is that the process is complex, onerous and often counter-intuitive which causes many people to opt out of it entirely, especially if they think their income doesn’t qualify them for any kind of tuition assistance.

But given that a majority of students receive some kind of financial aid (just as most airline passengers have discovered or negotiated their own ticket price which has little to do with what the guy sitting next to them paid), it’s a mistake to assume up front that the whole system is irrelevant.  In some cases, filling out the FAFSA (which I’ll get to in a minute) is the way to get your child onto the radar of an institution’s Financial Aid Officer (FAO) who might consider your son or daughter for types of aid/discounting (needs-based or merit-based) you aren’t aware of.  Which is why I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with the system in its entirety (as I’m doing now) before you have to engage with it for real as part of your child’s actual application process.
 

The Queue

Getting into the nuts and bolts of the process, the first thing to keep in mind is the notion that many players (the federal government, state governments, banks and other lenders, schools and – ultimately – parents and students) form a kind of a queue with each player waiting to see what the person or institution in front of them commits to before offering up any cash (whether in the form of checks or discounts) of their own.

That FAFSA I just mentioned stands for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and it’s one of two major sets of forms (the other being the CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE Form) that most schools use as the starting point for determining financial aid.  While some schools have alternative forms, and many ask parents to provide additional (or duplicate) information beyond what’s in the FAFSA and PROFILE, you should start the process by bracing to disclose most of your family’s financial information when you fill out and submit these forms.

Now filling out the FAFSA is not that different than filling out tax forms (in fact, the two sets of forms largely ask the same questions).  And once these forms are completed and submitted, the independent agencies processing them used their own methodologies (the federal methodology in the case of the FAFSA) to calculate an important value called the Expected Family Contribution (or EFC).  This is the number that will serve as the aid community’s starting point for what you are expected to pay.  And, if you subtract the EFC from the list price of a college, it also determines what everyone else will have to cough up if your kid is to attend a particular school.

All these forms need to be filled out by January 1st of the year when your kid will be enrolling as a freshman later in the Fall and most of them can be obtained and submitted online.  As an applicant, you will receive notice of what the formulas these various systems use claim is your EFC, a number that will also be used by schools to determine levels of aid they have to produce if they want your child.

In theory, the EFC represents the total a family is expected to pay, regardless of the cost of the school.  So if someone’s EFC is $10,000, that’s the number both a $15,000-per-year and a $50,000-per-year school will use as a starting point.  Which means the $15,000 school will have to figure out how to make up a $5,000 difference (their $15,000 total cost minus your $10,000 family contribution) if they want your kid to attend, while that $50,000-per-year school will have to make up a $35,000 difference.

But, in theory, we should all be flying to work in jetpacks by now.  Which translates to the fact that some schools (particularly expensive ones that often ask for more financial information than what you are asked to disclose on the FAFSA) might determine that your family contribution can be higher.  Or they may simply not offer you enough to make up the difference between your EFC and their total cost, leaving you with something called “unmet need,” a gap that must be closed by a family finding more money or taking out more loans.

You should also prepare for the possibility (if not the likelihood) that the EFC you’re delivered after filling out countless forms is way more than you can realistically pay.  Which is why this number needs to be subjected to some financial reality checking before proceeding to select a college that expects you to produce at least this amount not just one year but for every year your kid attends their school.

On the bright side, an EFC that makes no sense when compared to a family’s annual income might be reasonable if alternative sources for funding that EFC (like grandparents willing to contribute to their grandchildren’s education) are available.

But if there is no mechanism that would allow you to cover that EFC (never mind any unmet need you might discover later in the process) without putting other financial needs at risk (or going hopelessly into debt), it might be time to think about other options you can afford.

Only 1/3 or Higher Ed students who return complete within 6 years

Among students who dropped out of college for a year or more and then re-entered, about a third earned a degree within eight years, a new study shows.

Findings are based on data from the National Student Clearinghouse for a cohort of 4.5 million students who returned to college between Aug. 15, 2005 and Aug. 14, 2008 after at least one year away from higher education. Among that group, 33.7 percent graduated by Aug. 14, 2014.
Among students who never left school, 54.1 percent who started in fall 2006 earned a degree within six years, Clearinghouse data also show.

Returning students at four-year private institutions fared best; 52.5 percent graduated, compared with 44.1 percent at four-year publics. Just 27 percent graduated from two-year public colleges. But all groups lagged far behind students who never left their studies. Their completion rates were 26 percent higher at two-year public colleges and 27 percent higher at four-year publics and privates.
The smallest gap is at four-year for-profits, where 37.1 percent of non-first-time students graduated, compared with 42.7 percent of first-timers.

The study, an ongoing joint project of several education groups, helps fill a void in federal data, which counts graduation rates only for full-time, first-time entering freshmen.  Participating in the study were: InsideTrack, the American Council on Education, NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the National Student Clearinghouse.

Some states — Texas, New York and Florida — have been better about getting returning students to graduation, the report says. But states like California and the District of Columbia are lagging, either not graduating or serving enough non-first-timers.


“One thing is certain,” InsideTrack Vice President of Marketing Dave Jarrat said in a statement. “If our nation expects the more than 30 million adults with some college but no degree to complete a credential, we need to do a much better job supporting them once they’ve made the decision to re-enroll.”