Links for 10/15/09

SLA

for the purposes of the [cohort default rate] calculation, borrowers in forbearance and deferment are considered as borrowers in repayment. This flies in the face of common sense and the standards used by publicly-traded companies…
more than 1 in 3 borrowers struggling with their federal loans…

the cohort default rate used to inform policymakers today so understates the magnitude of this issue to be irrelevant.

Paul Romer on Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior…

Economists who have become addicted to skyhooks, who think that they are doing deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions, find it hard to even understand what it would mean to make the rules that humans follow the object of scientific inquiry…

Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

Steve Kolowich

the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College …[says] it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

637 applications for 2 positions!