Links for 1/20/10

Jennifer Epstein

The U.S. Department of Education on Friday proposed an ambitious approach aimed at ensuring that vocational programs and most offerings at for-profit colleges do not take advantage of students. Under the draft regulation, a vocational degree program whose graduates' annual debt repayment loads exceeded 8 percent of the average incomes in the field in question would risk losing eligibility to award federal financial aid…

The result of implementing a debt-to-income limit could be to weed out (or at least cut tuition at) vocational programs and institutions that don’t yield their recent graduates in-field jobs that pay well enough for them to repay their student loan debt on a 10-year schedule…

The ratio would be calculated by dividing the median debt load of a program’s last three years of graduates by Bureau of Labor Statistics data’s 25th percentile of annual earnings for people in occupations for which the program prepared students…

Judith Eaton

The emerging Accreditation 2.0 is likely to be characterized by six key elements. Some are familiar features of accreditation; some are modifications of existing practice, some are new:
• Community-driven, shared general education outcomes.
• Common practices to address transparency.
• Robust peer review.
• Enhanced efficiency of quality improvement efforts.
• Diversification of the ownership of accreditation.
• Alternative financing models for accreditation.

Arnold Kling

If incumbents have a self-reinforcing system that keeps out innovators, then we have market failure…

It is like the tenure system in academia. Who gets tenure? Above all, it is people who support the existing tenure system.
Incidentally, that is my explanation for why the Internet has failed to alter the academic journal system. People who go through the tenure process have an enormous stake in not changing the process. The process is self-reinforcing…
There is a market failure in education. Educational institutions are evaluated not on the basis of rigorous standards but instead on the basis of a system of credentialism that is self-referential…

In order to climb the ladder in academia, you have to display allegiance to the credentialist ideology. You have to reinforce the incumbents and help snuff out innovation. Our program is accredited, and yours is not. So there…
I am not against audits and reputation systems in general. As consumers, we need reputation systems in order to sort out quality. The key is whether a reputation system is reasonably open to innovation, or whether it serves primarily to maintain the status of incumbents…

Jason Delisle

On January 26th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will update its “baseline” estimate of federal program costs, including those for student loan programs and Pell Grants…

Senator Conrad will have to choose which estimate to use: the estimate using an outdated 2009 March baseline that is favorable to the bill’s supporters (i.e. President Obama and most Senate Democrats), or the estimate based on the most up-to-date information about the true costs and savings of the bill that is favorable to Republicans and opponents…