Links for 3/24/10

Keith Hampson

it is common for universities to have three versions of strategic plans: a published, publicly available version that tends to avoid provocative issues, a more detailed version with relatively sensitive information – made available to staff on a “need-to-know” basis, and an even more “sensitive and confidential” that “might never be committed to paper”, but that resides in the heads of the senior university administration…

Alan Ruby

What can we glean from the failures of branch campuses in Japan? The basic lesson is that location, demand, and brand determine enrollment and revenue…

Donald Marron

Congressional budget procedures are biased in favor of direct student loans over guaranteed loans. As a result, the budget case against guaranteed loans is overstated. It isn’t wrong — we are still talking tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years — but it isn’t as strong as the official numbers suggest. One implication is that eliminating the guarantee program may not save as much money as lawmakers think. That’s important, particularly if lawmakers want to spend those savings on other programs…

1. The administrative costs of the two programs show up in different budget categories…
2. The congressional scoring process does not appropriately measure the cost of bearing financial risk, such as that from extending loans or loan guarantees…

Bottom Line: Eliminating the guarantee program would reduce government spending, but not as much as traditional budget measures indicate…

Rob Manwaring

For the entire NCLB era, the federal government has provided funding (although a lot less) to states on a formula basis to support school improvement activities. The use of the funding has generally been left to the discretion of schools districts who invested in incremental reforms, and at best have seen incremental gains. Now the federal government is playing hardball, forcing dramatic changes at schools that are either dropout factories or the very lowest performing elementary and middle schools. Kudos to the federal government for going after high schools for the first time. (Generally high schools have not been impacted much by NCLB accountability because three-quarter of them don’t receive Title I funds and are therefore not held to AYP accountability requirements.) But, I fear that the timing of these new turnaround efforts and funding may fail to have the desired impact because of the rushed timing of the grant process...