Links for 3/25/10

Donald Marron

[the student loan program] has experienced two crises in recent years:
• In 2006 and 2007, the crisis was kickbacks…
• In 2008, the crisis was a lack of lending...

As I told my students, I think both of these crises had the same root cause: the fact that the government, rather than market forces, determined how much lenders were paid for making guaranteed student loans. In both cases, the government got the payment levels wrong, and the crises followed soon thereafter.
Back in 2006 and early 2007, the government had set payment rates too high. Lenders thus competed aggressively among themselves to win as much of the market as they could…

To their credit, the folks in Washington correctly diagnosed this problem. Late in 2007, the Congress passed and the President signed a bill that reduced the amount that lenders were paid.

Unfortunately, those reductions happened at the start of a financial crisis … And all of a sudden, lender payments were too low. Lenders thus threatened to flee the student loan market, which could have left millions of students without funding for their education.

Again to their credit, the folks in Washington stepped up and eventually found a solution…

Rick Hess

Both Diane's stance and Duncan's reflect the misguided premise that chartering or accountability is a way to improve instruction--like a new curriculum, professional development model, or reading program--rather than an opportunity to create the conditions where sustained improvement in teaching and learning become possible…

They provide invaluable opportunities to rethink schools and systems that are too often hobbled by anachronistic policies, practices, stifling contracts and cultures. But the action is not in the fact of charters, accountability, or merit pay, but in what one does with them…

The problem, as I see it, is not that choice or accountability "don't work"--but that the naïve faith that they constitute "fixes" has led us to skip past the hard work necessary to take advantage of the opportunities they can provide…

Accountability enthusiasts in the Bush era repeatedly made the same error, while airily dismissing thoughtful skeptics…

Patrick M. Callan

As colleges and universities hike tuition and cap enrollments while pleading for billions of federal dollars, we have new evidence that public disappointment and disillusionment with higher education are building rapidly...

When they see tuition rates outpacing the average family’s paycheck even in times of economic distress, or read stories about excessive compensation of college presidents or about universities bailing out athletic programs while furloughing faculty, it isn’t hard to see how people might be just a bit skeptical about higher education’s priorities...

our largest public college and university systems are freezing or rolling back enrollment and/or hiking tuition in the name of preserving quality. The problem is that a growing majority of Americans just don’t buy that line of argument...

The “squeeze play” -- the combination of beliefs that higher education is essential but that many qualified students are being shut out -- continues... As the squeeze on students and families intensifies and confidence in the altruistic mission of colleges erodes, higher education’s position in the competition for public resources when the economy recovers may be seriously undermined...

Rather than acknowledging the public’s concerns, some higher education lobbyists and advocates instead criticize the public as uninformed...

Keith Hampson

if our value as academics is based on our providing content, our days are numbered...

If universities were primarily about learning, they would have gone out of business with the emergence of mass market publishing. Credentials. Credentials. Credentials...