Links for 4/6/10

Kevin Carey

You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but eventually things are going to get ugly in a business where not only is there no relationship between what services cost and what customers are charged, and not only are the people providing the service ignorant of the cost, but there are active cultural norms discouraging those people from asking questions about cost or even considering concepts like efficiency in the way they work. Eventually someone will fight their way past whatever regulatory barriers you’ve paid for and pull the rug out from under you. There’s no avoiding it forever. The problem in higher education is that a lot of the decision-makers can make a plausible bet that they won’t be standing on the rug when it happens…

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Apparently in response to the poor job market for law school grads, one school is trying to give its students a boost: retroactive grade inflation.

Loyola Law School of Los Angeles is increasing all grades by a third…

Steve Kolowich

Statistics.com, a company that teaches a swath of online statistics courses to mostly adult learners…

The company outsources grading and other work to master’s degree-holders in India for much less than it would cost to employ similarly qualified teaching assistants in the United States…

"The institutions that dominate in a particular subject area will do so, in part, because they have expertise and experience in that subject area that will give them a leg up on institutions whose orientation is more general," Bruce says. "This view is antithetical to the view that large online institutions can dominate in all arenas by driving down costs."…

Ben Wildavsky via Scott Jaschik

to frame what’s happening in global higher ed purely in terms of a competitive threat is to miss the huge opportunities that exist in a world in which people and ideas are circulating more freely than ever before, a trend that I call “free trade in minds.” I think joining the competitive fray is great.

But the alarmist rhetoric we often hear has a destructive effect, because it suggests that we are going to lose out as other countries gain ground. It fosters what I call “academic protectionism,” which creates a climate of anxiety about what’s happening in other higher education systems. I’m not Panglossian about every aspect of global higher education -- there will undoubtedly be lots of missteps along the way, which is inevitable when the landscape changes so quickly. We’re in a period of experimentation. But it’s true that I’m optimistic, because I think we’re at an exciting time in the development of universities…