Links for 6/1/10

STEPHEN JOEL TRACHTENBERG and GERALD KAUVAR

The college experience may be idyllic, but it’s also wasteful and expensive, both for students and institutions. There is simply no reason undergraduate degrees can’t be finished in three years, and many reasons they should be…

Scott Jaschik

With the publication rate growing by 5.5 percent a year, someone able to read only a certain number of articles a year is seeing his or her "fraction of extant knowledge" decreasing by the same percentage.

Doug Lederman

If campus leaders can't figure out a way to more meaningfully involve faculty members in their institutions' efforts to gauge the quality and extent of learning, the campaign is likely never to take hold…

Given the fierce protectiveness with which people tend to view their professional responsibilities, that has often made assessment seem like a tool that could be used against professors, to prove that they're not doing a good job…

Chad Aldeman

It’s hard to argue the investments in more teachers has paid off…

In any profession, especially one as large as teaching, there’s going to be a tension between quantity and quality. For the last two decades, we’ve chosen quantity. Let’s hope the coming decades focus more on quality.