Links for 6/16/10

Lloyd Armstrong

we actually have no data to demonstrate that the education that for-profits provide is less effective than that at non-profits. For simplicity, I am willing to stipulate that the education provided at the top 200 of the approximately 4000 accredited non-profit colleges is superior to that provided at any of the non-profits, although there is no data to support that stipulation. However, I believe that a large fraction of the for-profits provide an education that is equal or superior to that provided by a similarly large fraction of the remaining 3800 accredited non-profit colleges. Many of the for-profits simply spend more developing courses, bringing in advanced pedagogy, and evaluating student outcomes than do most of the non-profits.

Arthur Levine

The American university, like the nation’s other major social institutions — government, banks, the media, health care — was created for an industrial society. Buffeted by dramatic changes in demography, the economy, technology, and globalization, all these institutions function less well than they once did. In today’s international information economy, they appear to be broken and must be refitted for a world transformed…

Traditional faculty might be described as hunters who search for and generate knowledge to answer questions. Digital natives by contrast are gatherers, who wade through a sea of data available to them online to find the answers to their questions. Faculty are rooted in the disciplines and depth of knowledge, while students think in increasingly interdisciplinary or a-disciplinary ways, with a focus on breadth…

What is certain is that higher education needs to change, because students won’t, and the digital revolution is not a passing fad. To be sure, the purposes of the university have not changed. They remain the preservation and advancement of knowledge and the education of our students…

Jeffrey R. Young

he's often rearranging the furniture to try to see how small adjustments alter social dynamics among students and professors. As one of his colleagues tells it, Shirky once wondered aloud whether making one of the tables longer might encourage people to stay and talk more. Or, to use a maxim he often repeats, "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity."…

Television emerged just as people had more free time—cognitive energy they didn't know what to do with, he says—and so people watched. And watched. And watched.

"Desperate Housewives basically functions as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat," he argued…

Don Lee

government surveys indicate that the vast majority of job gains this year have gone to workers with only a high school education or less, casting some doubt on one of the nation's most deeply held convictions: that a college education is the ticket to the American Dream…

"People with bachelor's degrees will increasingly get not very highly satisfactory jobs," said W. Norton Grubb, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Education. "In that sense, people are getting more schooling than jobs are available."…

What's not as clear as it used to be is whether pursuing higher education will continue to guarantee a substantially more affluent and secure life…

Alan Blinder, a Princeton professor and former Federal Reserve vice chairman, says it won't be surprising years from now if a carpenter in the U.S. earns more than a college-educated computer operator. In fact, the data suggest that education bears little relationship to jobs that are vulnerable to offshoring, he says.

On balance, Blinder says, "there's little doubt a college education is a good investment for most students."

But he offers this advice: "Don't train yourself or your children [in work] that a computer can do or a smart kid in China or India can do. Because that's ferocious competition."