Links for 6/28/10

John Lawlor via Keith Hampson

The number of people who have the ability to pay for the price of a college education during a narrow four-year window is diminishing, while those with the ability to pay are showing more constrained willingness to simply pay for prestige. The marketplace is deleveraging and becoming more prudent in their decision making about colleges. We are already seeing more students stopping and starting, attending multiple colleges, “buying down” to less prestigious colleges, and for the very focused students, seeking the most convenient, efficient means of getting in and getting out of school…

Kevin Carey

Some time in the last two or three years, we moved into the post-NCLB era of education reform… it is very difficult for the federal government to make state and local governments do good things they don’t want to do. And that’s where NCLB fell down. You cannot create a regulatory apparatus that mandates, via adherence to enforceable rules, the transformation of bad schools into good ones…

Steve Kolowich

Rio Salado College… using the same printed textbooks in all sections of each course…

By only ordering one book per course, rather than allowing each professor to choose the book for her section, Rio Salado would be able to purchase volumes in bulk while saving Pearson the trouble of selling every professor on its product. The result? Publisher discounts that let the college retail the books to students for about 50 percent of what they used to have to charge in order to break even…

What allowed Rio Salado to secure the necessary support was the fact that nearly all the college’s faculty members are adjuncts…

Alexandra Tilsley

Fewer people gave money to colleges in 2009, and those who did gave less than usual, a study of annual funds has found…