Links for 7/13/10

Kelly Field

According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions…

the government's official "cohort-default rate," which measures the percentage of borrowers who default in the first two years of repayment and is used to penalize colleges with high rates, downplays the long-term cost of defaults, capturing only a sliver of the loans that eventually lapse…

Goldie Blumenstyk

Default management is sometimes carried out by colleges on their own, sometimes by the agencies that guarantee student loans or companies that service them, and sometimes by the half-dozen or so companies that specialize in it and are paid by colleges for advice or hands-on involvement…

The fear is that colleges and the companies they hire can have a "very limited view of success" that involves staving off high default rates only during the period being measured, says Michael T. Ryan, vice president of borrower services for American Student Assistance. It's "winning the game of 'beat the clock.'"…

Martha C. Nussbaum

What do educators in Singapore and China do? By their own internal accounts, they do a great deal of rote learning and “teaching to the test.” Even if our sole goal was to produce students who would contribute maximally to national economic growth—the primary, avowed goal of education in Singapore and China—we should reject their strategies, just as they themselves have rejected them. In recent years, both nations have conducted major educational reforms, concluding that a successful economy requires nourishing analytical abilities, active problem-solving, and the imagination required for innovation. In other words, neither country has adopted a broader conception of education's goal, but both have realized that even that narrow goal of economic enrichment is not well served by a system focused on rote learning…

the reforms are cabined by these authoritarian nations’ fear of true critical freedom. In Singapore, nobody even attempts to use the new techniques when teaching about politics and contemporary problems. “Citizenship education” typically takes the form of analyzing a problem, proposing several possible solutions, and then demonstrating how the one chosen by government is the right one for Singapore. In universities, some instructors attempt a more genuinely open approach, but the government has a way of suing professors for libel if they criticize the government in class…

Singapore and China are terrible models of education for any nation that aspires to remain a pluralistic democracy…

Chad Aldeman

an all-too-common practice in online higher education: use the online delivery platform as a method to save institutional expenditures, but keep any extra student fees cost savings to subsidize other programs. We might also call this balancing budgets off the backs of students.