Links for 7/27/10

Kevin Carey

The federal government has every right to regulate the billions of taxpayer dollars it is pouring into the pockets of for-profit shareholders. The sooner abusive colleges are prevented from loading students with crushing debt in exchange for low-value degrees, the better.

But that doesn't mean for-profit higher education is inherently bad. The reputable parts of the industry are at the forefront of much technological and organizational innovation. For-profits exist in large part to fix educational market failures left by traditional institutions, and they profit by serving students that public and private nonprofit institutions too often ignore…

Traditional institutions tend to respond to such ventures by indicting the quality of for-profit degrees. The trouble is, they have very little evidence beyond the real issue of default rates to prove it. That's because traditional institutions have long resisted subjecting themselves to any objective measures of academic quality. They've pointed instead to regional accreditation, which conveniently allows colleges to decide for themselves whether they're doing a good job…

Jack Stripling

legislation that would revamp the benefit formula that has been in place since the Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect last year. While the proposed bill would make few changes for the funding of undergraduate education at public institutions, it would establish a new national cap on benefits for private colleges -- both for-profit and non-profit. Rather than base the maximum benefit on the highest tuition of any public program in a given state, the new cap would be derived from the average tuition and fees of all private and public baccalaureate programs across the nation. That baseline would be around $12,000, meaning veterans at private colleges would receive less funding in almost half of states, according to the American Council on Education…

“Now you’re saying you’ll pay the absolute highest cost there is for public schools, but private schools are going to be based on the national average. That just doesn’t make sense,” she said…

Andrew Dana Hudson

We are a whole generation graduating into a job market that has no room for us.
So I moved to India…

There might not be room for us recent college graduates in the job market at home, but the world is a big place. I bet somewhere out there is an opportunity for each of us. So go.

Eric Markley

higher education leaders complained, as they often do, that the K-12 system does not produce enough graduates ready to do college-level work. The reality is, however, that most colleges themselves fail to define what "college-level" learning is. When asked what it means to be a college graduate, higher education offers fine rhetoric, but few facts and seldom a clear answer. The K-12 system can't be blamed for missing the target when higher education refuses to set one.