Links for 11/1/10

David Glenn

The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment has just released a white paper about the regional accreditors’ role in prodding colleges to assess their students’ learning…

Accountability hawks will read those presidents’ quotes and think, “See? I knew it. Colleges only get serious about student learning when they’re pressed from outside. Without that external pressure, colleges will coast along complacently. They’ll cash their tuition checks and let their faculty members pretend that they’re teaching as well as they can and let students pretend that they’re learning as well as they can.”

But skeptics will read the same quotes and say, “See? I knew it. These assessment projects are being foisted on us by bureaucrats hundreds of miles from here. Our provost is making us do this only so she can check off some box on her next accreditation report. These people know nothing, nothing, nothing about my department or my discipline.”…

Annie Lowrey

Between 2007 and 2009, the number of LSAT takers climbed 20.5 percent…

indebted, unemployed attorneys accuse law schools of being little better than tuition-sucking diploma mills…

the number of law jobs has dwindled by about 7.8 percent…

At the same time, the law schools—the supply side of the equation—have not stopped growing. Law schools awarded 43,588 J.D.s last year, up 11.5 percent since 2000…

Tim Ranzetta

changes in aid since the Great Recession began…

• Federal loans are up 49%: $32 billion increase
• Federal grants have risen 105%: $21 billion increase …
• Institutional grants rose 21%...

Ben Miller

relying on the Pell Grant Program to deal with college costs in the long run is a recipe for financial disaster…

In exchange for substantial growth in the program costs, Pell’s buying power at nonprofit four-year institutions has stayed at about 15 percent; at public institutions it declined from 39 percent to 35 percent…

The Pell Grant is very good at what it’s designed to do—giving thousands of dollars to low-income students each year. But doing so is incredibly costly. And it cannot possibly hope to keep up with constant tuition hikes (nor should it). Without doing anything about containing college costs and making universities be more productive, all the billions of additional dollars will continue to be swallowed up by the higher education black hole.