Links for 12/14/10

Andrew J. Rotherham

In 1970 America spent about $228 billion in today's dollars on public schools. In 2007 that figure was $583 billion… much of the increase is just a lot of spending without a lot to show for it…

The more general problem with school funding is the lack of attention to productivity, i.e., thinking about outputs (student learning) in relation to inputs (spending). In education circles, productivity is a four-letter word. Cost and benefits? Never heard of 'em!...

Goldie Blumenstyk

The University of Phoenix has released its third “Academic Annual Report,” a document that continues to be notable not so much for the depth of information it provides on its students’ academic progress but for its existence at all. Few colleges, for-profit or otherwise, publish such reports…

Carlos J. Alonso

The current crisis of the university is a crisis of social legitimation…

I would argue that its underlying assumptions make the project of accountability a questionable strategy for the specific crisis of social legitimation…

the crisis of legitimation we are confronting today is related more to the product that we are selling than to our inability to make that product worth buying. Accountability presumes that if we are able to show the effective transmission of knowledge and skills to our students, we will satisfy the market's requirement for verifiable results. But what if the market has already devalued from the start the knowledge on which the entire operation of outcomes and accountability is based, as well as the institution where it is produced?...

Ed Whelan via Jennifer Rubin

many employers insist on a college degree for jobs that plainly don't require college-level skills and that many young people who would be far happier and more productive in the working world waste lots of time and lots and lots of money chasing after a paper diploma. The even bigger losers in this system are the young men and women, disproportionately minority, who went to crummy high schools that didn't prepare them for college and who can't get decent entry-level jobs. The big winners in this system are the colleges, which end up with a massively inflated demand for their services.