Links for 2/2/11

Greg Beato

while college tuition and fees keep rising, it sometimes seems as if the higher education industry is investing in everything but education…

But while it may be an American tradition to pay for the nuts and bolts of higher education—the salaries of instructors, the construction of libraries and classrooms—is it really a national priority to ensure every 19-year-old has equal access to luxury dorm rooms and top-notch diversity coordinators?...

total construction costs for the nation’s colleges ranged from $6 billion to $7 billion per year in the last half of the 1990s. Then there was a construction boom, with $113 billion in new construction occurring between 2001 and 2009…

Lloyd Armstrong

it seems that some are rethinking the statement that critical thinking should be (or is) the “principal aim of undergraduate education” as they are faced with increasing data that it isn’t happening. Instead, there are statements along the lines of “ the students are certainly learning domain knowledge.” Unfortunately, that also does not seem to be the case…

we should not continue to spend time picking at the flaws of current instruments that seek to measure learning – rather, we should focus on developing better instruments. At a minimum, this will require that we in higher education ask ourselves what we believe the valuable outcomes of higher education to be… With that information in hand, we can begin to develop better instruments to measure these outcomes. And using these new instruments, we can work much more effectively to improve learning in our institutions…

Dean Dad

As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture…

there’s also the basic incompatibility of life tenure with the idea of meritocracy. If incumbents don’t have to keep proving themselves against newcomers, then you do not have a meritocracy…

EduBubble

Egypt’s universities are dramatically cheaper than their counterparts in the United States and the students graduate without debt. But there are no jobs waiting for them and so they take to the streets. Imagine how angry the Egyptian kids would be if they were buried in American-scale debt?

If I were to be a cynical Machiavellian evil doer, I might say that it seems like a smarter plan to overload the American kids with debt because it seems to depress them and rob them of their initiative. If a kid can’t get a job, send him/her to grad school and that will crush whatever spirit they have left. Giving the education away free may be a mistake because the kids undervalue it and fail to blame themselves enough. Instead they take to the streets and blame the government and that’s bad from the standpoint of a cynical Machiavellian manipulator...