College Affordability and the Size of the Market

This piece from, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, and by, of all people, Lamar Alexander, makes the case that college unaffordability is overstated. As such, it's a useful provocation. But buried in it are some numbers that gave me pause. 

Consider that only about 15% of students enrolled in colleges and universities attend private non-profit institutions (you don't need to trust Alexander: check it here).  On the one hand, that means the entire conversation about higher education policy is mostly not about us.  On the other, at the risk of oversimplifying, when private institutions price themselves like private institutions, they might be eliminating about 85% of the market. By comparison, since about 55% of enrolled students are female, being single sex only eliminates about 45% and being only full time cuts out only about 63% of potential students).


OPINION COMMENTARY
College Too Expensive? That’s a Myth
Pell grants, state aid, modest loans and scholarships put a four-year public
institution within the reach of most.
By LAMAR ALEXANDER
Updated July 6, 2015 9:59 p.m. ET

Paying for college never is easy, but it’s easier than most people think. Yet some politicians and pundits say students can’t afford a college education. That’s wrong. Most of them can.

Public two-year colleges, for example, are free or nearly free for low-income students. Nationally, community college tuition and fees average $3,300 per year, according to theCollege Board. The annual federal Pell grant for these students—which does not have to be paid back—also averages $3,300.

At public four-year colleges, tuition and fees average about $9,000. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, tuition and fees are $11,800. One third of its students have a Pell grant (up to $5,775 depending on financial need), and 98% of instate freshmen have a state Hope Scholarship, providing up to $3,500 annually for freshmen and sophomores and up to $4,500 for juniors or seniors. States run a variety of similar programs—$11.2 billion in financial aid in 2013, 85% in the form of scholarships, according to the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs.

The reality is that, for most students, a four-year public institution is also within financial reach.

What about really expensive private colleges? Across the country 15% of students attend private universities where tuition and fees average $31,000, according to the College Board. Georgetown University costs even more: about $50,000 a year. Its president, John DeGioia, told me how Georgetown—and many other so-called elite colleges—help make a degree affordable.

First, Georgetown determines what a family can afford to pay. It asks the student to borrow $17,000 over four years and work 10-15 hours a week under its work-study program. Georgetown pays the remainder—at a total cost of about $100 million a year.

Apart from grants, work and savings, there are federal student loans. We hear a lot of questions about these loans. Are taxpayers generous enough? Is borrowing for college a good investment? Are students borrowing too much?

An undergraduate today can get a federal loan of up to $5,500 his first year. The annual loan limit rises to $7,500 his junior and senior years. The fixed interest rate for new loans this year is, by law, 4.29%. A recent graduate may pay back the loan using no more than 10% of his disposable income. And if at that rate he doesn’t pay it off in 20 years, taxpayers forgive the loan.

Are students borrowing too much? The College Board reports that a student who graduates from a four-year institution carries, on average, a debt of about $27,000. This is about the same amount of the average new car loan, according to the information-services company Experian Automotive. The total amount of outstanding student loans is $1.2 trillion. The total amount of auto loans outstanding in the U.S. is $950 billion.

But a student loan is a lot better investment. Cars depreciate. College degrees appreciate. The College Board estimates that a four-year degree will increase an individual’s lifetime earnings by $1 million, on average.

What about the scary stories of students with $100,000 or more in debt? These represent only 4% of all student loans, and 90% of the borrowers are doctors, lawyers, business school graduates and others who have earned graduate degrees.

About seven million federal student loan borrowers are in default, defined as failing to make a loan payment in at least nine months. That’s about one in 10 of all outstanding federal student loans in default—although the Education Department says most of those loans eventually get paid back.

Here are five steps the federal government can take to make it easier for students to finance their college education:

• Allow students to use Pell grants year-round, not only for the traditional fall and spring academic terms, to complete their degrees more rapidly.

• Simplify the confusing 108-question federal student-aid application form and consolidate the nine loan repayment programs to two: a standard repayment program and one based on their income.

• Change the laws and regulations that discourage colleges from counseling students against borrowing too much.

• Require colleges to share in the risk of lending to students. This will ensure that they have some interest in encouraging students to borrow wisely, graduate on time, and be able to pay back what they owe.

• Clear out the federal red tape that soaks up state dollars that could otherwise go to help reduce tuition. The Boston Consulting Group found that in one year Vanderbilt University spent a startling $150 million complying with federal rules and regulations governing higher education, adding more than $11,000 to the cost of each Vanderbilt student’s $43,000 in tuition. America’s more than 6,000 colleges receive on average one new rule, regulation or guidance letter each workday from the Education Department.

It is vital that more Americans earn their college degrees, for their own benefit and that of the country. A report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education in the Workforce tells us that if we don’t, we’ll fall short by five million workers with postsecondary education in five years.

Mr. Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, is chairman of the Senate’s education committee. He has been secretary of the Education Department, president of the University of Tennessee and governor of Tennessee.

Correction

About seven million federal student-loan borrowers are in default. An earlier version of this story referred to seven million dollars, not borrowers.

Innovation in Higher Education Redux

This from TechCrunch. There are a lot of smart minds buzzing around "innovation" in the "higher education space." In what's being called the post-MOOC era, we can wait to see who wins or we can jump in and try to shape the conversation and maybe come up with the liberal arts for the 21st century that people keep yammering on about. The folks described in this post seem to get one important thing: lots of false dichotomies in the current conversation (online OR offline, vocational skills OR critical thinking, liberal arts OR experiential learning).

Searching For The Next Wave Of Education Innovation

Posted Jun 27, 2015 by Danny Crichton (@DannyCrichton)

I’m going to come right out and say it: few areas have been as hopeful and as disappointing as innovation in education.

Education is probably the single most important function in our society today, yet it remains one of the least understood, despite incredible levels of investment from venture capitalists and governments. Why do students continue to show up in a classroom or start an online course? How do we guide students to the right knowledge just as they need to learn it?

We may have an empirical inkling and some hunches, but we still lack any fundamental insights.

That’s truly disappointing. With the rise of the internet, it seemed like education was on the cusp of a complete revolution. Today, though, you would be excused for not seeing much of a difference between the way we learn and how we did so twenty years ago.

I have attempted to tease out these challenges in two previous essays on what the modern university still offers us and how we might learn in the future. One thesis that becomes more clearer over time is simply that we have ignored the more human aspects of education, replacing it instead with a “give ’em tablets and they will learn” mentality.

The next wave of education innovation won’t come from dumping technology on the problem. Instead, it will come from deeply engaging with people and empowering them to make learning all their own.

This past month, I talked to two individuals on opposite sides of improving education. Jodi Goldstein, who officially became head of Harvard’s i-lab startup incubation center this month, discussed the opportunities and challenges of bringing an entrepreneurial mentality into America’s oldest university.

Mattan Griffel, founder of One Month, a subscription-based online education startup, is coming at the problem from the other direction, rethinking online education in the aftermath of the MOOC explosion. “[Online education] has kind of overstepped its current effectiveness,” he argued, “and everyone is saying what is possible by painting this picture, but the tools haven’t reached that point yet.”

Together, these two trailblazers and many others like them are starting to form the next wave of education innovation – and potentially transform our societies in the process.

More Transformation Than Disruption

One interesting change in mentality coming from this new wave is a more mature view about what to do with the infrastructure of learning we already have. While the end of universitieshas been proposed by people like Peter Thiel, the reality is that the combination of status and endowments will ensure that many universities will survive and even thrive in the online age.

One interesting change coming to universities is simply that the timeframe of degree programs won’t be as fixed as they are today. As we walked through the i-lab’s new initiatives, Goldstein noted that Harvard’s Launch Lab, an incubator space for alumni teams, has already engaged with many students in just its first few months of operation. “There has been enormous interest and demand and we have seen such a strong community form with students leveraging each other,” Goldstein said.

Traditionally, students who graduated from the university would be forced to leave, but the Launch Lab ensures that they can maintain a connection to their alma matter. In its first year of operation, the Launch Lab had about 50 alumni teams join the 10,000 square foot space just off of Harvard’s campus in Allston, Massachusetts.

Griffel at One Month, speaking methodically through the changes coming to education, believes that large research universities won’t change much in the near future from new online education initiatives. “The four year degree as we know it symbolically is going to change very little over the next ten years.”

Instead, he sees a larger cultural shift to the same sort of continuous education that the i-lab is trying to instill in its graduates. “We know that skills are changing faster and faster, so teaching people how to learn new skills is really important,” Griffel said. That skills-based approach is also what he thinks One Month can do to help the current system. “We are not trying to replace the branding of Harvard. It is going to take a long time to see someone with One Month on a resume, which is why we are targeting more about the skills.”

One mistake that Griffel sees is in the extensive focus on students over teachers. While the language of education innovation often emphasizes students, empowering teachers may be as important or even more so for rethinking the way we learn. “We need to change the role of teachers. What kind of people do we consider teachers? How do we elevate teachers in society?” He thinks there is an opportunity to make them “rock stars” and bring new perspectives into the profession.

Rethinking Liberal Arts In A Technological Age

Few debates in education get teachers and students alike more worked up than the future of the humanities and the liberal arts. What use is there to English or art in a world where a twelve-week programming class can dramatically change your employment and salary outcomes?

Goldstein of the i-lab addressed that challenge of balancing the traditional role of the university with the more experiential programs of a startup incubator. “I’m glad that we are not trying to change the curriculum. Harvard is already really good at that, but we can sit along side that,” she said.

Instead, Goldstein sees an opportunity to have students act as ambassadors, learning the trade of entrepreneurship and then bringing that mental model back to Harvard’s other schools. Interestingly, only roughly 30% of students at the center come from the nearby business school.

Goldstein, who first joined the i-lab in 2011, has made it a mission to seek ways of engaging non-traditional entrepreneurs. That’s why the i-lab has moved beyond just offering incubation space and startup events to creating what she called “structured entrepreneurship opportunities.”

One example of this is a program run jointly with IDEO called the Future Lab, in which students go through a design-thinking curriculum developed by the storied design consulting firm while interning at startups and working on their challenges. Last year’s pilot program had 16 students.

Griffel at One Month is sanguine about the future of the liberal arts and believes that startups need to think deeply about how to foster critical thinking. “I think it is kind of like a fool’s choice,” he explained. “We are told that it is a spectrum: either vocational or deep critical thinking. But when you break down deep critical thinking, it is really just a set of skills that is taught.”

Liberal arts provides a framework for handling the constant changes in skills required to survive in industry. “With the liberal arts approach, we don’t know what we need to train people toward because we don’t know the jobs of the future,” Griffel noted. However, that doesn’t mean universities shouldn’t change their approach. “This becomes less relevant when education is a lifelong thing, rather than just a moment in college.”

Finding The Next Wave

Today, it seems clear that the fusion of online and offline learning is going to be at the core of improving education. Humans are social creatures, and placing them in front of a laptop and hoping that they are just going to soak up the knowledge is often asking too much.

At the same time though, we need to be shifting our culture about what the ideal form of education might be. Academic knowledge needs to be complemented with practical learning, a mix that can be customized to each student’s needs. Griffel believes that “We are trying to build this technology that highlights the best content and trying to shift, in the students’ eyes and everyone’s eyes, what is the role of education in your life?”

Whether through experiential learning with startups or skills-based learning through an online subscription, this next generation of education may be less disruptive and sexy than its immediate predecessor – but it also might just work.

Two Years of College for "Free": A Trend?

Smart four year colleges will start planning now to be coordinating with this phenomenon.

Oregon Will Become Second State to Offer Free Community College
Lawmakers approve new program in last minute pre-holiday vote

July 7th, 2015 3:10 pm | by NIGEL JAQUISS

More than 10,000 students are expected to benefit from a last-minute bill passed by legislators this week that makes Oregon only the second state (after Tennessee) to offer free community college.

The idea, according to state Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton), is that a lot of needy students who might like to attend community college are currently failing to apply for federal grants that could pay for much of their education.

The new legislation, Senate Bill 81, offers a carrot: If eligible students apply for and receive federal grants for community college, Oregon will pay the balance of their tuition. The recipients must have lived in Oregon for 12 months, begin their community college course work within six months of finishing high school or the equivalent, take courses that are required for graduation and maintain a 2.5 grade point average. (And it's not entirely free—each student must pay a minimum of $50 per term.)

Read more at Willamette Week

New DropBox Feature Might Make Grading Easier

DropBox has introduced a COMMENTS feature that lets you look at a shared file in your browser (Microsoft office docs and PDFs all seem to work) and make comments in a sidebar.  Anyone who can see the file can make comments and you can notify folks that there are comments just by mentioning them.

Potentially useful for feedback on student papers and for group work or committee work where downloading document or group editing in something like Google docs is either too intrusive or too slow a process.

ASU and EdX offering Freshman Year Online

ASU will offer a freshman year program  - all online - that will likely be fully transferrable and will cost around $6000. This latest iteration on MOOCs includes a focus not on isolated courses but a coherent program of courses - a freshman year foundation. The innovation here is the co-design of the courses (12 of them).  Of course the experience will be a far cry from what students get at a residential college, but but will it be $12,000 less? Or $40,000 less? 

Promising Full College Credit, Arizona State University Offers Online Freshman Program

By TAMAR LEWINAPRIL 22, 2015

Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest universities, is joining with edX, a nonprofit online venture founded by M.I.T. and Harvard, to offer an online freshman year that will be available worldwide with no admissions process and full university credit.

In the new Global Freshman Academy, each credit will cost $200, but students will not have to pay until they pass the courses, which will be offered on the edX platform as MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses.

“Leave your G.P.A., your SATs, your recommendations at home,” said Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of edX. “If you have the will to learn, just bring your Internet connection and yourself, and you can get a year of college credit.”

Continue reading at NYT.com

And then there were 46

Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced it is closing. According to its Wikipedia entry, it had an endowment of $88 million, academic staff of 64 for 735 students. Unlike many of its peers it had not gone in for graduate programs in recent decades.

Sweet Briar College to close

BY KARIN KAPSIDELIS Richmond Times-Dispatch

SWEET BRIAR — Sweet Briar College announced today it will close Aug. 25, blaming “insurmountable financial challenges” caused by the dwindling number of women interested in single-sex education and the pressures on small, liberal arts schools.

The private, rural college near Lynchburg will hold its last commencement May 16 and cease operations at the end of the summer session after more than a century of educating women.

The college’s board of directors voted unanimously Feb. 28 to shut down after a yearlong study of its future failed to find any viable paths forward.

“This work led us to the unfortunate conclusion that there are two key realities that we could not change,” Sweet Briar President James F. Jones Jr. said.

Few students are choosing to attend rural schools where options for internships and work experiences are limited, and even fewer want to attend a women’s college, he said.

“The liberal arts college sector is embattled now on so many different fronts,” Jones said in an interview.

Sweet Briar will be the third liberal arts college to close in Virginia in the past two years, the result of financial pressures that also claimed Saint Paul's College in Lawrenceville and Virginia Intermont College in Bristol.

Jones broke the heartbreaking news to stunned students in a meeting just before 1 p.m. Some burst out of the auditorium in tears at first word of the closing. Others sobbed and hugged each other, and called their parents on cell phones as the reality hit them.

"Will someone please tell me if this is a joke?" one cried.

A few said they had found out just before the meeting after faculty and staff were told, but most appeared caught unaware.

Continue reading at Richmond Times-Dispatch

See also Inside Higher Ed

Blended Course Design MOOC

UCF is offering the fourth iteration of BlendKit – an open, online course for those interested in blended learning course design, sponsored by ELI and delivered via Canvas Network.

The course begins on Monday and is free (along with a credential option for a fee, for those interested).

BlendKit 2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer MOOC

Blended learning (the strategic combination of face-to-face and online learning experiences) is growing in popularity within higher education and K-12 settings around the world. The goal of the BlendKit: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer MOOC is to provide facilitated assistance to faculty members and instructional designers in developing and designing blended courses through (1) a consideration of key issues related to blended learning and (2) practical step-by-step guidance in producing materials for a blended course (e.g., developing design documents, creating content pages, and receiving peer review feedback at one's own institution).

This five-week course involves:

• Expert and peer assessment and critique on design work
• Regular interactions with facilitators and students
• Blogging/social networking interaction opportunities
• Weekly webinars with guest presenters
• Document templates and practical step-by-step “how to” guides
• Readings from scholarly works pertaining to blended learning

A Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grant in 2011 leveraged the University of Central Florida’s expertise to create the Blended Learning Toolkit as a free, open resource for educational institutions interested in developing or expanding their blended learning initiatives. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), UCF’s grant partner, agreed to use its membership to distribute the toolkit and support new course models. The BlendKit course emerged from the grant to assist educators in designing blended courses and has supported three open, online cohorts since 2012.