USA Colleges Intensify Undergrad Overseas Recruiting

University Rankings Show Boom in Global Student Mobility
“The compilers of a leading league table of the world’s top universities on Tuesday reported an ‘unstoppable rise’ in the numbers of students choosing to travel abroad to study. ‘Global student mobility is on a seemingly unstoppable rise, with those seeking an overseas education targeting the leading universities,’ wrote John O’Leary, an academic adviser to the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds, which produces the annual QS World Universities Rankings. ‘Even after considerable growth in recent years, the latest rankings show an extraordinary rise of almost 10 percent in international student numbers at the top 100 universities.'”
nytimes.com via Inside Track.com

20 Amazing Changes In College Demographics

There have been some major changes in postsecondary demographics , and here is the most comprehensive list in one place that I have seen. Kaitlyn Cole from onlineuniverisites.com sent this to me.

Here’s the link: (http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/09/20-amazing-changes-college-demographics/).

University Of Phoenix: It’s Rise And Recent Turbulence

Here is the story of one of the world’s largest universities  that is in the political spotlight today.

The rise of Phoenix
“’In 1970, adults lacked effective access even to ineffective higher education,’ writes Sperling. ‘Supposedly, the mission of my own university was to serve the entire community, but a working adult wanting to pursue a degree was offered courses designed for kids just out of high school, taught by professors who considered it their job to deliver the subject matter in lectures scheduled for two or three nights per week. With great persistence, an adult learner could expect to earn a degree in 6 to 10 years — for some, it took 20.’”
publicradioworks.org

Should There Be An Alumni Factor In College Rankings?

Time to Up-End College Rankings?
“Student-faculty ratios, graduation rates and cost of attendance all are valid measures of a school’s quality – and are central criteria used in many popular college rankings. But as families grow more concerned about high tuition costs and low job-placement rates, a new ranking system is betting they’ll be more interested in alumni outcomes. That is, the school’s success in graduating men and women who are prepared to meet the demands of today’s job market and workplace. Alumni Factor, launching Monday, weighs data including graduates’ household income, net worth, whether alums would return or recommend the school to others, immediate job placement and more to rank 177 U.S. colleges.”
blog.wsj.com

Courts Rebuff State Efforts To Underfund Illegal Immigrants

In separate decisions over the past month, courts in New Jersey and Florida have rebuffed state efforts to reduce spending on college education by denying low tuition rates and financial aid to American citizens whose parents are illegal immigrants, The New York Times reports. The latest ruling came from a federal court in Florida, which threw out state regulations defining American children of parents without legal immigration status as out-of-state residents, ineligible for tuition breaks at public colleges and universities. Tuition for out-of-state students can be as much as three times the rate for residents. The five students who brought the lawsuit against Florida education officials were born in this country, had been living in Florida for most or all of their lives, and had graduated from public high schools there. In a broad decision, Judge K. Michael Moore of Federal District Court in Miami found the regulations unconstitutional because they “create a second-tier status of U.S. citizenship,” by denying benefits to the students freely available to other Americans. The policy “does not advance any legitimate state interest,” the judge wrote, while it hindered Florida’s goal of “furthering educational opportunities for its own residents.” The lawsuit was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Read more: http://tinyurl.com/9fmtp2j

Source: PEN Newsblast

College Tips To Get A Good Job Starting In Your First Year

Dear Class of 2016: Get Moving on Your Future
“Welcome to the hallowed halls of academia. Now start planning for life in the real world. It’s still a tough jobs market out there and likely will continue to be for some time. So it isn’t too early for freshly minted college students to start making themselves more marketable—from taking classes that polish essential skills to building a strong network. ‘The size of your support network and mentoring group can often be as important as your degree,’ says Rich Feller, president of the National Career Development Association, which provides programs and services for career development.”
online.wsj.com

Employers Need To Recognize On Line Education Attainment

Investors love online education. If only employers did too.
“Four hundred million dollars. That’s how much was invested in education technology companies last year, according to Kevin Carey’s excellent new piece in the Washington Monthly. Higher education is one of the hottest growing sectors in Silicon Valley, and with good reason. The college premium is enormous. College-educated men have seen their wages increase since the 1960s even as wages for men with some to no college education have dropped. College grads face much lower unemployment rates than other educational groups. The gains among advanced degree holders are even larger. So, unsurprisingly, demand for higher education is increasing.”
washingtonpost.com

Best Bang For The Buck Colleges :Another Way To Rate Colleges

Higher Ed Watch
Which colleges provide the most value to their students by getting them over the finish line at a reasonable price?

Read More

Credit Hour Has Big Problems As Measure Of Higher Education

The basic currency of higher education — the credit hour — represents the root of many problems plaguing America’s higher education system: the practice of measuring time rather than learning, according to a report co-released today by the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program and Education Sector.

The report, Cracking the Credit Hour, traces the history of the credit hour, which was created by Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 19th century. A credit hour typically represents one hour of faculty-student contact time per week over a 15-week semester. Most bachelor’s degrees require 120 credit hours.

Author Amy Laitinen, deputy director for Higher Education at the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program, outlines many of the problems that an over-reliance on this time-unit has caused for today’s students. These include:

• Credit hours are not universally transferable. Colleges routinely reject credits earned at other colleges, a particular problem for the 59 percent of students who attend more than one institution.
• Credit hours are difficult to assign to online courses, which often allow students to proceed through courses at their own pace. The percentage of students taking at least one online course has increased from less than 10 percent to 32 percent between 2002 and 2010. For-profit universities, which often use online classes, are also seeing dramatic increases in their student enrollment.
• Credit hours do not readily translate into assessments of students’ prior learning. Yet students who earn credit through programs that assess and award credit for things they already know are more likely to stay in and complete college than those who don’t.

As the report notes, the credit hour “was never intended to be a measure of, or proxy for student learning.” Over time, however, the credit hour has taken on enormous importance in everything from setting faculty workloads to determining state and federal funding and an institution’s eligibility for federal student aid.

It is the federal student aid program’s reliance on credit hours that has stifled many kinds of innovation, the report argues. Even though the federal government has tried to indicate a willingness to move away from the credit hour, “many in the industry still believe that their safest bet, if they want to keep access to federal financial aid, is to do what they have always done: use time to determine credits.”

Cracking the Credit Hour recommends a number of different policy solutions. All, it argues, are available today. The federal government could:

• Innovate within the existing frame of the credit hour. Although the recent redefinition of the credit hour was designed for other purposes, “it also created opportunities for institutions to use non-time-based measures of learning to qualify for federal financial aid,” Laitinen writes. Specifically, the competency-based model already in use by Western Governors University should “be the norm,” rather than the exception, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
• Innovate through experimentation. The current Higher Education Act offers the Department the opportunity to create what Laitinen calls a “small, controlled, voluntary virtual laboratory of ‘experimental sites’ on which it tests particular learning-based financial aid policies to see if they work, how they work, for whom they work, and under what conditions they work.”  She suggests these innovations could include financial aid for credits earned using valid Prior Learning Assessments or outcome-based financial aid.
• Innovate by moving away from a system that is free from the credit hour’s history. Direct assessment of student learning is already permitted under the Higher Education Act.

“If the U.S. is to reclaim its position as the most-educated nation in the world, federal policy needs to shift from paying for and valuing time to paying for and valuing learning,” the report concludes. “In an era when college degrees are simultaneously becoming more important and more expensive, students and taxpayers can no longer afford to pay for time and little or no evidence of learning.”

Read Cracking the Credit Hour.

Also read our Frequently Asked Questions about Credit Hours and Competencies in Higher Education

Reports Worth Reading

Reports worth Reading
The ECS staff keeps an eye out for reports, studies, and articles that are relevant to your state policy work. Check out these recent reports related to remedial/developmental education. ECS also added the publications to its online resource library.

• Development, Discouragement, or Diversion? New Evidence on the Effects of College Remediation (National Bureau of Economic Research)

• Diagnostic Assessment: Challenges & Opportunities for the California Community Colleges (EdSource and Learning Works)

Where to Begin? The Evolving Role of Placement Exams for Students Starting College (Jobs for the Future)