Four (or maybe five) ideas for how President Obama really could reform college financial aid
Addendum: My ideas in this blog post are now a Major Motion Picture column over at Inside Higher Ed. My observable corner of the blogiverse has been active and very sharp since the president’s speech at SUNY Buffalo and the White House dreams of reforming college financial aid. Various people I read have noted the […]
Atomic Department Ravages the Big Apple!!
On Monday, I discussed the difficulties with analysis of college and university costs that relied on either legal or largely rhetorical allocations. Today, I want to discuss the common perception that traditions of departmental autonomy are responsible for huge amounts of inefficiency in colleges and universities. ((This is different from arguments about labor costs. Skyrocketing faculty […]
Rhetorical allocations in higher education
Sara Goldrick-Rab’s discussion in early August of higher education, health care, and costs argues that there needs to be more nuts-and-bolts scrutiny of costs in colleges. I agree, and yet I also think it is difficult to do so cleanly. If you think hospitals are good at obscuring what is spent where (and they are very good […]
Student services and higher-ed unbundling
Over the weekend, a few papers on higher education gave me mental whiplash: Andrew Kelly and Rick Hess’s Beyond Retrofitting, a brief for unbundling of higher education; and Sara Goldrick-Rab et al. on very tentative evidence of success by Single Stop USA. (Instead of heading to a white paper that will quickly become obsolete, I […]
Silly season in education politics
It’s a Friday in early August, so why not have crazy education news? You’ve already destroyed our district, but could we at least pretend to open our doors this year? After months of public disavowal by Pennsylvania politicians of any obligation to fund Philadelphia’s schools adequately, Philadelphia superintendent William Hite gave notice yesterday that if […]