Dear Commons Community,

The National Education Policy Center recently issued its latest report, Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Organizations.     This annual report documents the extent of the EMO industry in the United States.  Highlights from this report include:

• 729 schools were operated by EMOs in 2009-2010;
• 353,070 students were enrolled in schools operated by EMOs in 2009-2010;
• In terms of performance and based on a crude Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) measure, 53% of EMO operated schools met the AYP and 47% did not meet AYP.

The report concludes that while the EMO industry has seen remarkable growth since the 1990s when data first was collected, the growth in recent years has been relatively  modest.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I was invited to attend an all-day meeting in Albany entitled, A New York State Summit on K-12 Online and Blended  Learning.   The focus of the meeting was an initiative on the part of the NYS Education Department in using Race to the Top federal funding for developing a K-12 online learning network.   As described in the Summit’s brochure:

“Online and blended learning expand educational opportunities and improve outcomes for a wide range of students. There are pockets of innovation happening across New York and the nation; that we would like to highlight & examine. As such, we are convening a group of education leaders from our state to learn more about the innovative online and blended learning programs currently operating.   The goal is to identify the next steps in creating a structural network for expanding online learning opportunities for students in the state.”

About 150 individuals, mostly K-12 administrators including representatives from New York City, were invited.

This is long overdue and a step in the right direction.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Obama Administration and the U.S. Department of Education has proposed a number of changes to the guidelines regulating financial aid for for-profit colleges.  The NY Times has an editorial today referring to a new report by the Education Trust that highlights the low graduation rates of some of the larger for-profit colleges and universities.  The critical provision of the new guidelines is the gainful employment provision that essentially requires:

“the [U.S. Education] Department to examine for-profit colleges and nonprofit trade programs to see how much debt their students accumulated in paying for schooling, and whether the jobs they secured after graduation allowed them to repay their loans. Programs that had particularly high debt ratios combined with very low repayment rates could become ineligible for student aid”.

Naturally the for-profit colleges are lobbying heavily against this provision that potentially would curtail a significant portion of their financial aid eligibility.   Below is a table from the Education Trust Report that presents troubling graduation rates for some of the for-profits.  In comparing higher education sectors, the report found that four-year for-profits graduated only 22 percent of their students within six years, compared with 55 percent for public schools and 65 percent at private nonprofits.   The for-profit students also left school with significantly more debt.   Anyone interested in this topic should definitely read the full report.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has a sad article on how a number of college/universities are making difficult decisions about the foreign language programs on their campuses.  Officials from SUNY Albany, the University of Maine, Louisiana State University and others are cited as blaming budgetary pressures for these decisions.    Furthermore, globalization  has pushed decision makers not to eliminate foreign languages altogether but to seek to shift resources from European languages to Asian and Middle Eastern languages.   The argument seems to be that if the language has economic relevance, it can stay;  if not, au revoir.   For example, at Winona State University  in Minnesota, officials have placed a moratorium on new majors in French and German while it “challenges the faculty to make those disciplines more relevant to the contemporary world”.

Here in New York State, it will be painful to see how officials at SUNY and CUNY will handle the budgetary situations in which they will find themselves over the next several years.  Governor-elect Cuomo has given every indication that cuts will be deep.    CUNY has already authorized tuition increases somewhere in the range of  5-10% for  next year.  At some point, our presidents, provosts and deans will look at academic programs  and support services.

Tony

Dear Commons Colleagues,

My colleague, Nick Michelli, at the Graduate Center, sent along this bit of good news (State_Revenues_2010-11-30-State_Revenue_Flash) from the Nelson Rockefeller Institute of Government (SUNY Albany) that state tax revenues throughout most of the country have risen for the past quarter.  This is good news as state-funded public agencies including higher education brace for a difficult fiscal year.  Here in New York (where budgets are being reduced and tuition is rising at CUNY and SUNY) there was a 4.5% or almost $600 million increase from last year at this time.    While this alone will not erase a $3 billion state deficit, it is a step in the right direction.

Tony