Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article (subscription required) today on the for-profit higher education sector.  Enrollment in for-profit colleges fell by about 7 percent from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2012, according to December estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse. That is a much steeper decline than the drop of 1.8 percent for higher education over all during the same period.  The article attributes the decline to:

“Over the past two years, for-profit colleges have come under growing scrutiny from federal lawmakers, state regulators, skeptical investors, and consumer advocates, who have questioned their recruiting tactics and educational quality.

An increasing number of nonprofit colleges have also begun to offer programs online, making it tougher for the for-profit institutions to compete on factors like convenience.

New federal regulations now also make it explicitly illegal for the colleges to pay incentives to their admissions representatives on the basis of the number of students they enroll. Mr. Kinser says the declines in enrollment that coincide with that new regulation suggest that without those incentives, “they’re having a tougher time recruiting.”

There have already been major staff reductions at a number of the for-profits and more are to come:

“.. contraction has been a major theme over the past two years. Career Education Corporation announced the closing of a quarter of its 90 campuses and a reduction of 900 positions; Corinthian Colleges took steps to sell or close nine campuses; DeVry announced plans to cut its employee count by 570; and Capella Education planned a reduction of 185. Last month the University of Phoenix and its parent company, the Apollo Group, began the elimination of 115 of its 227 campuses and learning centers, and 800 jobs, in addition to the 700 positions it cut two years ago.”

It is unfortunate but a few rotten apples such as Phoenix and Kaplan have really hurt this sector.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the Georgia Institute of Technology and Coursera had to cancel a MOOC due to design and other technical difficulties.   Fatimah Wirth, the instructor for the MOOC aptly named “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” decided on Saturday to suspend the course because students were getting misleading emails and there were problems with students editing documents on Google Docs.

“One student reported that the first e-mail he got from the instructor “was not an introduction to the course per se, nor instructions for getting started, but rather an apology for the technical glitches that were, unbeknownst to me, already occurring.”

Ms. Wirth had tried to use Google Docs to help the course’s 40,000 enrolled students to organize themselves into groups. But that method soon became derailed when various authors began editing the documents. Things continued downhill from there; some students also had problems downloading certain course materials that had been added to the syllabus at the last minute. When the confusion continued, Georgia Tech decided to call a timeout.

The company on Sunday announced that it would reopen the course at an unspecified date. Richard A. DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, told The Chronicle he expected the course would be live again “in a matter of days.”

In the meantime, Coursera is dealing with the backlash against its first aborted MOOC since it began offering the massive courses early last year. This is the first time the company has suspended a course, said Daphne Koller, its co-founder, in an interview. “Given that we’ve launched well over 100 courses, I think that’s a pretty good track record,” she said.

There is still debate about whether MOOCs can replicate the educational experience of a traditional classroom, but in general the large-scale online courses have managed to avoid being panned outright.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Examining data from a number of sources, The Huffington Post is reporting that a new survey released by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) says STEM majors earn the highest starting salaries when compared to their peers in the liberal arts and, increasingly, business majors.

Specifically, engineers saw a healthy year-over-year increase of 3.9 percent to their average starting salaries from 2011 to 2012. Aerospace engineering majors saw the largest increase — 8.3 percent for $64,000 per year. NACE surveyed salaries of 2012 college grads in more than 90 fields, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and Job Search Intelligence, a compensation measurement company.

In a statement, Executive Director Marilyn Mackes said she’s not surprised that engineering majors dominated the list of the top earning college degrees, saying the market needs them most and has a comparatively harder time finding qualified applicants.

Forbes Magazine’s Meagan Casserly says a race for innovation within both big business and the startup economy is behind the demand.

In short, while the unfortunate truth for graduates is that the jobs shortage is going to make finding a well-paying job even harder in the coming years, for STEM graduates opportunity abounds. STEM-related jobs are growing 60 percent faster than other fields.

A college degree’s value is becoming an increasingly relative measure, as average student debt levels rise, and fewer opportunities present themselves to recent college graduates. The millennial unemployment rate was estimated at 13.1 percent in January, according to Policymic.com, and millions of college graduates are underemployed. Some 46 percent of recent college graduates work jobs that don’t require a college degree. Perhaps more shocking: about 38 percent hold jobs that don’t require a high school diploma.

In 2010, the median of earnings for young adults with a bachelor’s degree was 114 percent higher than someone who ends his or her education after high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Students who chose these majors could count on a little more.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article today on the funeral services for former mayor Ed Koch.  It particularly examines his Jewishness and how he lived it on his own terms.  Here is an excerpt:

“As with everything else in his life, Mr. Koch did being Jewish on his own terms. He was a fierce defender of Israel and extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, often speaking about the many Nobel Prizes and other accolades fellow Jews had earned. He felt strongly that he had a Jewish soul. But he did not keep kosher, and was not traditionally religious.

His funeral, at 11 a.m. Monday, will be at Temple Emanu-El, At 1 East 65th Street on the Upper East Side. Mr. Koch chose the Reform congregation for his funeral in part because an Orthodox rabbi would not officiate at the ensuing burial in a non-Jewish cemetery, and in part because of Emanu-El’s large capacity — it holds 2,500 people, and Mr. Koch wanted a full house. The funeral will feature three flags, for the United States, New York City and Israel. Ido Aharoni, Israel’s consul general in New York, will be among the speakers. So will Bill Clinton.

On Tuesday, mourners, led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit shiva for Mr. Koch at Gracie Mansion. Mr. Koch sat shiva there for his own father while he was mayor, Rabbi Schneier said.

“He is the quintessential New York Jew,” said Rabbi David M. Posner, Temple Emanu-El’s senior rabbi, who will preside at the funeral. “Strong and passionate, just like everything else about him. He’s not necessarily Orthodox, but he certainly is observant in his own way.”

Mr. Koch, in a 2007 video interview with The New York Times, which was not published until after his death, repeatedly made it clear how central his Judaism was to his identity.

“I’m just this little Jewish kid from the Bronx!” Mr. Koch said. And then, asked how he wanted to be remembered, Mr. Koch said, “I want to be remembered as being a proud Jew, who loved the people of the City of New York, and did his best to make their lives better.”

Among the phrases he chose for his headstone were the chilling last words of the slain journalist Daniel Pearl: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R) set off a firestorm by declaring that an “educational elite” has taken over colleges,  and lashed out over what he says are worthless courses that offer “no chances of getting people jobs.”

In a national radio interview Tuesday with Bill Bennett, U.S. Education Secretary during the Reagan administration, McCrory said there’s a major disconnect between what skills are taught at the state’s public universities and what businesses want out of college graduates.

“So I’m going to adjust my education curriculum to what business and commerce needs to get our kids jobs as opposed to moving back in with their parents after they graduate with debt,” McCrory said, adding, “What are we teaching these courses for if they’re not going to help get a job?”

McCrory said he doesn’t believe state tax dollars should be used to help students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill study for a bachelor’s degree in gender studies or to take classes on the Swahili language.

“If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it,” McCrory said. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

Bennett added his own take, which seemed to echo former presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s controversial statements about higher education.

“We’ve really created this elitist cult of hierarchy where people who know how to do things, do things with their hands are looked down upon,” Bennett said

The first term governor said he’d propose legislation to change the higher education funding formula in the state “not based on how many butts in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs.”

As Louisiana Governor Bobbly Jindal said recently:   Republicans have to stop being the “stupid party”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of  The War Against Boys, has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times focusing on the inequalities that exist in our schools in grading practices for boys and girls.  Specifically, she observes:

“Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

…That boys struggle with school is hardly news…Over all, it’s likely that girls have long behaved better than boys at school (and earned better grades as a result), but their early academic success was not enough to overcome significant subsequent disadvantages: families’ favoring sons over daughters in allocating scarce resources for schooling; cultural norms that de-emphasized girls’ education, particularly past high school; an industrial economy that did not require a college degree to earn a living wage; and persistent discrimination toward women in the workplace.

Those disadvantages have lessened since about the 1970s. Parents, especially those of education and means, began to value their daughters’ human capital as much as their sons’. Universities that had been dominated by affluent white men embraced meritocratic values and diversity of gender, race and class. The shift from a labor-intensive, manufacturing-reliant economy to a knowledge-based service economy significantly increased the relative value of college and postgraduate degrees. And while workplace inequities persisted, changing attitudes, legislation and litigation began to level the occupational playing field.’

Here at the CUNY Graduate Center in our Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, several students are doing work on issues similar to those that Sommers raise.  Todd Feltman is examining the appropriateness of reading materials for 4^th and 5^th grade boys.  And Joseph Nelson is studying Black boys’ identity in a single-sex school for boys of color.

In sum, what happens early on in education is critical and is shaping the roles of men and women in college and in their careers.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an editorial expressing caution about expanding the number of charter schools.  Citing recent studies conducted at Stanford University, charters have not performed on average any better than traditional public schools and monitoring by state agencies has been lax.

“The charter school movement gained a foothold in American education two decades ago partly by asserting that independently run, publicly financed schools would outperform traditional public schools if they were exempted from onerous regulations. The charter advocates also promised that unlike traditional schools, which were allowed to fail without consequence, charter schools would be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform.

With thousands of charter schools now operating in 40 states, and more coming online every day, neither of these promises has been kept. Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.

If the movement is to maintain its credibility, the charter authorizers must shut down failed schools quickly and limit new charters to the most credible applicants, including operators who have a demonstrated record of success.

That is the clear message of continuing analysis from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states. In 2009, its large-scale study showed that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education.

A study released this week by the center suggests that the standards used by the charter authorizers to judge school performance are terribly weak.

It debunked the common notion that it takes a long time to tell whether a new school can improve student learning. In fact, the study notes, it is pretty clear after just three years which schools are going to be high performers and which of them will be mediocre. By that time, the charter authorizers should be putting troubled schools on notice that they might soon be closed. As the study notes: “For the majority of schools, poor first year performance will give way to poor second year performance. Once this has happened, the future is predictable and extremely bleak. For the students enrolled in these schools, this is a tragedy that must not be dismissed.”

Currently, only 6 percent of all schools are charter schools, and charter networks account for only about one-fifth of that total. States that are in a hurry to expand charter schools should proceed carefully. The evidence of success is not all that ample.”

A word of caution indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There will be much written about former Mayor Ed Koch over the next several days.  His passing this morning was not unexpected.  Many of us who were in New York in the 1970s and 1980s credit him with saving the City from the brink of collapse.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In George Will’s column in the Washington Post,  New Jersey Governor. Chris Christie (R) ripped the Republican Party by calling the decision to lengthen the presidential nomination process in 2012 the “stupidest thing the Republican Party ever did”.   Christie has made similar remarks before, including last February in an interview with Fox News, in which he called the Republican National Committee’s decision to award delegates in most states proportionally “the dumbest idea anybody ever had.”

Christie told Fox News that the Republican Party should be “focusing on getting a nominee and having that nominee begin to train his attention on the president of the United States.” Allocating delegates to candidates proportionally, as opposed to a winner-take-all system, prolonged the GOP primary race.

Tony