I love the Deadliest Catch, an action filled Discovery Channel show about Alaskan crab fishermen. I might just eat crab instead of turkey this year because Captain Phil asked me to. But I’ve never been able to find the education connection I needed to write about the Deadliest Catch on Quick & Ed–until now (not [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Inside Higher Ed'
Students on a Balance Sheet
Inside Higher Ed reports today about Spelman College’s new financial aid initiative intended to ensure students make it to graduation. Says Spelman’s Vice President for Development:
The worst thing from our perspective would be to have a student who’s a senior, who may have upwards of $60,000 in loans, not be able to graduate.
Indeed. Students don’t [...]
Boast Away
Like all good Ohio State University alumni (M.P.A. ‘95), I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks [...]
The Bell Curve Returns
With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted [...]
The Data Void
One of the interesting things about working on both K-12 and higher education policy is observing the differences between them. In K-12, there’s a long-running and very active research and policy conversation about class size. Books have been written, studies conducted, debates organized, policies implemented, all focused on the relationship between student / teacher ratios [...]
Beer Pong Ain’t Wimbledon
This paragraph from Inside Higher Ed’s article today about efforts to rid college campuses of drinking games makes me wonder if the author has a little experience with the topic…
Like many drinking games, beer pong’s beauty lies in its simplicity. Played on a ping pong table, the object is to toss a table tennis ball [...]
What We Do Cannot Be Measured
Two main camps square off in education over and over again. One side, typified by the Broader, Bolder coalition in K-12, emphasizes student demographics. They point out, justifiably, that students enter school with widely divergent skills and expectations. As such, schools can only do so much to rectify the situation. The [...]
Higher Ed Hypocrisy
We live in a time of information abundance. It’s now possible to track and record most of what happens to an individual student over their entire educational lives, from the time they enter kindergarten to the day they graduate from college, and beyond. This isn’t something we could do, it’s something a growing number of [...]
Global College Rankings
America has bestowed many gifts on the world–baseball, comic books, the Internet (and really, what else is there?). To that list we can now add college rankings. First popularized by U.S. News & World Report in the early 1980s, rankings were, for a long time, strictly an American invention. But in recent years there’s been [...]
What about the ladies room?
Forget about fancy, high-priced dorms–the University of Colorado at Boulder just sold the naming rights to a men’s bathroom, complete with an inspiring quote: The best ideas often come at inconvenient times. Don’t ever close your mind to them.
But what about the ladies? Certainly there’s a successful businesswoman out there who would contribute her name [...]
Scholarly Spirits
In the spirit of the holiday, today’s Inside Higher Ed has an interview with the author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Gets you thinking about hauntings at your own alma mater.
Higher Education "Performance"
InsiderHigherEd.com has a story today about a growing trend in college president compensation, whereby pay is linked to “performance.” Not a bad idea per se — I’m certainly among those who think that K-12 teacher pay should be linked to perforamnce. But then the article describes the performance measures being used:
These payments aren’t just bonuses [...]
Oberlin’s Money, Mouth at Odds
In the middle of an Insidehighered.com piece on Oberlin College’s recent effort to integrate the word “fearless” into their latest marketing campaign, we find this:
“The timing of this marketing effort coincides with a financial concern that is specifically mentioned in the strategic plan, which calls for an enrollment reduction of 163 undergraduate students by 2010 [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.