After more than six decades, I can close my eyes and think about the truly great teachers I have experienced along my educational journey.
My elementary school teachers were generalists, required to teach young children how to read, write, and navigate the foundational concepts of math. They had the answers to all our questions.
In middle school or junior high, we were introduced to specialists who taught us English, Science, Algebra, Geography, History, and a foreign language.
A simple question from a friend and colleague about how independent school K-12 learning outcomes are established and measured led me down a road less traveled.
I am very familiar with higher education’s learning goals and measurements. When I was leading APUS through its initial accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission, criteria related to implementing and evaluating learning outcomes were major components of the self-study process.
A blog post from Wharton Interactive’s Faculty Director Ethan Mollick provided me with the heads up about an AI study with potential implications to the Future of Work. Mollick wrote that he and several other academics from Harvard and MIT spent the past several months working with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
The research project involved measuring the impact of AI LLM tools, specifically ChatGTP4, on the productivity of 758 individual contributor-level consultants at BCG.
For years, college students have complained about the cost of textbooks and course materials. At American Public University System, the institution where I served as president until August 2020, our mission of providing an affordable college education to our students led to the creation of a textbook grant for undergraduate students in 2001. The purpose of the grant was to cover an out-of-pocket cost that made college unaffordable for many students.
I realized after writing about the financial aid practices at Ivy Plus universities, elite non-Ivy Plus colleges and universities, HBCUs, and large state universities, that there was a distinctive group of colleges that I had left out.
Community colleges are widely known for their low tuition. At the same time, my findings had surfaced a surprising revelation (to me) that financial aid practices for the first four income quintiles (from lowest to highest) did not always result in a low net price for the lowest income students.
Enrollments in U.S. colleges and universities flourished from 1940 through 2010. For the past decade and a half, many colleges have struggled with adjusting their fixed cost, campus-based business model to declining enrollments as well as prospective students and their families focused on the relative value of earning a four-year degree.
Some adjustments have been implemented over a period of years.
Last week, the New York Times published a guest essay from associate professor of German Leif Weatherby at NYU. The title of the essay, What Just Happened at West Virginia University Should Worry All of Us, opened with a statement that the recently announced planned program cuts (169 faculty and 30+ degree programs) to WVU’s curriculum and faculty would deprive West Virginia’s citizens of the best part of a college education.
As rising seniors prepare to return to high school for their senior year, I thought I’d prepare an article discussing a way to find out a lot of information about prospective colleges. The tool is called College Navigator and it is maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.
Recently, I wrote several articles about admissions, financial aid awards, and net price for higher education institutions. The purpose for the first article in the sequence was to point out the financial aid funding practices of the 12 Ivy Plus colleges and universities as well as the fact that their business model relied on a high percentage of full-pay students compared to other institutions of higher education.
