Blogs

The determined effort to ensure that everyone has a post-secondary credential of some kind spawns a wide range of new educational products. Traditional suppliers of higher education seek an appropriate response. Should they try to commercialize their brand by also publishing courses online? Should they partner with an aggressive and effective for-profit or foundation-funded not-for-profit enterprise to leverage faculty intellectual property into credential producing products for large audiences? Should they offer academic services to validate learning acquired through non-traditional means leading to credentials or college degrees?

Last night was the last session of the online Strategy and Competition in Higher Education (SCHE) course. That’s the ending. And it’s now been almost a week since edX was announced. That’s a very big beginning, and a great example of why we are both so optimistic about the future of higher education.

Yesterday’s post about adjuncts on food stamps had as its subtext a sense that the current economic models for higher ed are unsustainable. To my mind, the right questions are not “how do we restore a Golden Age?” or “how do we create hundreds of thousands of new faculty positions without raising tuition?” Those simply aren’t going to happen. The right questions involve finding new economic models for higher education that could actually survive.

There has been a lot of ferment about the future of information and our cultural record in recent weeks. There are signs that within our students' lifetimes our gardens will not be so walled. It makes sense to focus our teaching on the skills of joining scholarly conversations wherever they will take place, in hopes that those conversations will not always be restricted to those with temporary access to academic libraries.

I'm going to guess that many reading this column also have seen the “should one go to grad school” blog posts and perhaps even its variant, “should one to go grad school in the humanities.” In April, Inside Higher Ed linked to a similarly titled essay in The Hairpin, and also last month, GradHacker’s own Andrea Zellner responded to a blog called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School.” Then there are the animated spoofs on the topic, which in my view, are no less thought-provoking. (Since there are so many devoted to specific courses of study, I won’t link to any one clip here.) But what about a much different question about graduate school—not one about entrance decisions, but exit strategies? When should one leave grad school, and in particular, a PhD program?

Where do you situate yourself for lectures, keynotes, and conference talks?

I jumped on a plane recently to try and assist my son Nick with changing his “F’s” to “D’s” or “C’s” on his high school report card in order to graduate in June. His father and I realize that our last ditch efforts to discipline may be ‘too little too late’ for our son, but Nick understands that he cannot move out of his Dad’s house (or into my empty one) until he gets a GED. I let Nick know that some of the readers of this column are interested in hearing from him about his high school burnout, and he may, in fact, write a response to my maternal blogging (after we get through the next three weeks.)

The city of Backboro, like many northeastern cities, has chronically aging infrastructure. A key element of our transportation infrastructure is fast approaching the end of its usable life, and the city parents (we used to say "city fathers", so I guess "parents" must be the current term) are doing a creditable job of planning for its replacement.