Filter & Sort
Liberal Arts Deans
In Straight Man, Richard Russo has a wonderful line to the effect that there’s nothing scarier than a happy liberal arts dean, since the possibility of happiness in that role suggests a world other than the world that exists. It’s true. I had to smile when I saw IHE tackle the same theme.
Ask the Administrator: Second Round Interviews
A new correspondent writes: "What can candidates expect from second round interviews?"
OER
Has anyone out there been part of a large scale experiment with Open Educational Resources?
Friday Fragments
Get a Job or Your Tuition is Free! The App Academy, in San Francisco, offers a 9 week, 90 hour per week boot camp to train people as programmers. In return, the students pay 15 percent of the salaries they land for the first year. The contrast between the App Academy, which appears to be thriving, and the City College of San Francisco, which is fighting closure, is tempting, if unfair. The App Academy is narrowly focused and, by virtue of the 90 hour per week requirement, pretty selective. But the idea of the trainers having a stake in the success of the students has something to be said for it.
Training for What?
Should a public college partner with a private company to train scabs?
Competencies!
I can tell I’m getting older by what gets me excited. There was a time when a story had to feature Winona Ryder and/or Paul Westerberg to get my attention. Now I read about the Department of Education issuing a guidance letter on competency-based education and financial aid eligibility and get all worked up.
“Not a School for People Like Them”
Rising star of the Twitterverse Tressie McMillan Cottom has a must-read post about her observations as a sociologist and former admissions staffer at a for-profit college. It’s about the interaction between the prestige hierarchy of higher education, economic class, and self-image.
“Undermatching”
I get a little twitchy whenever I read about “undermatching” as a problem. Broadly, “undermatching” is the claim that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds often attend colleges that are “beneath” them academically, and that therefore they miss certain kinds of opportunities. If only the elites were more thoughtful about reaching the masses, the argument goes, they’d do a better job of creating a pure meritocracy, and the talented tenth (or twentieth, depending on taste) wouldn’t be shackled to institutions built for the unwashed masses.