More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 12 - January 27, 2018
Serving more undergraduate students at higher quality and lower cost is an objective built into the university's organizational design, into its standards for admitting students and promoting faculty, and into its year-round academic calendar, course catalogs, and pedagogical approaches. It is also the driving reason behind the university's emphasis on online learning.
The university's operational efficiency allows it to pay its faculty members more; by McKinsey's analysis, they make roughly 15 percent more in total compensation than their peers at comparable institutions.
few tenured university professors would willingly bear teaching loads equivalent to those of community colleges, as BYU-Idaho faculty members do.
success in an increasingly competitive higher education environment requires each institution to identify and pursue those things it can do uniquely well.
Paul LeBlanc, who once led an effort to unseat the president of the college where he taught and departed academe for a time to do a stint as vice president of new technology at book publisher Houghton Mifflin.
None of these students graduate with more than five years' worth of credits, compared to 20 percent of students at peer institutions.38
Most fundamentally, it shifted its paradigm from teaching to learning.67
As a kind of battle cry to abandoning the study hall in favor of the playing field or pub, many students invoked the Mark Twain witticism, “Don't let your studies interfere with your education.”
Professors typically lectured to these vast groups of students once each week. Much of the real teaching, conducted in smaller and more frequently convened sections, was delegated to assistants.
He required freshmen to live in the school's dormitories, as most students had done in the early days. He reasoned that housing all freshmen together, under close supervision, would not only allow Harvard to admit students at a younger age but also set a tone for their subsequent years of study.
“A boy's career in college is largely determined,” he believed, “by the conditions of his freshman year, and it ought to be possible to organize that year so as to improve the whole state of the college intellectually and socially.”
Lowell also pushed through a measure to have Latin honors—cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude—noted in the commencement program and alumni catalogue.
the Boston Globe's 2001 discovery that more than half of Harvard College grades were A's and A-minuses, and that more than 90 percent of graduates earned honors.
By making the SAT the national standard for college admissions, Conant and Chauncey gave Harvard and other elite colleges access to the country's brightest students. They also paved the way for remarkable growth in American higher education.
A committee of twelve well-regarded Harvard scholars sought broad input and published a 267-page volume called General Education in a Free Society, or, in reference to its crimson binding, the “Redbook.”
The Redbook improved general education for a generation of students not only at Harvard but elsewhere:
The $7,000 starting salary of the twenty-six-year-old football coach exceeded by 30 percent that of the university's highest-paid professor and was comparable to President Eliot's, who had served in his capacity for thirty-six years.74
By 1979, three-fourths of Harvard undergraduates would be participating in intramurals.
the effects of Carnegie climbing by small colleges in state higher education systems that already had well-established universities.
a 1964 Carnegie Foundation Report called The Flight from Teaching.17
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian who served in the Kennedy administration, described the Harvard College students of the 1950s as “an uncommonly unoriginal, conventional-minded, sloganized, and boring undergraduate generation.”
In the spring of 1969 the faculty decided, in the face of SDS-led student pressure, to discontinue Harvard's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, which some considered a symbol of the war in Vietnam.
extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”
Christensen, renowned for his skill in discussion-based teaching, declared: “Every student teaches and every teacher learns.”
he made a science of the task of building confidence in learners.
believe that teaching is a moral act.
Ricks was renowned for its symphony orchestra, choirs, dance teams, and theater groups, achieving with freshmen and sophomore students a level of quality comparable to that of four-year schools.
In the ten years after 1987, the average ACT score went from 18 to 23, and the high school grade point average from 2.7 to 3.4.21
When, in April 1972, two dozen black students broke into and occupied Massachusetts Hall, site of Bok's office, he let them remain until they willingly dispersed, six days later.2
Expressing regret for the need to impose external control, Bok in 1990 recommended that deans require faculty members to formally account for all of these outside activities.19
Much of the cost increase was driven by new information technology, yet that technology did little to increase the instructional productivity of the faculty.
Clark Kerr went on to become the first president of the Carnegie Commission.
In the California system, Kerr had envisioned a ladder that students could climb—from an associate's degree at a community college to a bachelor's degree at a state university to a graduate degree at one of the California research institutions. It is a great irony that community colleges and state universities would attempt to use the ladder for their own climbs.
According to this model, getting better means what it did to Charles Eliot—having everything at its academic best.
But in the century and a half since Eliot declared, “We would have them all, and at their best,” the bulk of colleges and universities have doggedly tried to make themselves over in Harvard's image.
“mission creep”
“Carnegie creep.”
the effort to manage public image and rankings also proves to be an arms race that leaves all poorer but collectively no further ahead.
Since the late 1980s, college tuition and fees have risen 440 percent, four times faster than inflation.
Notwithstanding the four-year designation of the institutions they attend, only 35 percent of students nationwide finish in that time frame. In fact, only 55 percent graduate within six years of starting college.
Those who do earn bachelor's degrees have a less than one-third chance of being deemed verbally and quantitatively literate, a percentage that is falling.
The model is broken and yet so much that we associate with a college education—that a degree requires four years of study and 120 earned credits, that undergraduate life is also about fraternities and teams and dorm life, and that a faculty member with a terminal degree, usually a PhD, is inherently the best educator—is becoming unsustainable.
These assumptions and more have driven up the cost of educating students across higher education, and those costs are now excessive. —Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University
The would-be disruptors of the 1990s failed to ignite a revolution in higher education of the kind Milken sparked in banking. One reason was that they lacked the capacity to prove, as Milken did with junk bonds, that lower-cost educational approaches such as online learning can yield results of comparable quality to those of traditional university study.
Some learning outcomes can be measured, but the full effect of a higher education is hard even to define, let alone to quantify with the precision of a financial interest rate.
the tripling of Harvard's endowment between 1994 and 2000.
Western Governors University (WGU), a Salt Lake City–based not-for-profit created in 1996 by the governors of nineteen western states.
WGU not only won accreditation but did so with an unprecedented four regional associations. It admitted its first applicant in 1999 and just over a decade later enrolled 20,000 students in all fifty states.
The increasing speed of Internet communication has been mirrored by enhancements in online instruction technology; online courses are getting demonstrably better, now equaling or exceeding the cognitive outcomes of classroom instruction.
an online instructor's teaching performance is easily monitored, and an underperformer has no contractual right to further employment.
