College Unbound Quotes

“The truth about change is that we tend to overestimate its speed while underestimating its reach.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Colleges now view students as customers and market their degree programs as products.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Western Governors University—is slowly gaining traction with an innovative approach to measure learning and award credentials. The idea behind this institution is simple and practical: Degrees should be based on how much students know, not how much time they spend in a classroom.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“semester”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Professors today,” Thrun said, “teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Silicon Valley has maintained that pace since the 1970s and has been seen as an innovative force in the American economy. Technology has rapidly transformed nearly every industry. While colleges have spent millions to outfit campuses with wireless technology, purchase the latest computing power, and hire IT staff, technology has failed, until now, to improve quality, bring greater efficiency, and lower costs, as the next two chapters will detail.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“We go to classes because we have to, but the learning is happening after class and online,”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Indeed, as the United States moves away from a broad educational approach into narrow, practical majors, many Asian countries are moving precisely in the opposite direction out of fear that they are producing nothing more than a nation of test takers.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“The commonality among them, he says, is that “we all majored in what we were interested in. The curiosity and the willingness to adapt are more important than what the degree is in.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Right now, higher education benefits from confusion in the market because schools can hide behind national averages on salaries and would-be students are more apt to trust a school’s marketing materials in the absence of better information.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Students who take all or part of their classes online perform better than those who take the same course through traditional instruction.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Data sharing will become a reality for college students everywhere in the future.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“The Internet allows any of us to watch lectures by star professors from around the world as many times as we need to master a concept. So why take a class with a mediocre professor droning on, especially if we never have a chance to ask him to repeat a section of the lecture we didn’t quite understand?”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Those who majored in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math did the best. And the majors that did the worst? Education, social work, and the most popular major on US college campuses: business.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“As much as we spend on higher education, no bottom-line evaluation method exists for measuring what actually happens in the classroom and how that eventually translates into the value of the degree.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“What you witness are campuses where the students are customers first, classrooms are filled with adjunct professors who rush off to their next job after class, and students spend very little time engaged in studying or learning.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“We lack high-quality educational substitutes for those who are ill-suited to traditional colleges and universities at eighteen. It seems we send some kids off to college because there is nowhere else to put them. The campus is a convenient, albeit expensive, warehouse.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Freshmen now say the number one reason to attend college is to “get a better job,” according to a major annual survey of incoming students. Before 2006, students told researchers that the number one reason was to “learn about things that interest me.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Student loan debt is now an intergenerational problem, with ripple effects throughout the economy and social policy.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Bob”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“Employers want workers who have the ability to learn how to learn. In other words, the capability to find the answers to the questions of tomorrow that we cannot envision asking today.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“have found by talking to employers and educators that what they want most in their workers is the ability to learn how to learn. In other words, the capability to find the answers to the questions of tomorrow that we cannot envision asking today. The economy is changing at warp speed. The ten jobs most in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“By the time students reach their early twenties, they have spent some 10,000 hours playing video games, on average, sent and received 200,000 e-mail messages and instant messages, but have allotted just 5,000 hours to reading books.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“The A is now the most common mark given out on college campuses nationwide, accounting for 43 percent of all grades. (In 1988, the A represented less than one-third of all grades.)3 With little sense of what to make of grades anymore, graduate schools and employers have stopped using them as the leading indicator of success. Even within schools, there is little consensus on what a particular grade means.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“The classroom has become one giant game of favor exchanges between students, professors, and administrators. When they each play their parts, everyone comes out a winner. Students receive better grades, adjuncts keep their job year after year, full-time professors win tenure or have to spend less time dealing with students complaining about bad grades, and administrators are rewarded with more money and higher rankings.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“In a bid to save money and increase their flexibility in a changing economy, colleges are hiring fewer full-time faculty and more and more adjuncts. Adjuncts, hired semester by semester, depend on positive student evaluations at the end of the term to get their contracts renewed. One way to ensure a good evaluation is to be an easy grader.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“In many ways, higher education is like any industry that has produced its product a particular way for a long time and is suspicious of anything new. This cynicism runs even deeper on college campuses because everyone is an expert in something. Despite their scholarly credentials, a vocal slice of professors and administrators remain skeptical of the research into the strength of online programs. This persists even as every new study of online learning arrives at essentially the same conclusion: Students who take all or part of their classes online perform better than those who take the same course through traditional instruction.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“in Computer Science I. He had just started his sophomore year and was dabbling in the intro class for computer science majors. Growing up in New Orleans, he had toyed around with different”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

“In the last decade, the percentage of students from families at the highest income levels who got a bachelor’s degree has grown to 82 percent, while for those at the bottom it has fallen to just 8 percent.”
― Jeffrey J. Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students