We need to convey to students there is nothing to be embarrassed about in terms of where you started. The focus here is on where you want to finish.
Groups Help Low-Income Students Enter College
(via gjmueller)
Students from low-income areas are in a double-bind. Even if they rise above their economic background to be accepted at college and work toward a better future, the substandard education they received at their neighborhood schools all but guarantees them the second-class academic label of “remedial” students. Neither their economic poverty nor their impoverished education are necessarily any fault of their own, but often merely the unlucky circumstance of their birth into a family in a poor, working-class neighborhood.
Colleges have reason to fear being held accountable for the very large numbers of these students they routinely accept each year, knowing that many of these students will never make it through two semesters. This practice has the advantage that the colleges can claim that they offer broad access to postsecondary education, while regarding the students who wash out as underachievers, and the high schools they came from as ineffective.
Colleges actively perpetuate the social stigma of students who are academically underprepared (“we offered them remedial classes”), while at the same time actively reduce the social stigma of students who are economically underfinanced (“we offered them financial assistance”), for the simple reason that both stragegies are in the college’s own self-interest.
Source: gjmueller
Pew: College students and technology
Community college students and device ownership:
- 67% have desktop computer;
- 70% laptop;
- 72% ipod/mp3 player;
- 94% cell phone.
So tell me again please why online courses and learning management systems are still designed around a desktop paradigm?
Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential, by Anya Kamenetz. Free ebook available at Scribd and Smashwords.
Kamenetz is a writer at Fast Company and author of Generation Debt (2006) and DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (2010).
What DO we mean by education, exactly? There are three big buckets of benefit that an educational institution, like a college, historically provides.
- Content—the skills and knowledge. The subjects, the majors. You could think of this as the “what” of education.
- Socialization—learning about yourself, developing your potential, forming relationships with peers and mentors. The “how”.
- Accreditation—earning that diploma or other proof that will allow you to signal your achievement to the world, and with luck get a better job. The “why.”
Each of these buckets, the What, the How, and the Why, has been profoundly affected by the information revolution. But most people are still being pushed down the assembly line of kindergarten through college without access to alternatives that might be not just cheaper or faster but smarter and better. DIY, or Do-It-Yourself, is a movement about self-reliance and empowerment. In the case of DIY education, it means getting the knowledge you need at the time you need it, with enough guidance so you don’t get lost, but without unnecessary restrictions. DIY doesn’t mean that you do it all alone. It means that the resources are in your hands and you’re driving the process.
Kamenetz does a good job of capturing the vast number of resources available for personal learning, but never does quite demonstrate how someone might actually earn a “DIY” credential. The advice to take charge and be self-motivated runs smack into the hard reality that currently about the only credentialing available is through traditional higher ed pathways. The definition of “education” may be changing, but so far at least, the definition of “degree” isn’t.
A glimmer of good news: student loan interest rates are dropping!
Good news? Good news? I guess for Sallie Mae it’s good news.
It isn’t good news when student loan rates continue to be variable rather than fixed.
It isn’t good news when lower costs to borrow is concurrent with greater need due to rising tuition, encouraging larger and larger amounts of student debt.
It isn’t good news when lawmakers and administrators see lower borrowing costs for students as a pretext to continue the cycle of rising tuition rates far into the future.
Cheering lower interest costs for student loans demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of financial aid over the past 30+ years.
The steady shift of monstrous burdens on students and families has been accomplished by moving from a low-tuition, state-supported, federally-subsidized, grant-based system of tuition payment to a high-tuition, commercial loan-based system with steady erosion of support and subsidies to institutions and students. The federal and state governments gradually withdraw their support from the institutions, while the institutions simply shift their deficits to the backs of their students. And all that glamorous multimillion dollar fundraising goes straight to the athletic programs, while student tuition rises, tenured faculty teach fewer hours, and well-intentioned but woefully unprepared adjuncts become the foot soldiers of the teaching mission of academia. And the library has a bake sale.
Because the federal government generously backs guaranteed student loans, they have been as sure a bet for lenders as U.S. Savings Bonds, especially after laws were changed to completely prohibit the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy court.
Students sign on to this debt in good faith, but under the duress of knowing it is the only option available to achieve the credentialing necessary for a job or a career. Starting any career with massive debt is like swimming upstream with a stone and a rope tied around your neck.
Add in a period of stubbornly high unemployment, when those loan payments start coming due just six months after graduation, and things go south in a hurry.
Add the larger number of women who are now college graduates, who systematically earn less than their male graduate counterparts, and often bear far more responsibility for child rearing in single or two-parent homes.
So Sallie Mae lowers need-based loan rates from 4.5 to 3.4 percent. OK, that’s good. But if the tuition at my college just rose 11%, and has risen 34% over the past four years, an interest-rate drop of 1.1% makes only the most miniscule difference.
For those students and their parents who do not qualify for need-based support, unsubsidized Stafford loans and PLUS loans for parents remain unchanged at 6.8 and 7.9 percent, at a time when the Fed discount rate is 0.75 percent, and the WSJ Prime Rate is 3.25 percent. So if you already have unsubsidized loans, or you need them for college this year, you have no cause for celebration about some falling student loan interest rates.
(via bellcurved)
Source: bundlehq
It's not about you
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
African Americans are still half as likely, and Hispanics are still a third as likely, as white students to complete college. This is despite minority college enrollment rates nearly doubling over the past 40 years.
Is College Worth It? Pew Research
Source: pewsocialtrends.org
When we spoke recently, he mentioned a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students. “We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.
If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates? … It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing.
Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make sense to teach them something useful instead?
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The more a college does to market itself as ‘hip’ to prospective students through spectacles and similar events, the more it does to undermine genuine student-created culture, ultimately making the college a far less interesting place to be.
Will higher ed forfeit its teaching role to for-profits?
“For-profits are better placed to expand online because they do not have to worry about resistance from academic staff, nor about exploiting their earlier investment in campus facilities. A disruptive technology, which online learning may prove to be, rarely favours existing providers,” said [President of the Commonwealth of Learning, Sir John] Daniel.
That raised the question of whether higher education would split over the coming years into a public sector focused on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching. Daniel said the recent dramatic funding cuts to UK universities was likely to significantly swing the balance in funding higher education towards research and away from teaching.
I’ve been arguing this for years, but I’m not sure the bulk of the teaching will necessarily go to for-profits. There’s a great role for undergraduate-focused teaching colleges in public higher ed, but community colleges are too stretched by their multiple missions, and faculty and administration at universities are much more interested in their research role than their teaching role.
Higher education is now at a crossroads. If public higher education forfeits its teaching role to more nimble for-profits, students will be the losers.
