I watched this PBS documentary a couple weeks ago, and it made me really angry:
Frontline: college, inc.
There seems to be a fundamental problem with the idea of an institution whose supposed intention is to open up higher education to those who would not otherwise be able to have access to it but then charging them more than traditional non-profit universities so that lower-income students attending for-profit colleges will eventually be saddled with even more debt (tens of thousands of dollars of greater debt) than students attending public state universities and liberal arts colleges. Here's Stephen Colbert's note on the same issue:
Colbert University
The Colbert clip includes a quick interview with Andrew Hacker, one of the authors of the recent book Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do about It. I strongly recommend this book: it's a quick read, it convincingly presents in clear terms a lot of major issues contributing to the diminishing quality of higher education in a lot of universities today, and it offers some potential solutions.
For the other side of the for-profit university debate, see this interview with a CEO of one of the online for-profit schools: "Online Learning and the World of For-Profit Education."
A funny for you.
I once had a student miss 3/4 of a semester; he was conveniently gone during the period of the term when all his papers would have been due. His excuse: he was in jail. I did not ask why. He later withdrew from the class.
Here are a couple recent articles on whether a college degree is worth achieving, especially given the current economic crisis and rising unemployment:
Brad Tuttle, "College By the Numbers": This basically runs down a lot of statistics in recent reports about higher education from around the Web.
"A College Degree Pays off--and Then Some: A Report": This provides a link to a College Board report that summarizes the various benefits of having a college education. The benefits are not simply economic (e.g., employability, salary) but also social (job satisfaction, marriage rates, involvement with children, health, voter participation, volunteerism). In a sense, this report suggests the ways in which having a higher education benefits not just the individual but also his/her family and community.
This somewhat brief article in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal suggests that entry-level jobs in large companies are going to students who have graduated from large state schools, such as Texas A&M and University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). I'm not sure how reliable the study is, and the comments on the article bring up some major problems with the reporting in the article. However, one might see that it makes sense that large recruiting companies would make it easier on themselves to recruit from large state schools: to use crude economic terms, public universities are going to provide greater supply to meet the corporate demand. But this article does raise the question of whether larger state schools really do train their students with the "practical skills" they need for entry-level jobs better than elite liberal arts schools or Ivy League universities. Are the educations received at state schools more "useful" or "utilitarian" than those received at smaller, private institutions?
