After college, what will you earn?
If college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment. Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to [...]
College credits without college classes
Prior learning assessment — college credit for skills and knowledge acquired outside the classroom — is “poised to break into the mainstream in a big way,” predicts Inside Higher Ed. ”The national college completion push and the expanding adult student market are driving the growth.” The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) and the [...]
What’s the community colleges’ niche?
Community colleges should “focus on their historic strength, general education,” and let for-profit colleges handle “high-cost vocational programs,” suggests Community College Dean. Vocational training is “their niche, they’re (sometimes) good at it, and they can charge enough to sustain themselves while doing it.” Specialization makes sense, the dean argues. One camp says that the way [...]
From combat to college
To protect veterans and service members from aggressive, dishonest college recruiters, President Obama signed an executive order last week requiring a “know before you owe” fact sheet, counseling on how to complete a degree and stronger oversight of improper recruitment practices. Recently Student Veterans of America revoked charters for campus groups at 26 for-profit colleges, charging [...]
Can community colleges learn from for-profits?
When community college students drop out, they lose future earnings and taxpayers lose their investment in the heavily subsidized system, write Mark Schneider and Lu Michelle Yin in a Los Angeles Times commentary. Raising graduation rates would raise graduates’ earnings and income tax revenues. But how? One important step to reducing the number of dropouts [...]
When low tuition isn’t a bargain
Low tuition isn’t always a bargain for community college students, argues Nate Johnson in an Inside Higher Ed commentary that defends Santa Monica College‘s abandoned two-tier pricing plan. If low-cost community colleges don’t have the revenue to offer enough classes, students will turn to high-cost for-profit colleges, which expand quickly to meet demand. From 2001-2 [...]
Low grad rate has high costs
Low community college graduation rates have high costs for students and taxpayers, concludes a new report from the American Enterprise Institute. Cutting the dropout rate in half would generate $30 billion in lifetime income for 160,000 additional graduates and $5.3 billion in taxpayer revenue, the report estimates. Community colleges can boost graduation rates and save money [...]
CC tries premium pricing for ‘next-day’ classes
Instead of wait lists and closed classes, Santa Monica College in California wants to offer premium-priced sections of crowded courses, reports the Los Angeles Times. Students could pay as much as $200 a unit for high-demand courses; the regular rate will be $46 per unit by summer. Students would be able to use financial aid to pay for [...]
Learning from for-profit colleges
Nonprofit higher education can learn from the for-profit sector how to serve students who are “working adults with children, members of racial and ethnic minorities, first-generation college students, or all three,” writes Ben Wildavsky, a Kauffman Foundation scholar and co-editor of Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation (2011), in an Inside Higher Ed commentary. Given the practical [...]
Veterans go to college
Most military veterans use the GI Bill to enroll at community colleges, but for-profit colleges are an increasingly popular choice.
