The $10,000 bachelor's degree: gimmick or real?
With the cost of college at record highs, the governors of Texas and Florida (Rick Perry and Rick Scott, respectively) have challenged their state's public higher education systems to come up with a bachelor's degree program that costs no more than $10,000. Perry put out the call in 2011, and 10 colleges that enroll about 10 percent of undergraduates at public universities in the state have responded ( though not the flagship University of Texas at Austin), according to this story in the Wall Street Journal. Scott just issued his challenge and a few schools have already responded, according to this story in the Orlando Sentinel. Does the proposal make sense? I asked Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007 and now a professor at the university's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, to make sense of the proposal.
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Michigan coalition opposes Race to Top finalist in letter to Obama, Duncan
A large coalition of Michigan parents, PTA leaders, K-12 teachers, professors and others — including the superintendent of Detroit Public Schools — sent a letter (see text below) to President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan protesting the selection of a new education entity as a finalist in the latest edition of Race to the Top, the administration’s signature education initiative.
The U.S. Education Department this week announced 61 finalists in the latest Race to the Top edition, this one designed to award a total of nearly $400 million in federal funds to school districts that agree to implement specific school reforms. The list of finalists was