Top ten stories from Hechinger: Higher education headed for a shakeout
If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, as the New York Times famously dubbed it, 2013 was the year of … well, not the MOOC.
The number of universities jumping on the MOOC bandwagon continued to rise, along with the number of people enrolling in these massive online open courses. But so did skepticism of their effectiveness, and warnings from the architects of MOOCs themselves that they were never meant to be the answer to the problems of higher education.Signs that those problems are deepening were are among Hechinger’s 10 top higher-education stories of 2013.
Analysts and others warned that higher education was headed for a shakeout, unable to keep up with families’ demands for discounts on tuition, and even the presidents of small institutions in New England—a place identified with quintessential red-brick, ivy-covered college campuses—said they were worried about the futures of their schools. With enrollment starting to decline, private, for-profit universities quietly lowered their tuition and faced other unaccustomed setbacks. Some conventional nonprofits merged or consolidated to cut costs. And historically black colleges and universities faced an uphill battle to survive.
One worry for these schools was the continued shift to credentials other than traditional college credits—the “education buffet” of college-level courses offered to students while they’re still in high school, advanced-placement programs, military or corporate training, career and life experience, and those MOOCs, and to such things as “badges” and e-portfolios. The universities’ weapon so far has been to not accept the credits, even as increasing numbers of students transfer among schools, forcing them to spend more time and money getting their degrees.
That’s one cause of abysmal graduation rates. Another, it turns out, is that students are forgoing advisors who can help them finish college. That’s led to the advent of “success coaches,” and another new incentive being tried in some New evaluations put Minnesota teachers to the test
Minnesota Public Radio Pine Island, Minn. – Principal Cindy Hansen’s fingers fly across her laptop as she types notes in a corner of Scott Morgan’s classroom, watching as the special education teacher works with a kindergartner on her social skills. This is more than a principal pop-in. Hansen and Morgan are part of a new, experimental kind of teacher evaluation. Earlier, they met for a pre-evalua
Colleges tying presidential raises to results
Like all leaders of American colleges and universities these days, Massachusetts Bay Community College President John O’Donnell is under pressure to increase graduation rates and turn out students ready for jobs. And like a small but growing number of his counterparts around the country, O’Donnell has a new incentive to meet these goals: His salary partly depends on it. Massachusetts Bay Community