oflovefaithhopedream

Catching up on my reading from the last few weeks and want to draw your attention to this bit of reporting from Inside Higher Ed . Key lessons here: (1) Pell spending leveled off in the last year. (2) A very sizable fraction of Pell dollars are still going to for-profit institutions, but this has declined a bit in the last year. (3) We could cut total Pell spending by $15 billion dollars (almost 45%) simply by deciding that public dollars cannot be spent at for-profit institutions.  This would make Pell policy consistent with the policies of most state grant programs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending $3.3 million on efforts to " re-imagine aid design and delivery ." I'm hoping they will revisit the decades-old decision to offer aid through a voucher system that rests on the premise that maximizing choices in an open market will promote the well-being of all students and the national interest in an educated citizenry. But absent that, let's hope they p...

Data is powerful, and today's colleges and universities are learning that lesson the hard way.  As increasing amounts of information regarding their student outcomes become available, media outlets are taking advantage, running stories like this one, 11 Public Universities with the Worst Graduation Rates .  The clear intent is shame and disinvestment in public education, and it's working. One of my very talented and knowledgeable colleagues shared that story on Facebook, writing "Is there any way to understand these completion rates other than dismal?" That's a good question. What I appreciate most about it is that it asks how we can understand it?  Not, "who is to blame?"  Too often that seems to be the goal of publishing numbers, as if the old adage about sunshine being a miracle cure would actually apply to problems involving human beings. As I flipped through the slide show of the "11 Worst," looking at the often pretty campuses of those f...