Higher Education Change Agents article in Fast Company magazine

Al Jones writes:

"Fascinating article from Fast Company magazine on the radical change agents right now working to change the current higher education model in the U.S. (which has increased in cost more than anything else in the economy since 1990, has slipped from #1 to #10 in world ranking for producing graduate degrees, and ignores market signals more thoroughly than any sector of the economy.)

Surprises in the piece:
How many millions have tapped MIT’s offer of free class content since 2001 (a B.S. credential from there runs $189,000 though, clearly separating the desire for world-class content from a world-class credential.)

Didn’t mention University of Phoenix, the for-profit campus that would now be the nation’s largest with a quarter million or so students enrolled, 400 new faculty added per quarter, and an increasing number of physical campuses to facilitate the online courses…and a better ongoing quality measurement system for course content than any campus I’ve heard of.

Described open-source approaches, modeled after Linux and Wikipedia, to lectures, full campuses, degrees, and textbooks that are already scaling up.

Amazon’s Kindle’s next model is for college textbooks and already in field testing at a few campuses (it’s just bigger to accomodate the page size.)

Hadn’t heard of the Western Governors’ University started by the 19 Western States quite a few years ago that’s all online and has 12,000 student now (making it bigger than UM, MSU-Bozeman, and a third the size of University of Wyoming)

Lots of surprises to me and I’ve been following this topic since reading "The Organization Man" with it’s 1950’s critique of higher ed that still hasn’t really hit Montana’s. The author of this article has a very perceptive and disturbing look at the myths about college in "Generation Debt", her book of a couple of years ago, i.e. for 45% of bachelors-earners there won’t actually be a true economic return on their investment (wrong degree/field, wrong school, too much debt, too many years of little or no earnings) while it’s worse for the 75% or so who start but don’t complete a degree (pretty much no return on investment while generally substantial student loans incurred.)

Since business already spends more on training than the entire higher education budget in the U.S., for decades now, and only invests in training in managers and salespeople mostly (85% of corporate training dollars go to just those employees), the money’s out there, it’s just looking for a clear return on the investment (as the students and parents are starting to as well.)

your pal al (300 college credits and still pretty ignorant.)"

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html