In his speech last night, President Obama said, “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. That is a goal we can meet.” Not long afterward, a friend emailed to ask if I though this was realistic. Answer: It depends, as these things often do, on exactly what the president means.

President Obama is almost surely referring to educational attainment numbers compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD statistics showing that America has lost its long-standing lead in the percent of adults with a college degree are frequently used in education-policy circles as evidence that we need to repair various parts of our leaky education pipeline. (As someone who’s written a lot about low college graduation rates, I was glad the president noted that this is substantially a problem of people starting college but no...

Ezra Klein links to the video of lunatic CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli going on what appears to be an entirely sincere rant about the stimulus package and the Obama administration’s plans to help distressed homeowners. As Ezra notes, “Santelli sells himself as a sort of financial sector Howard Beale: He’s mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. The problem is he’s on the trading floor of a stock exchange surrounded by the very masters of the universe who started this mess.”

At one point in the video, the conversation turns to the idea of helping homeowners in danger of foreclosure refinance at lower rates. Santelli is having none of this, despite the fact that higher-than-projected mortgage default rates are what led to the rapid devaluation of allegedly investment-grade securities held by large financial institutions whose staggering blindness to such risk led to...

Via Eduwonk by way of DFER, the story of Yolanda Hill, a Rochester mother of five who has been shackled and thrown in prison for enrolling her children in a good school system: Greece [school district] officials hired a private investigator to look into Hill’s claim that her children lived with their grandmother. According to his report, over four months this school year, Hill was seen driving her kids each morning from her home on Morrill Street [in an adjacent disrtict] to her mother’s home, where they would board buses for various Greece schools. The school district says that the education provided for the children due to the filing of false paperwork was worth $28,000. This makes perfect sense when we start with a society that’s unusually and increasingly stratified by income, with residential patterns to match, and say “Hey, let’s draw lines around our gated enclaves of privilege a...

Earlier this week the Chronicle published a new column from yrs. truly about assessment in higher education. In a nutshell: the general intransigence / lack of enthusiasm for producing public, comparable assessment measures has put higher education in a tight spot, because college leaders now have to make the case for funding in an incredibly difficult budget environment without any credible evidence of what the money will do for students from a learning perspective. “Trust me and give me more money” has never been a winning argument to make to the state lawmakers who hold the purse strings (I know, I used to work for them), as recent decades of public disinvestment in higher education can attest. And as more and more information about nearly everything becomes available, the near-total lack of reliable institution-level learning data stands in increasingly marked contrast.

Clearly, ...

Readers who don’t live in the D.C. metropolitan area may not know that, in addition to numerous national private universities like Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Catholic, and American, we the perenially disenfranchised residents of the nation’s capital also have jurisdiction over a single public institution, the University of the District of Columbia. Formed some 30 years ago via the awkward merger of three existing colleges, UDC has historically proved to be a typical creature of DC municipal governance, i.e. ineffective, wasteful, patronage-driven, mismanaged, possibly corrupt, etc., etc.

Last year the UDC board hired a new president, Dr. Allen Sessoms, formerly of Queens College and Delaware State. Sessoms immediately vowed sweeping changes, and so far he’s been a man of his word, proposing to spin off part of UDC into a stand-alone community college, raise admissions...

Once again, community colleges are left to struggle along the best they can. Despite the fact that the economy is shedding half a million jobs per month, the “moderate” approach to stimulus in Congress appears to involve rejecting aid to state and local governments and thus ensuring pro-cyclical cuts in public employment. As a result, education budgets are sure to suffer, and there’s a strong case that no institutions are more vulnerable than community colleges, which get short-changed in the public budgeting process when times are good and don’t have endowments and other diverse revenue streams to fall back on now. With crumbling, outdated facilities, many community colleges are ill-equipped to handle the surge of new students who will arrive seeking refuge and retraining as job losses mount. Mid-career workers with families facing sudden, unexpected unemployment aren’t going to...

Paul Basken (one of the best higher-education reporters in the business IMHO) filed a short piece in The Chronicle a few weeks ago about struggles to improve the quality of teaching in engineering. He wrote: After a close-up look at 40 American engineering schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has released a new report on the matter, but the diagnosis is old news: A widespread emphasis on textbook-heavy theory over hands-on practice discourages many students and leaves the ones that remain unprepared for real-world problems. With the difficulty long known, why have solutions been so elusive? Among the reasons cited by college leaders: a faculty culture resistant to change, and perceived pressure from accreditors.And:

The “problem-based approach” in Georgia Tech’s biomedical-engineering program includes asking sophomores to spend an entire semester exploring ...

Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways — scholarly rekown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the “quality” of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University of Texas campuses, for example, look like this:

The Austin and Dallas campuses are getting students at 1,200 and above while the nonselective regional campuses like Pan American and Permian Basin are below 1,000. This conforms with nearly any measure of prestige and status one could name: Austin is an internationally known, Research I, AAU institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment and a football team that was lucky enough to beat my Ohio State Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl last month, not that I’m bitter. (Although: “Colt...

Today President Obama brought some much-needed leadership and tough-minded thinking to the crucial education policy issue of hair-trigger weather sensitivity and resulting needless school closures (at HuffPost via Russo): “My children’s school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice,” Obama said, and all at the table started laughing. “As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled,” he continued. He said that in their old hometown, “you’d go outside for recess in weather like this. You wouldn’t even stay indoors.” The President said he would have to bring “some flinty Chicago toughness” to Washington. Asked if he was calling Washingtonians wimps, Obama responded: “I’m saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.” So, so true. I lived in Connecticut until I was 12 and then upstate New York through...

The Post exerpted the education part of Bills Gates’ annual State of the Gates Foundation letter on their op-ed page this morning (Disclosure: Education Sector receives grants from the foundation). It proceeds in pretty standard fashion until this sentence, about halfway through: Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. That’s one of the (many) good things about being one of the richest and most famous people in the world. You can straightforwardly admit that your initiatives haven’t always been successful, because having done so you’re still one of the richest and most famous people in the world. It’s also the upside of moving into charitable work in the middle of your life as opposed to the end — you have time to learn, refine, and plan for the long term. Gates also said: We had less success trying to change an...