Matt Yglesias responds to the University of Phoenix post below: I think the main lesson here is that traditional universities need to do a better job of getting into the niche that’s currently dominated by these poorly performing for-profits. In part, state governments would do well to shift emphasis away from trying to burnish the sheen on their “flagship” traditional universities and toward doing more in the way of providing community-college services for working and nontraditional students. But given the nature of the American system, perhaps the bigger part of this is that social and intellectual pressure needs to be brought to bear on rich people to stop donating to already-wealthy universities with huge endowments and to instead focus their efforts where they’ll do more good. Harvard and Yale have plenty of money, and their students aren’t coming from needy families. But plenty of ...

That’s the only word for the University of Phoenix’s conduct if the allegations described in today’s Higher Ed Watch and reported in the Chronicle are true. In a nutshell: Back in the early 90s there were a series of scandals involving unscrupulous for-profit colleges that tricked students into borrowing lots of money through federal loan programs for which the students received little or nothing in return. The students would quickly default on the loans, the colleges would keep the money, and the federal government, which guarantees student loans, would be left holding the bag. In response, the feds prohibited students from using federal loans to attend colleges where more than 25 percent of borrowers default within two years. (Last year Congress changed the provision to 30% within three years). Now three former Phoenix students have filed a class-action suit in Arkansas alleging that...

Everyone knows that college is getting more expensive, but it’s easy to get lost in the vagueness of that general knowledge and lose track of exactly how expensive, how that rate of change is changing, and (in particular) where all those additional dollars go. Fortunately the good people at the Delta Cost Project have taken the time to analyze vast amounts of revenue and spending data submitted by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education and report their findings, which were released today.

They found that average tuition for full-time undergraduates at public research universities increased from $4,486 in 2002 to $5,825 in 2006. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation and presented in constant 2006 dollars.) That’s an increase of 29.8 percent during a time of economic expansion. Tuition is going to increase terribly in the next few years, and it will be blamed entirely on...

While riding Metro home from work last night, I looked up and noticed one of those advertisement placards they run inside the cars, which was promoting the District of Columbia’s 529 plan. The slogan was (I may not have the wording exactly right): “Math is complicated. Saving for college is simple.” And I got to thinking: Is it? Really? The ad was clearly aimed at families in the middle class and below, and was meant to appeal to their anxieties about paying for their children’s higher education. Such concerns are justified; college is getting more experienced by the year. But let’s stop for a moment (or two) to recap why it’s so expensive. For the past several decades, the government — primarily states — has been slowly but steadily pulling back from funding higher education at the same time that colleges and universities have been relentlessly raising prices and increasing...

As The Chronicle reported a few days ago, Texas A&M has proposed giving professors bonuses of up to $10,000 based on student evaluations. Predictably — and in my mind, appropriately — many people have raised serious objections to this. Student evaluations aren’t necessarily reliable measures of student learning, some studies indicate that they’re biased toward professors with easy grading policies, etc., etc. All fair points.

BUT — what seems missing from the discussion is the logical next step: If we agree that there’s a need to create better incentives for high-quality teaching in higher education, and we agree that the best measures of high-quality teaching are based not on subjective student evaluations but objective measures of how much students learn, then why not give professors a $10,000 bonus based on objective measures of how much their students learn? Learning is...

Before the holiday, a colleague of mine posted an item about a November ’08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled “Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?” Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included “a number of nontraditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument,” they were still only able to predict about 12 percent of subsequent teacher effectivness, leading them to conclude:

Presuming all goes well and I’m not bumped for someone more photogenic and/or an international crisis of some kind, I’ll be on CNN’s The Situation Room today between 4:15 and 4:45, where they’re using Malia and Sasha Obama’s first day of school as an excuse to talk about the D.C. public schools they won’t be attending, why said schools are so bad, hard-charging DCPS chancellor Michelle Rhee. In summary: the D.C. schools system has been in deplorable shape for many years, ranking dead last on various measures even when compared to other urban school districts with similar levels of poverty, crime, and social dysfunction. The culprits are legion: incompetent bureaucrats, a corrupt teachers union, fractured governance, Congressional meddling, local political leaders using the school system as a patronage machine — the list goes on. Two years ago, the city elected a young, reformist mayor...

Higher education policy disputes in Washington are generally about information. As a rule, the federal government doesn’t (and shouldn’t) regulate how universities conduct their academic affairs. So most new federal initiatives consist of lawmakers asking questions: How many of your students graduate? How much money do you spend? On what? And so on. For the D.C. higher-education lobby, the standard response to proposed new information reporting requirements is to (A) Loudly declare that they’re a bad idea, and then (B) Go back to the office and try to come up with a justification for (A).

Such justifications come in three flavors. First, that American colleges and universities operate under a sacred principal of autonomy that dates back to (and possibly precedes) the founding of the republic. This one hasn’t been working very well lately, mostly because it’s not true, but also...

In the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion here in Washington about higher education accountability. But given that states remain the primary regulators and funders of public higher education, accountability issues will mostly play out in statehouses, not the halls of Congress. Since the early 1990s, nearly all states have established some sort of process for gathering information about institutional results. As a result, potentially valuable practices have been developed whereby states gather all kinds of interesting data about elements of higher education, including student learning results, retention, completion, student engagement, institutional efficiency, economic impact, research output, socioeconomic equity, community involvement, and more. But no state is really hitting on all cylinders, and states continue to struggle in figuring out how to translate that...

We returned from Finland on Saturday, so here are my initial overall impressions, focused mostly on the implications for K–12 education (higher education is forthcoming).

To begin, let me acknowledge that one can’t draw firm conclusions about cause and effect after a short visit. Spending a week in a far-off country means you return knowing a lot more than you knew, and a lot more than most people know back home. You’re also armed with various illustrative anecdotes and quotations that are useful to bolster arguments. But I would never claim total knowledge of the American education system, and I live there, spent 19 years in school there, get paid to write and think about it full-time, etc. So my factual assertions will be limited to the obvious (e.g. it’s very dark in winter), first-hand observations, and expert sources. When I say, for example, that “Finns are a punctual people,”...