Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from "This. Changes. Everything" techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read.

The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT's track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they've proven that thoughtful,...

Yesterday, in arguing that college isn't for everyone, I wrote:

Of course college isn’t for everyone. Just last week, the Post profiled 17-year old high school senior Bryce Harper, who definitely shouldn’t go to college. Instead, he should (and will) become a professional baseball player and earn millions of dollars.

I had assumed that because Harper is 17 years old and about to enter the baseball draft, he must be a high school senior. Wrong! Last night an editor of Baseball America emailed the following:

You mention Bryce Harper and call him a high school senior. This is false. Harper was a sophomore last year at Las Vegas High, but got his GED over the summer and enrolled at the College of Southern Nevada this year, where he's been taking classes and playing baseball. This is a very uncommon move, but allows Harper to be eligible for this year's draft, rather than having to wait...

With Jacques Steinberg's piece in last Sunday's Times (Plan B: Skip College), the "Is college really worth it?" meme seems to be in full flower, in part because it's an interesting issue and in part because the media suffers from a fatal weakness for novelty and counterintuition. But most of these discussions suffer from confusion about what question they're actually trying to answer. In roughly ascending order of importance, here's how various people are framing the issue:

Is college for everyone? This is a dumb question. Of course college isn't for everyone. Just last week, the Post profiled 17-year old high school senior Bryce Harper, who definitely shouldn't go to college. Instead, he should (and will) become a professional baseball player and earn millions of dollars. The number of good career paths that don't require a college degree is small and shrinking but not non-existent....

PBS broadcast a documentary on for-profit higher education last week, titled College, Inc. It begins with the slightly ridiculous figure of Michael Clifford, a former cocaine abuser turned born-again Christian who never went to college, yet makes a living padding around the lawn of his oceanside home wearing sandals and loose-fitting print shirts, buying up distressed non-profit colleges and turning them into for-profit money machines.

Improbably, Clifford emerges from the documentary looking OK. When asked what he brings to the deals he brokers, he cites nothing educational. Instead, it's the "Three M's: Money, Management, and Marketing." And hey, there's nothing wrong with that. A college may have deep traditions and dedicated faculty, but if it's bankrupt, anonymous, and incompetently run, it won't do students much good. "Nonprofit" colleges that pay their leaders executive salaries...

Every year around this time colleges and universities release their acceptance rates. Every year the most selective colleges report that acceptance rates are at an all-time low, which freaks out the next class of high school juniors to no end. So every year I make the following point, which is that it's not as hard for qualified students to get into a selective college as it seems. Here's why:

1) The general perception of a tightening admissions environment is highly driven by the annual publication of institutional acceptance rates. People arrive at the seemingly reasonable conclusion that if the acceptance rates at all the top schools decline (as they have been) then it's harder to get into a top school.

2) That is not necessarily the case. That's because there are at least three possible explanations for declining acceptance rates: (A) A larger number of qualified students are apply...

Earlier this week I wrote an article for The New Republic blaming Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota for killing the Obama administration's college-graduation initiative. The crux of the matter is this: In 2009 the House of Representatives passed a bill cutting out for-profit banks as the middleman in the federal student loan process. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that this would save taxpayers $87-billion over 10 years. Anticipating that the bill would pass, colleges across America began switching away from bank-based loans. In March 2010, the CBO issued a new estimate of how much money the bill would save from March 2010 forward. Accordingly, the colleges that switched before March 2010 weren't included in the estimate. So the estimated future savings dropped to $67-billion. Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, insisted that Congress use the new estimate in...

They say that everything's relative, and this is certainly true in politics. Normally, the President signing a bill eliminating $87-billion in corporate student-loan welfare would be a huge deal. But when it happens in the same legislation that overhauls the entire American health-care system, people take less notice. And the successful student-loan reform, in turn, overshadowed the collapse of the Obama Administration's college-graduation agenda. That's the subject of an article I wrote for this week's New Republic.

In a nutshell, the student-loan reform was more a triumph of good government than an improvement in education policy. Cutting out for-profit banks as the middlemen in the federal student-loan program was a huge achievement. But nearly half of the savings were either defined into non-existence by Kent Conrad (the article explains how this happened) or targeted for health...

One of the most interesting things going on in higher education is the Bologna Process, which is (to oversimplify a lot) an attempt to create a European common market for higher education. In the past, European countries have had very different ways of signifying postsecondary learning, both at the course level (credits) and credential level (degrees). This created a lot of friction and uncertainty in the labor market, making it harder for students to bring credits across national borders and for academics and employers to fairly judge the value of foreign degrees. Now Europe is moving to a standard 3+2 degrees cycle (3 years for a bachelors and 2 years for a Master's, in American terms) and creating a great deal more transparency with respect to what, exactly, students who have earned credits from a given program or university have actually learned. That transparency, in turn, is the...

Kevin Drum cites an Economist poll finding that while the public prefers spending cuts over tax increases by a 62-percent to 5-percent margin as a means of cutting the deficit, the public also doesn't want to cut spending in any specific area, except for foreign aid, which makes up less than 1 percent of spending. "Ah, the American public. God love 'em." says Drum. Jacob Weisberg used similar data a couple of months ago to level a broader indictment against "the childishness, ignorance and growing incoherence of the public at large."

I think these polls actually reveal very little useful information. Everyone pays taxes and the large majority of people pay federal taxes. The benefits of most federal programs, by contrast, are either hard to quantify and personalize (national defense) or vary substantially among different groups (Social Security, Medicare). Thus, the general tax increase...

Last month I wrote about how Southeastern University in Washington, DC finally collapsed in de-accreditation after being allowed to persist in mediocrity and failure for far too long, leaving a trail of dropouts, loan defaults, and frustrated students in its wake. Now comes news that seven of those students have sued the university for fraud in DC Superior Court--or to be more precise, sued the Graduate School, which absorbed the remnants of Southeastern after the university's doors shuttered last fall. The plaintiffs are asking for $10-million in punitive damages and millions more in compensation. You can read the complaint here.

I don't know how strong the case is from a legal standpoint. But its's worth considering some excerpts from the particulars, all of which ring true:

In exchange for the promises made by the Defendant, the Plaintiffs paid substantial amounts of money in...