The Obama administration's "Blueprint for Reform" was released a couple of weeks ago to much fanfare. It hasn't attracted much attention in the higher-education world because it's a plan to reauthorize the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But if you're in the teacher-preparation business or you work for a university-based school of education, a couple of provisions are worth noting.

First, on top of page 15, is a call for "state-level data systems that link information on teacher- and principal-preparation programs to the job placement, student growth, and retention outcomes of their graduates." Translation: the administration wants to keep track of where students go to work after they leave teacher-preparation programs. Then it wants to gauge how effective those former students are at teaching, by measuring how much their students' scores grow over the course of a year...

Yesterday morning, the American Enterprise Institute released a new report on Hispanic college graduation rates co-authored by Andrew Kelly, Mark Schneider, and myself. It shows how many colleges are falling short in helping Hispanic students earn degrees. And not just because of poor high-school preparation and economic factors—our analysis found that colleges with similar levels of admissions selectivity have very different rates of success. The report includes interviews with colleges that had both unusually high and unusually low Hispanic graduation rates, as compared to similar institutions. The constrasts are striking. Colleges can make a real difference in helping students earn credentials, if they focus resources and attention in the right way.

Hours later, Congress announced a final compromise deal on student-loan reform. In order to pass health care, and accommodate a

Working on federal policy and keeping your wits about you requires a pretty high tolerance for cognitive dissonance and general b.s. But I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this: In September 2009, the House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, or SAFRA. The bill was designed to save $87-billion over 10 years by moving students from the more-expensive FFEL progam, in which the government subsidizes private banks to make loans, to the Direct Loan (DL) program, in which the government lends money directly. The plan was to use the $87-billion to boost Pell grants, improve community colleges, and help more low-income students earn degrees.

When the bill passed the House, it looked very likely that it would pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Colleges can switch from the FFEL program to DL quickly, but not instantaneously. Seeing the...

In response to the question Diane Auer Jones poses below about student loan reforms, my colleague Ben Miller (who has a frighteningly detailed understanding of the intricacies of federal loan policy) offers the following:

Because the piece has a lot going on, let's go through it one step at a time. Jones writes:

On one hand the Administration is trying to garner support for another jobs bill, yet on the other, it wants to eliminate an entire industry.

No matter how you run the numbers, the entire student loan industry will NOT be eliminated. In the doomsday scenario, about one-third of the 35,000 jobs--about 11,550--could be lost, but it's also possible that jobs could be gained. No one knows for sure. If there are losses, they are going to be in two areas: marketing and origination. Traditionally, loan origination means just moving the funds from the lender to the recipient. The...

Ashley Thorne of the National Association of Scholars has written a response / rebuttal to my new Chronicle column, which argues that cash-strapped colleges and universities would benefit from a "Race to the Top" for higher education. She's friendly about it and agrees with some of my points, but in the end we have very different ideas about the appropriate scope of higher education. 

On the particulars, Thorne seems to share many of my views about the need to improve preparation, reduce remediation, facilitate credit transfer, help people learn and graduate and get good jobs and so on. But underlying her critique is a strong thread of conviction that too many people are going to college. And I just don't believe this to be true. For decades now we've been investing huge amounts of time and money in growing the supply of college graduates. And for decades the job market has responded by...

With the prospect of President Obama's student-loan bill passing through the budget reconciliation bill fast approaching, Sen. Lamar Alexander (Republican of Tennessee) took to the Washington Post op-ed page to tell some lies about the bill. Alexander, who used to be the Secretary of Education and knows better, said:

Starting in July, all 19 million students who want government-backed loans will line up at offices designated by the U.S. Education Department ... the government should disclose that getting your student loan will become about as enjoyable as going to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

That sounds pretty terrible, spending hour upon hour sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs beneath soul-deadening fluorescent lights, waiting for your number to pop up on a screen so you can shuffle up to a window and listen to a surly civil service worker tell you that you won't be able to...

One of life's more vexing minor challenges is picking which sentences in a given Thomas Friedman column to mock. I'll start here:

Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.

Stuff like this elevates preemptive self-parody to high art. The facile Jetsons / Flintstones analogy comes quickly on the heels of more vintage Friedman-speak ("We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification") before being immediately (and thankfully) abandoned. Note to columnists: if you have to announce the subject of your column as the subject of your column, you haven't written a very good column.

The rest of the column consists of simply reprinting the thoughts of Intel CEO Paul Otellini on "competitiveness."  Friedman describes acting as Otellini's scribe as "my public...

Almost exactly a year ago, I was flipping through The Washington Post over morning coffee when this headline caught my eye: "Southeastern University's Accreditation at Risk." I was intrigued. Universities don't lose accreditation very often, particularly those in the traditional public and nonprofit sector. Near the end of the article came this sentence:

Accreditors noted that they had given considerable latitude to Southeastern because of its mission to educate a diverse and underserved student population but that the same problems had persisted for 30 years.

The accreditor had lowered its standards for Southeastern because it enrolled diverse and underserved students? Really? That sounded pretty terrible, so I wrote a blog post saying so. One commenter (sadly, lost in blog platform transition, so I'm paraphrasing) responded by saying no, no, of course we did no such thing, and it was...

Today my colleagues Erin Dillon and Robin Smiles published a new report detailing how a group of HBCU's successfully and dramatically reduced student-loan default rates (Chronicle coverage here). It offers an important lesson about incentives and public accountability.

The story begins in 1990, when the federal government cracked down on thousands of fly-by-night colleges that were defrauding the government by signing up students for bogus loans. The national loan default rate peaked at 22.4 percent that year, costing taxpayers billions. Congress responded by banning any college where more than 25 percent of borrowers defaulted for three consecutive years from the program. The law was a spectacular success -- over 1,000 colleges were kicked out and the national default rate dropped to the mid-single digits.

Most legitimate colleges were unaffected by the 25 percent standard. But a few ...

I heartily recommend Daniel DeVise's profile of Trinity Washington University president Pat McGuire in this weekend's Washington Post magazine. McGuire and her colleagues embody much of what is good and right about higher education. By transforming a failing women's college into thriving university dedicated to serving minority and first-generation students, she is working in the best traditions of Catholic education. DeVise's article is comprehensive so just a few things to add: Trinity's success in serving minority students stands in marked contrast to other D.C.-area institutions. Trinity is drawing from the same pool of students coming out of D.C.'s notorious public school system. It is a low-resource institution -- McGuire, after 20 years in the presidency, makes $202,000 a year. Many colleges cite lack of money and poor student preparation as an excuse for appalling failure rates. ...