May 19, 2012, 2:47 pm

As Elite Colleges Invite the World Online, Questions Remain on Their Business Plans

When Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this month that they were forming a partnership to offer online courses free to the masses, they pledged $60-million to the effort, dubbed edX. That’s about twice the median budget of four-year colleges and universities in the United States. All for courses that, for now, won’t bring in a penny in tuition revenue.

Harvard and MIT are not alone. Their announcement followed closely behind a similar one just a few weeks earlier by another group of elite institutions: the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford and Princeton Universities. That effort, through a new company called Coursera, was backed by $16-million in venture capital.

With some real dollars at stake, do these elite universities know something about the future of higher education that the rest of…

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May 2, 2012, 6:59 pm

Did Anyone Ask the Students?, Part 2

By Jeff Selingo

Part I of my conversations with students at six colleges and universities about the future of higher ed happened to appear the same day there was yet another announcement that has the potential to chip away at the legacy system. The biggest name brand in higher ed, Harvard University, announced that it was joining MITx, the online platform that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started in December to offer free courses to the masses.

You can see complete coverage of the new edX effort by my colleagues here. But one piece of the plan I wanted to mention is that Harvard and MIT plan to offer certificates of completion. That’s similar to what other institutions, such as Stanford and Michigan, are doing with their massive courses.

What happens to the value of the college degree when top universities are essentially giving away some of their courses free? That was the essence …

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May 1, 2012, 5:13 pm

Did Anyone Ask the Students?, Part 1

By Jeff Selingo

“Do you actually believe in this stuff?” one of my colleagues at The Chronicle asked me last week.

The stuff he was referring to were the disruptive innovations that are supposed to revolutionize how higher ed is delivered in this country, a topic I’ve been writing a lot about lately.

I had just returned from the Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University, a gathering that had attracted some 800 educational entrepreneurs, CEO’s, and investors to hear talks about the future of education and see demonstrations from more than 100 companies promising to bring massive change to the tradition-bound industry.

As I considered his question, I started to tell him about recent campus visits that had much more of an impact on my thinking about this subject than the Arizona conference. In the last month, I have talked with students at six institutions that represent nearly…

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April 19, 2012, 12:36 pm

Education Innovators: Preaching (as Usual) to the Choir

By Jeff Selingo

Scottsdale, Ariz. — Michael Crow, the ubiquitous president of Arizona State University, opened the Education Innovation Summit here this week by giving his views of what ails higher ed. He called it “filiopietism,” or the excessive veneration of tradition. Not enough students are coming into the system, he said, and not enough are completing a credential to reach national goals. Quoting his father, Crow called this a “piss-poor performance.”

I’ve seen Crow give similar keynote presentations to graduate-school deans and college presidents in recent months, although those speeches didn’t seem as hard-nosed as this one. He admitted upfront that this audience probably would be more sympathetic to his message of what’s wrong with higher ed than those other two were.

Before him were 800 people, mostly educational entrepreneurs, CEOs,

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April 4, 2012, 4:55 am

A Liberal-Arts Consortium Experiments With Course Sharing

By Jeff Selingo

In discussions about the future of higher education, there’s often plenty of hand-wringing over the precarious fate of the hundreds of small, tuition-dependent private colleges scattered throughout the country. With many of them located in out-of-the-way places, their isolation means that merging or even collaborating with other institutions to reduce costs is typically not an option.

But advances in technology can now link together institutions that are separated by thousands of miles. An experiment by a group of 16 liberal-arts colleges and universities in the South might serve as the blueprint for other small institutions looking for ways to maintain a core of academic programs but offer enough variety to attract students.

The concept behind the group’s New Paradigm Initiative is simple: the 16 institutions of the Associated Colleges of the South, which include Davidson…

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March 21, 2012, 6:58 pm

For Have-Nots, the Rockier Road to a College Degree Increases the Appeal of Alternatives

By Jeff Selingo

In public forums about the drastic changes that higher ed may undergo in the coming years, one question inevitably gets asked of those advocating market disruption: Would the alternatives to the traditional degree pathway be good enough for their own children?

The answers are always nuanced, and I have never heard anyone say they’d surely send their kids to Western Governors University or choose a certificate from MITx over a degree from nearly any four-year college.

The underlying concern in the question, of course, is that disruption in academe could worsen the divide between the

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March 8, 2012, 4:16 pm

The Student Swirl

By Jeff Selingo

College campuses are full of long-held assumptions about how academe works. A perilous one for the future of American higher education is that high-school students pick a college, enroll, and—two or four years later—graduate from the same institution.

That pathway hasn’t been the norm for a majority of college students for quite some time, and the findings from two major projects released in the past few weeks reveal that student behavior in obtaining a college credential is becoming even less predictable: It’s much more of a “swirl” than a straight path (a phenomenon identified by Clifford Adelman in the 1980s). That swirl has important implications for policy makers and college leaders.

The first data points come in a new report on a group of students we know very little about from government statistics: transfers.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center…

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February 20, 2012, 4:55 am

Taking Some of the Guesswork Out of the Value-of-College Question

By Jeff Selingo

The lifetime wage premium that accompanies a college degree has long been the best selling point for colleges trying to attract students. The marketing pitch went something like this: Don’t worry how much you spend on our degree, we all know that getting a college credential is worth it.

Of course, not all colleges or majors are created equal. And it’s nearly impossible for consumers to get any information about how much a graduate in a specific major from a particular university earns. That’s probably one of the best measures of the return on investment in higher education, but, as with so many other tools that would allow consumers to make bottom-line comparisons, colleges are loath to share such information. In the absence of data, it’s easier for colleges to sell the dream of higher education at any cost.

But with tuition prices continuing to climb and the economy stuck…

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February 4, 2012, 1:54 pm

What Free Market in Higher Ed?

By Jeff Selingo

President Obama couldn’t have picked a more opportune time to put colleges on notice about their rising costs. Days after Mr. Obama threatened colleges with the loss of some federal aid during his State of the Union address, hundreds of private-college presidents descended on Washington for their annual meeting. A few of them stuck around for the annual meeting of Christian colleges, which followed a few days later.

The talk among the college presidents about the Obama administration’s proposals was similar at both meetings. While they welcomed the potential additional dollars that were part of the proposals, they didn’t like the strings that were attached.

“The very issue of setting tuition is the principal fiduciary responsibility of a college,” David L. Warren, the head of the private-college association, told me.

During a panel discussion at the meeting of…

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January 26, 2012, 2:40 pm

A Disrupted Higher-Ed System

By Jeff Selingo

The “disruption” of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard’s Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players.

What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and “rebuilt with people at the center.”

In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville.

But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed?

While amenities and…