Category Archives: Economics

Evolution or Revolution

By Ray Watkins | Published: September 1, 2010
In 25 or 50 years, when someone or other, most likely a graduate student, writes a history of U.S. Higher Education in our time, the New Faculty Majority "Program for Change: 2010-2030" will have to play a key role. I don't think it matters if the particulars of the program are achieved or not; its historical importance is its attempt to imagine a new employment system in U.S. higher education using a model developed largely in California and Canada. I think that it's broad enough to be useful to almost anyone interested in reforming higher education. It's our, "What is to be Done." OK, maybe it's only our "Port Huron Statement." Hopefully, in articulating this vision, the NFM...
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Learning Consumerism

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 25, 2010
When I was a kid, the weeks before the start of the school year were a joy. I loved rulers, and paper, and protractors, and compasses and binders. I still love the technology of my childhood. I also know that this impulse needs to be held in check less my house become an office supply store. That's consumerism. We can't really blame school for it, but schooling can't escape it, and too often encourages it. As technology develops, consumerism develops right along with it, creating as many new problems as opportunities. Now we hear that smart phones are a "must-have" for students (Tech gadgets are must-have school supplies). There's nothing surprising in that-- the commodification of life is ever...
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The Tortoise Picks Up Speed

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 18, 2010
Here's a short piece (Former Govs. Prod States on Digital Education )that seems to suggest that the tortise in the digital education race-- the public educatin system-- may be slowly catching up to the hare-- the for profit sector. It seems to have a focus on K-12 but there's no reason it can't exapnd its reach. Slowly but surely the public sector is going to wake up... What's impressisve about the Digital Learning Council is that it iincludes people from both Apple and Microsoft, as well as administative types. Power and money, any way you look at it. Now if they would only realize that they can use this technology to make a college degree cheaply available to working...
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Surprise!

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 16, 2010
Here's a short passage that I bet just about everyone would find surprising:
President Obama has set a noble goal of having the United States lead the world in college graduation rates by 2020. It is an aim that will empower individuals and strengthen the country as a whole, but it certainly won't be easy. Our current graduation rates are far behind our international competitors and we will be hard pressed to meet our own college-educated workforce capacity by the end of the decade.
It's from a student advocacy group called Education is a Right: "We Need Vigilance in the Higher Education Community". What? The U.S., the most powerful nation in the world, isn't the leader in...
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Thinking Small

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 26, 2010
The entire modern history of higher education in the U.S. is littered with various people-- inevitably but not always crediting themselves with liberal intentions-- wringing their hands over the difficulties of class mobility. No matter the context, the basic idea is always the same: not everyone wants to go to college, so why should we make them? It's an appeal to our sacred values of individuality. We are all unique, we should all be the masters of our own destiny. Chris Meyer's recent piece in Education Week (The Inadvertent Bigotry of Inappropriate Expectations) has all of the right elements: the liberal credentialing ("As someone who founded and ran a college-prep enrichment program for at-risk secondary school students...") and the...
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The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 21, 2010
I have some colleagues-- all in the non-profit education business-- who feel a little too smug about the for profit industry. It's naive, of course, to think that the for-profit industry schools are, by and large, less ethical than the traditional universities, with their multimillion dollar athletic programs (essentially an advertising and recruitment expense as extravagant as any drug company) and two-tier employment system of a few tenured professors supported by the many non-tenured, par time teachers and graduate students. No sector can afford to throw stones in these glass houses. The for profits, for example, are no more likely to put students into debt, according to Neal McCluskey (Politicians Are The Problem For Higher Ed). What's unique about...
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