Monthly Archives: August 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 class and poor kids. Then the race really would be on…

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 graduation rates? Nope. The piece is remarkable in other ways, too, particularly in the way that it links for-profit education, socioeconomic class, and government funding.

I just hope that our administrators realize that being cautious in recruitment, and allowing a clear picture of defaults and job placement rates to emerge, can only help us reach out beyond the class boundaries of traditional education. I also wish Education is a Right would be just as concerned with employment practices in all of higher education, but that’s a story for another day.