Beyond College Rankings

The choice of whether and where to attend college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality…popular rankings of college quality, such as those produced by U.S. News, Forbes, and Money, focus only on a small fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that contribute the most to student success.

Source: Beyond College Rankings : A Value-Added Approach to Assessing
Two- and Four-Year Schools, Brookings Institution, ,Jonathan Rothwell
and Siddharth Kulkarni

Tuition and College Quality

For better or worse Americans associate high quality with high price. It’s true for colleges and universities. The higher the tuition the higher the implied quality. The fact is that most students do not pay the list tuition and there are many high quality schools with reasonable tuition.

How to Separate Higher Education Politics from Facts

The politics of higher education confuses and distracts you from the decisions you need to make. What you need are facts. Here is a separation of higher education politics from the facts you need.

Buzz Today Source: The New York Times “College, the Great Unleveler” And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where…More Americans than ever enroll in college, but the graduates who emerge a few years later indicate that instead of reducing inequality, our system of higher education reinforces it…Higher education is becoming a caste system, separate and unequal for students of different family incomes. Where students attend affects their chances of graduating and how indebted they will become in the process…invest more in Pell grants and community colleges It is a fact that community colleges represent a much lower cost of education. Typically the average annual cost is $3,000 to attend a community college. This makes enrollment at a community college a very attractive means to get an associate’s degree or the credits for the “gen ed” of a bachelor’s degree. But this choice is not without its negative implications. As the comments in BUZZ Today indicate, “where students attend affects their chances of graduating.” This statement could not be more accurate when it comes to the decision to attend a higher cost four year institution vs. going to a community college first. According to the US Department of Education, the official six-year graduation rate for four-year public universities is 57% compared to the official three-year graduation rate of 22% for public two-year colleges.

So what is the take away for you as you look at these facts? The take away is that the success you achieve from education depends far more on what you bring to your education than the specific institution you attend. Harvard University graduates well over 90% of its students. The reason Harvard has such a high graduation rate is because it is so highly selective at admissions. Conversely, community colleges have open enrollment, essentially admitting anyone and everyone. The fact is that Harvard students are more qualified from the point of admission which significantly increases the graduation rate from the institution.

Here is the bottom line of the politics vs. facts of higher education. When it comes to your individual success, the most important thing is what you put into your education. If you could get into Harvard University you would most likely graduate, not because of the institution, but because of “who you are”. Conversely, should you decide to go to a community college first, the fact is that, just as in the Harvard University case, your success will depend much more on “who you are” than the characteristics of the institution.

So when it comes to politics and policy, there is a lot of energy being expended on the institutional issues – for-profit vs. not for profit, selective admissions vs. open enrollment, high cost vs. low cost, etc. In the end, the fact is that your success in education depends most upon the decisions that you make about yourself. For help with those personal decisions see “Your Future is Calling” for how to tips, help and useful exercises.

Three Reasons a Degree is Important

“Is a College Degree Worth It?” There are three important reasons the answer is almost always Yes.

A degree is a credential, it communicates important information to the external world. The first reason credentials are important is because employers screen and select new employees based on the credential. Automated resume screening software screens job candidates before an interview. The second reason is one we have explored before. On average, each progression of  accredited degree (Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s, Professional/Ph.D.) produces more life time income than the degree immediately below it. This is true even though some associate’s degrees produce higher income than some bachelor’s degrees.  The third important reason has to do with the motivation of the learner. This last one is about you – as in Your Future is Calling. This is the reason we will explore in depth here in what I call the lessons of CS50/CS50x at Harvard University.

Buzz TodaySource:  David J. Malan CS50 blog: I am a Senior Lecturer on Computer Science at Harvard University I received my A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same in 1999, 2004, and 2007, respectively. I teach Harvard College’s introductory course, Computer Science 50 otherwise known as CS50. In October 2012 Harvard launched a MOOC called CS50x. 150,349 students registered to take the course online. 1,388 or .9% of the original registrants received a certificate of completion for taking the course.

The data in the BUZZ Today documents the level of completion of the MOOC number CS50x offered starting in October, 2012 from Harvard University. The percentage of enrollment that received a certificate of completion was .9%. CS50 is the core course offered on the Harvard campus to students enrolled in degree seeking programs at this prestigious University. During the fall of 2012 there were 706 Harvard students enrolled in CS50. Of those 706 originally enrolled, 703 or 99.6% completed the course.

With so many nines floating around it may be confusing. The results for completion are .9% vs. 99.6%. Just to be totally clear, this is something under one percent vs. nearly one hundred percent for the same course from the most famous University in America. What does it mean?

Clearly it is not about the commonly referenced issues of course content, college reputation, faculty status/capability or time of the year. It is the same course, the same university at the same time. I will assert that what is different is the student doing the learning and more specifically the motivation of the students enrolled in the MOOC CS50x versus the motivation of the on campus student enrolled in CS50.

Here is the specific conclusion relative to the headline that the degree is important. The most important distinction between the students enrolled in CS50x, the online MOOC and CS50, the Harvard University campus course, is that all of the students on campus were students enrolled in a degree program. They were degree seeking students. In contrast, none of the students enrolled in CS50x, the online MOOC were degree seeking students. CS50x does not award college credit. By design, completion of CS50x online does not qualify for credit toward an accredited degree. There is one other important distinction between CS50x and CS50. The campus based CS50 students actually paid thousands of dollars of tuition to be enrolled while the CS50x MOOC students enrolled for free.

So the key comparisons are:

CS50x – Free MOOCM .9% completion
CS50 – Tuition paying and degree seeking 99.6% completion

This is the same course from the same institution taught by the same faculty member. One is online and one is on campus. All of those who enrolled in CS50x knew it was online before they registered.

It’s clearly not about the cost, the content, the fame of the faculty member, nor the reputation of the institution. These are all factors frequently cited as differentiators. I assert that it isn’t even about the quality of the students attending even though Harvard’s highly selective admission policies are designed to assure high quality students. On a pure random basis, with 150,349 registrations for a Harvard course there had to be tens of thousands with the intellectual capacity of those attending CS50 on the Harvard campus.

There is only one defensible inference to be drawn from this gigantic .9% vs. 99.6% gap. The implication has to be that the campus based students were motivated to complete while the online CS50x students had no comparable compelling purpose to complete the course. The investment of the campus students represented a step toward an important credential – in this case, an accredited Harvard University degree. For the online MOOC students this was just another course out of thousands available.

And it is with this evidence that I share the third important reason for earning a degree.  This third reason is about you, the learner. The credential, that is, the degree itself is a powerful motivator to do the work to learn and prosper from the effort.

Oh, by the way, I think this data has important implications for the outlook of MOOCs as the disruptive force in higher education. I will let you draw your own inferences about this issue. My belief is that MOOCs as they are constituted today will not displace the higher education as we know it.