The latest scrutiny in the for-profit education space comes from one of the regional accreditation bodies and their attention directed toward ”accreditation shopping.”
Recently, I met with officials from a university who had requested to talk with me regarding my experience in online education. The institution they represented was a fairly well respected state school that was located near two large metropolitan areas. It had also been dabbling in online programs for a number of years, first offering them within their community to adult learners and then expanding them regionally. Total enrollment numbers for their online programs were not significant.
What I found interesting about the conversation was that the three individuals I met with had been conducting “research” and visiting other schools for six years. That’s right — six years! What I tried to convey to them was that, in the ever expanding and evolving world of post-secondary online education, SPEED WINS. Read the rest of this entry »
Is the Obama vverhaul of student financing a bad thing? Absolutely not! Although I stand opposed to the recent health care legislation and the government intervention necessary to implement it, the overhaul of higher education finance is a good thing. Now don’t ask me how higher education financing slipped into a health care bill, but at its face value good things could come of it. Its benefits include:
1. Students will borrow directly from the federal government and bypass the middlemen (banks) who have made sizable amounts of money from fees associated with the previous form of lending.
2. Pell Grant funding should increase helping more of those who are in financial need earn an education.
3. Loan repayments for graduates will be capped at 10% of a graduate’s salary rather than the 15% that it is today.
Will we see the intended $68 million in savings? The jury will be out on that one for a while, but these recent changes are a step in the right direction.
I know many people including family and friends who are just unwilling, within reason, to try new things and establish new goals. I am no philosopher or sociologist, but life at times just sucks the wind out you. This battering, if ongoing and relentless, can produce this unwillingness to step out to achieve new goals or at least experience new things.
This is true with folks who know that completing their degree will mean a better life and more self confidence but can’t take that first step. Some have let life knock them down and they refuse to get up. Others have established a personal “comfort zone” and don’t want to venture outside it. With the advent and acceptance of online learning, the goal of earning or completing a degree is more within reach than ever before — for any adult, no matter how young or old.
I shared this quote by Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, with my family last week. It really illustrates this point. I hope it will mean as much to you as it did to the Redgates:
“Something in human nature tempts us to stay where we’re comfortable. We try to find a plateau, a resting place, where we have comfortable stress and adequate finances. Where we have comfortable associations with people, without the intimidation of meeting new people and entering strange situations. Of course, we all need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation. But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned, we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old, whether twenty, forty, or eighty.”
In the movie City Slickers, Billy Crystal plays a radio advertising salesman going through a mid-life crisis. He and his friends deal with the humdrumness of life by participating in a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado — an experience that turns out to be a kind of epiphany for all of them. At the end of the movie as they prepare to return to New York and the familiar routine, Billy Crystal explains to one of those friends the concept of a “do-over.” Do you remember, he says, when you used to play ball as a kid? Sometimes when you fouled things up, you would get a “do-over.” Simply, it was a second chance to swing at the pitch.