The Higher Education Bubble

[dcan]

I may have posted these in another thread, but if not they show how "alternative" education is preparing to face off against "traditional" outlets.

1. Straighterline to offer critical-thinking tests.

The company, StraighterLine, announced on Thursday that beginning this fall it will offer students access to three leading critical-thinking tests, allowing them to take their results to employers or colleges to demonstrate their proficiency in certain academic areas.

Why is this an important example of the new face of education?

2. Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming

As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren’t there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers? Employers like the current system, because the huge (often over $100,000) cost of demonstrating competency is borne by the student, not by them. Employers seemingly have little incentive to look for alternative certification. That is why reformers like me cannot get employer organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take alternative certification seriously. But if companies can find good employees with high-school diplomas who have demonstrated necessary skills and competency via some cheaper (to society) means, they might be able to hire workers more cheaply than before–paying wages that are high by high-school-graduate standards, but low relative to college-graduate norms. Employers can capture the huge savings of reduced certification costs. And students avoid huge debt, get four years more time in the labor force, and do not face the risks of not getting through college. Since millions of college grads have jobs which really do not use skills developed in college anyhow, alternative certification is more attractive than ever.

Back to StraighterLine, a company that has brought relatively high-quality college-level courses to undergraduates online at very modest costs. Through StraighterLine, a student spending a thousand bucks or so a year could get a large hunk, if not all, of a year of college-level learning if he or she applied herself. The biggest problem, as Burck told me, is that accreditation agencies refuse to accredit courses (they only accredit degrees), even though, arguably, a degree is simply a collection of courses. But the college-dominated accrediting agencies, seem to not want new forms of competition for existing schools.

Enter ETS and CAE. ETS has operated the famed SAT test for the College Board and owns and operates many other iconic tests, such as the TOEFL, GRE, and Praxis. Through affiliated organizations, it is big into employee testing. Via StraighterLine, students, for a modest fee, will be able to take the iSkills test that “measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology.” CAE is a powerhouse organization, with a board laden with leaders from the college world (e.g, Benno Schmidt, former Yale president; Charlie Reed, chancellor of the Cal State University System; Michael Crow, president of Arizona State; Sara Martinez Tucker, former Under Secretary of Education). The CLA assesses critical learning and writing skills through use of cognitively challenging problems. It is the test used by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa to support the research in Academically Adrift, my favorite recent higher-education book. Hundreds of universities use the test.

Students can tell employers, “I did very well on the CLA and iSkills test, strong predictors of future positive work performance,” and, implicitly “you can hire me for less than you pay college graduates who score less well on these tests.”

The article also mentions Saylor, Khan, and others.