September 2012
1 post
The Price of Prestige
By the time Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka met with me last summer for an interview about my involvement with higher-education reform efforts in Texas, I—and fellow reformers—had already been painted as barbarians at the gate by the academic establishment. All for a handful of commonsense suggestions for reform that almost anyone running any other kind of organization wouldn’t bat an eye over.
So...
May 2012
1 post
3 tags
Taking Entrepreneurial Education Further
Acton students leave with MBAs, of course, but they don’t leave as “MBA Hares.”* And with the changes to the program we’re enacting this year, that distinction will become even starker. The gist of the changes—the most substantial in ten years—is this: we’re moving even further toward simulating what it’s like to be a real entrepreneur, in the trenches, launching a business. In other words,...
April 2012
2 posts
In the News: Toppling Towers, the Demotion of...
There’s an encouraging trend developing: reportage on the revolution happening in education is moving further away from the fringe and toward a more mainstream audience. In the last few weeks, the Washington Post has asked, “Do college professors work hard enough?”, which, while still sensational, would have sounded like blasphemy a year or two ago. The Wall Street Journal is...
More on the Quality-of-Learning Gap
The Washington Post recently pointed out higher education’s quality-of-learning gap and highlighted UT-Austin in particular:
Last year, UT freshmen scored an average 1261 on the [College Learning Assessment], which is graded on a scale similar to that of the SAT. Seniors averaged 1303. Both groups scored very well, but seniors fared little better than freshmen […]
We’ve talked...
March 2012
1 post
The Acton Education Innovation Challenge
This month we officially launched the Acton Education Innovation Challenge, which pairs aspiring education disruptors with successful CEOs and entrepreneurs who are changing the face of education in the United States. Registration is open until May 18.
It’s all part of a larger effort to match rising stars with legends (we call them “Guides”) in their respective fields....
February 2012
3 posts
The National Review: Federal largesse can't prop...
This week The National Review asked me to comment on the educational proposals President Obama is trying to push through. Here’s the gist of the article:
“Race to the Top” federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees … [O]ver the next decade, many universities may bankrupt...
1 tag
The Changing Value of Tenure
There’s something interesting happening when a professor—at a prestigious university no less—gives up his hard-won tenure to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity in innovative education. But, as The Chronicle of Higher Education mentions in a recent piece, that’s exactly what one Stanford professor’s done :
And then this week, the Stanford University professor who...
2 tags
5 Questions from the Dallas Morning News
So, are you and President Obama now on the same page? In his State of the Union address and during a later speech at the University of Michigan, he more or less put universities on notice. Washington will pay attention to how well they spend money and how much they charge students.
That’s the first question from a Q&A I had last week with the Dallas Morning News’s...
January 2012
1 post
2 tags
Feedback on the Business Education Summit
Denis Saulnier—an education technologist and one of over fifty leaders in education who attended last fall’s summit on the future of business education—this week gave a breakdown of his experience at the event and had this to say:
Overall, an incredibly impressive—and more importantly, inspiring—event for those concerned with business education and education in general.
That’s...
December 2011
1 post
1 tag
Is the End of Publish-or-Perish Near?
On The American Interest’s website, Walter Russell Mead writes this week:
In the humanities and most of the social “sciences”, the Ph.D and peer review machine as it now exists is a vastly expensive mediocrity factory. It makes education both more expensive and less effective than it needs to be. There are islands and even archipelagos of excellence in the sea of sludge but we needn’t...
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
A Summit on the Future of Business Education
In my experience, university faculty typically fall into two camps: (1) teachers who care deeply about their students, and (2) political types who care more about their own prestige. Sadly, the professors most often featured in the press come mostly from the political group—teachers are too busy teaching to waste time on political spin. In September, we were blessed to gather at Acton a roomful of...
1 tag
Transformational Education in Action: Children's...
What do you get when give kids the chance to
Make something with his or her own hands;
Sell it (safely) to a stranger; and
Experience the freedom (and responsibility) of having a little extra spending money as a reward?
I call these three things the “3 Magic Seeds of Entrepreneurship” (pdf). And we plant those seeds each fall at the Children’s Business Fair (CBF) in Austin,...
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
Godin on Modern "Factory" Education
Seth Godin asks the right question about modern education in a recent blog post:
As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable,...
August 2011
3 posts
3 tags
New Models for Status Quo Universities
Is it possible to create a new type of public university, where professors and administrators make clear promises to their students and deliver an exceptional education at a reasonable cost? It’s not only possible, it’s a reality at the University of Minnesota–Rochester, where Chancellor Stephen Lehmkuhle has shown that a results-oriented approach to education can help graduates lead more...
2 tags
A Salute to Great Teachers
Do you remember a special teacher or coach who changed your life? Me too. Extraordinary teachers quite literally change the world because of the students they inspire. That’s why, a few years ago, our Acton Foundation put out a call to entrepreneurial students all over the country to help us identify extraordinary teachers. The response was impressive, and we ultimately invited over thirty...
3 tags
Praising Excellence in Higher Education
One of the great joys of being a teacher is getting the chance to work with other teachers who change the lives of students. Just this week I came across the great work that Brad Hancock is doing as the Director of the Neeley Entrepreneurship Center at Texas Christian University, especially with regard to helping students answer the questions “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” in its Values and...
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Improving Higher Education in Texas
It’s time for the debate about reforming higher education in Texas to move past disparaging professors or demonizing reformers, so we can capitalize on ways to improve the learning and research at our Texas universities. The cost of a college degree is too high, and our graduates are not as well prepared for productive and meaningful lives as they should be. It seems everyone agrees on this. Plus,...
4 tags
The Innovative University: Clay Christensen's...
Often the rhetoric concerning higher education reform is so heated that it becomes unhealthy. After all, there’s a lot of money riding on the outcome. But for those who want a thoughtful, reasoned—even gentle—approach to the extraordinary opportunities (and massive problems) facing higher education, there’s Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s new book, The Innovative University. I’ve had...
4 tags
Khan Academy and the Coming Tsunami
Those of us lucky enough to be on the front lines of education innovation see new advances in technology and pedagogy on an almost daily basis.
Just look at Kahn Academy, which is helping a 10-year-old learn advanced trigonometry, as this excellent in-depth Wired profile of the company shows.
Some critics dismiss Khan as just another “lecture and drill” tool. But this is missing the point. It’s...
Surplus Truck Windshields, Surplus PhDs, and the...
While working in Russia in the 1990s, I saw factory after factory continuing to produce products that no one wanted. I have one particularly vivid memory of a small town outside of Nizhny Novgorod, where thousands of unneeded truck windshields had been piled into a ravine to make a rickety bridge for automobiles.
The truck itself was no longer being produced, but the windshield factory chugged...
June 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Can Kids Teach Themselves Biotechnology?
Yes, they can, and even when it’s presented in a foreign language, according to some of the research done by education scientist Sugata Mitra.
Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments—where he placed computers in unexpected public places in the developing world—had almost unbelievable results and has helped advance the discussion on how to change childhood education. (Not to...
3 tags
The Blended-Learning Movement is Growing Fast
“Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of […] perceptual learning,” the New York Times reports. Start observing this “perceptual learning” trend closely and you’ll see a fast-approaching revolution in the way students learn, as powerful as anything described in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific...
4 tags
"Undergraduate Education No Longer a Top...
In this past weekend’s Austin American-Statesman, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (authors of Academically Adrift) touch on the “has college been worth it?” question—which many recent graduates are asking themselves, especially in light of incredible student debt and a weak job market. And they suggest a few problems with the higher education system today:
In much of higher education, the problem...
2 tags
Retiring University of Illinois Professor Thanks...
Professor David Rubinstein last week penned a scathing indictment of modern academia. The portrait painted: an unaccountable system that “squeez[es] taxpayers,” where the golden carrot of tenure too often creates twisted incentives. From Rubinstein’s Weekly Standard article:
The grandest prize of all is, of course, tenure. The tenured live in a different world than ordinary mortals, a world in...
4 tags
How Much Should a College Degree Actually Cost?
Student debt that recently surpassed credit card debt. College tuition rising faster than inflation. And this: according to the Economic Policy Institute, “The unemployment rate for college-educated workers under 25 is 9%—double the rate of workers older than 25 with a bachelor’s degree” (via).
All of it’s beginning to more clearly point to the question: How much is a...
May 2011
7 posts
3 tags
Ripe for Innovation
A great article at Atlantic.com this week asks the question: Is College (Finally) Ready for Its Innovation Revolution? It’s a good article not because the topic is new or profound (it’s a question that those of us close to the issue have been answering with an emphatic “Yes” for some time now).
No, it’s a good article (1) because it keeps alive a conversation about...
New Study Uncovers Superteachers
A new study released this week by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) shows something impressive: even though—shockingly—a mere 20% of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin teaches 57% of student course load, that same 20% still brings in 18% of external research funding.
These are, clearly, superteachers—men and women capable of not only devoting much of their...
2 tags
The Classroom Where Fortunes Were Made
I’ve talked before about new educational approaches needing to help students (1) master 21st century skills and (2) develop demonstrable proof of what they’ve learned.
Take this Stanford class as a case study in both. Known as the “Facebook Class”—in reference to the Facebook “apps” they designed, deployed, and monetized—this group of 75 enterprising students...
My Entrepreneurial Journey: An Experiment in...
“All eyes up here.” “Turn to chapter six of your textbook.” “Repeat after me.” Tactics even the greenest teacher knows. But is this the way we want to teach our children? A few serious problems:
It’s focused on the teacher, not the student.
It’s about regurgitating the “right” information rather than learning how to learn and solving real-world problems through the type of trial-and-error...
What'll College Look Like in a Decade?
Check out this funny essay from Jane Shaw at Minding the Campus. It takes the position of some future chronicler of education looking back, in the year 2020, at the last decade in education transformation.
I say it’s “funny,” but I think the appropriate description will be—to people ten years from now—”eerily prescient.”
Here’s a dateline from the future:
...
Dispelling Educational Myths about Price and...
Here’s a glimpse of an illusion we’ve lived with in education for far too long:
In fact, the truth has always looked more like this:
Interactive teaching—one-on-one, in small groups, or in Socratic dialogues—is the type of personal education everyone really wants. But there are relatively too few master teachers around, and delivery is very expensive.
That’s why we grew to...
Cost of College Skyrockets—While Quality of...
“No tree grows to the sky.” It’s an old Wall Street adage that means bull markets can’t last forever. Prices can’t rise indefinitely. Consumer confidence has its limit. And eventually everyone wakes up and realizes they’re betting their lives and livelihoods on tulip bulbs.
The traditional college model is no exception—but it seems to think it is. And this worries me. Students’...
April 2011
1 post
Not Just Another Education Blog
There’s a wave of transformation coming to education in America—and it’s long overdue. Our current ”assembly line” approach to schooling is obsolete. A relic from the long-dead Industrial Age. (Just think about it: the bells, the rote schedules, the mindlessness and heartbreaking boredom.)
Basic skills aren’t even delivered effectively. There’s little encouragement for students to dream big...
