My guess is that online education is more of a complement than a substitute for offline experiences. To be sure, watch something like Michael Sandel’s online course, Justice, and there is no need to attend Harvard for the same thing. But that is because a huge amount of effort went into its design and production. And it is also one where the lecture experience translates online. For courses like Game Theory, the lecture experience is limiting and bringing it online only demonstrates that more starkly.

Republicans took to the Senate floor Tuesday to denounce a bill proposed by Democrats that would freeze student loan rates by closing a loophole that allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on some of their income, in anticipation of a procedural vote on the measure Tuesday afternoon. Democrats have referred to the bill as the Edwards bill, as it targets the tax strategy former presidential candidate John Edwards was criticized for using.

But in the past, many conservatives have dinged the same tax loop hole Democrats now seek to close.

Republicans have denounced the bill — which would pay for the $5.9 billion loan rate freeze by preventing individuals with incomes exceeding $250,000 who file their taxes as a small business to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on some of their income – as punishing wealthy individuals at a high cost.

“Sadly the misguided government solution we will vote on today will be counter productive for our job creators,” said Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, on the Senate floor.

But conservatives have often had a dim view of this loop hole. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal editorial page lamented:

“Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn’t stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a ‘subchapter S’ corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder. Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends.”

The conservative columnist Robert Novak, that same year, wrote, “It is one of the last loopholes left in the Internal Revenue Code, and it is a big one.” Even Sean Hannity of Fox News got in on the act that year saying: “Hey, John Edwards is worth, what, $30 million to $40 million, set up a sub-S corporation to keep him from paying Medicare taxes on 90 percent of his income, and then he lectures the rest of us how Medicare is going broke.”

The House has passed its own version of a bill to that would keep rates on subsidized undergraduate loans from reverting from its current 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent by stripping $5.9 billion from a program within the health care law to pay for the freeze.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, said Monday: “For Republicans, well, we don’t think young people should have to suffer any more than they already are as a result of this President’s failure to turn the economy around. We just disagree that we should pay for a fix by diverting $6 billion from Medicare and raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.”

Rep. Todd Akin is not one to mince words.

At a policy debate on Saturday, the Missouri Republican slammed federal student loans, saying that the government should quit the student loan market completely.

“America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” Akin said, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Akin is one of three candidates seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill in November. McCaskill is seen as one of the more vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election this year. Conservative groups are wasting no time, spending more than $3 million on television and radio ads in Missouri to date, according to the Washington Post.

Akin’s opposition to federal student loans is nothing new. He voted against the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2009, warning that it would result in lost jobs and increased government debt. “This bill should serve as a warning to the depth of the Democrat majority’s appetite for the consolidation of federal control and the dismantling of private industry,” he said in a press release.

The bill, which was signed into law in 2010, dramatically expanded financial aid for college students and restructured student aid programs.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, signaled a rare agreement with President Barack Obama on Monday when he said that he fully supports Obama’s effort to extend current interest rates on federal student loans. To the dismay of approximately 8 million students, the rate is set to double to 6.8 percent this summer.

Whether or not Akin will get the chance to face McCaskill in the fall is still unclear. He has the backing of at least two prominent social conservatives: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) both endorsed him in April.

If he does end up winning the GOP nomination, the race has at least a chance of being civil. McCaskill found herself sitting behind Akin on a plane last month. “He’s always friendly and polite,” she tweeted. “I appreciate that.”

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

Mitt Romney circled back at the end of a brief news conference Monday afternoon to clarify an issue he had failed to mention before: his support of a temporary extension of a low interest rate on federal student loans, which President Obama also favors .

“There’s one thing I want to mention that I forgot to mention at the very beginning, and that was that particularly with the mention of the number of college graduates that can’t find work or that can only find work well beneath their skill level, I fully support the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans,” Mr. Romney said. “There was some concern that that would expire halfway through the year, and I support extending the temporary relief on interest rates for students as a result of – as a result of student loans, obviously – in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.”

Though House Republicans oppose such an extension, Mr. Obama has been urging Congress to extend the existing interest rate on federal student loans. If Congress fails to act, the interest rate on the loans, which are taken out by nearly eight million students each year, will double on July 1, to 6.8 percent.

The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council, which says the costs of subscriptions to major research journals “cannot be sustained.” It says that the cost of these journals has gone up by 145 percent over the last six years and, if things continue at that pace, it’ll be forced to cut back.

Just to put this in context, the total cost for subscriptions is $3.75 million a year. As of the end of the last fiscal year, Harvard’s endowment was $32 billion. If it received a similar rate of return on its investments as it did last year, it would take it about five and a half hours for its endowment to cover this cost.

In any case, the Faculty Advisory Council is fed up with rising costs, forced bundling of low- and high-profile journals, and subscriptions that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. So, it’s suggesting that the rest of the Harvard faculty focus on open access publishing. The statement calls on the faculty to “move prestige to open access” and to consider resigning if they’re on the editorial board of a subscription journal.

None of this is binding, and there’s a very good chance that if a researcher gets an opportunity to publish in Nature, they’ll take it. But it’s another sign of a general dissatisfaction with the current state of academic publishing, which was what spawned the open access movement originally, and has more recently given rise to a large boycott of the publisher Elsevier.

But here’s the thing. You don’t need the experience. You just need some grit.

grit
courage and resolve; strength of character

In other words, you can figure it out.

See no matter how much experience I get, I continuously find myself in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing. I have countless personal tales of being neck deep in some type of problem or subject, and being completely baffled how I’m going to figure it out.

Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned on Tuesday after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country’s north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education.

Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul.

But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers and their school buildings, usually in the more conservative south and east of the country, from where the Taliban insurgency draws most support.

“We are 100% sure that the water they drunk inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls’ education or irresponsible armed individuals,” said Jan Mohammad Nabizada, a spokesman for education department in northern Takhar province.

Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said.

They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated.

“This is not a natural illness. It’s an intentional act to poison schoolgirls,” said Haffizullah Safi, head of Takhar’s public health department.

None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.

The Afghan government said last year that the Taliban, which has been trying to adopt a more moderate face to advance exploratory peace talks, had dropped its opposition to female education.

But the insurgency has never stated that explicitly and in the past acid has been thrown in the faces of women and girls by men while walking to school.

Education for women was outlawed by the Taliban government from 1996-2001 as un-Islamic.

Good programmers not only learn, but they want to learn. They often know enough about a technology so that they have a good feel for what problems it might solve; and only invest time truly learning it when it’s needed.

Private student loans often carry uncapped, variable interest rates and aren’t required to include flexible repayment options. In contrast, government loans offer fixed interest rates and flexible options, such as income-based repayment and deferral for hardship or public service.

Steep increases in college costs are to blame for the student-loan debt burden, and most student loans are now made by the government, says Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, a private lenders’ industry group.

Many private lenders encourage students to plan ahead on how to finance college, so “your eyes are open on what it’s going to cost you and how you will manage that,” says a spokeswoman for Sallie Mae, a Reston, Va., student-loan concern. Federal rules implemented in 2009 require lenders to make a series of disclosures to borrowers, so that “you are made aware multiple times before the loan is disbursed” of various lending options, the spokeswoman says.

Both private and government loans, however, lack “the most fundamental protections we take for granted with every other type of loan,” says Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org, an advocacy group. When borrowers default, collection agencies can hound them for life, because unlike other kinds of debt, there is no statute of limitations on collections. And while other kinds of debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, student loans must still be paid barring “undue hardship,” a legal test that most courts have interpreted very narrowly.

The bill gives parents “a cause of action” so they can sue any teacher that breaks the rules by “demonstrating gateway sexual activity” and also bans the distribution of materials “that condone, encourage or promote student sexual activity among unmarried students” (why do I have the feeling we’re talking about condoms and not porn here?)

Apparently, this comes in response to recent controversies where students received some sex education that mentioned alternatives to sexual intercourse. Honestly, I thought that kind of thing was standard in abstinence-only programs. I thought even advocates of abstinence until marriage recognized that if you’re telling students who’ve likely already started having sex (and in Memphis, for example, 61 percent high school students and 27 percent of middle school students have) to stop, it’s nice to provide some suggestions on safer alternatives. Even if it’s just something as clearly inferior to sex as fucking hand-holding.

But no, the bill’s sponsor says, “‘Abstinence’ means from all of these activities, and we want to promote that.”

And yet they come into my math class and raise their hand half-way through my demonstration of the mean value theorem to ask me when they will ever use this. They want me to justify that I’m not wasting their time.

I never mind answering this question.

Never.

It allows me to give them a glimpse into the beauty that I see when I play with mathematics. To me math is a game. We have a set of rules and we take turns playing this game. When the rules change — say we relax that fifth postulate so that a line can have no parallel lines through a given point — we are playing a different game.

The reason for learning mathematics should never be restricted to how it will help us do something else.

Never.

The hard part is that math is so darned useful. There is math everywhere. It’s easy for us to think about learning the math we need to do science or economics.

If you’re 35 years old and you’re thinking about retaking the SAT as a kind of blog stunt, I would highly recommend you avoid it. In fact, I would recommend that no one take the SAT ever. It’s a sternly worded dinosaur of a test, graded in an arbitrary manner with outdated equipment, and it blows. The only reason people take it is because they have to. It exists only so that preppy dipshits can brag about their scores well into adulthood if they did well. I hate it. I hope the Princeton Review gets fucked by a cattle prod.

Imagine a set of electronics as easy to play with as Legos. TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir introduces littleBits, a set of simple, interchangeable blocks that make programming as simple and important a part of creativity as snapping blocks together.

In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.

Read: Deterring Iran is the best option.

Why is this happening? Prisons are a big business. Most are privately run. They have powerful lobbyists and they have bought most state politicians. Meanwhile, we are bankrupting out states and creating a vast underclass of prisoners who will never be equipped for productive lives.

I never thought I’d say this, but God bless you, Pat Robertson.

About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended today after walking out of classes to protest a lack of consistent teachers, the removal of the principal and a host of other administrative problems at the all-boys school.

The students were chanting “We want education!”

Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school’s future. This year, as recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym due to a lack of teachers, parents said.

Worries escalated after district offices moved into part of the building in January and the school was not listed as an application school for next year’s directory. In addition, the school’s founding principal, Sean Vann, was reassigned on Wednesday after a three-month sick leave.

Parents said Detroit needs a school to address the achievement gap concerning African-American men but fear this school’s future is in jeopardy.

“They’re failing these young black men,” said parent Sharise Smith.

Smith said her son got an A in geometry first semester without taking a final exam. “It was by default, just for showing up. It wasn’t because he earned an A.”

Hundreds of students who staged a protest earlier this month about administrative changes at Denby High were not suspended. Smith called the suspensions unfair and an indication that nothing will change at Douglass.

“What are they teaching them by suspending them – that they’re in a communist country and can’t protest injustice?”

Some students at Douglass Academy spent most of their time for in February in the gym, or the cafeteria or the library. That’s because about half of the teachers at Douglass Academy called in sick for several days.

A former teacher’s aide in Michigan says she’s been fired after refusing to give her Facebook password to her supervisors.

Kimberly Hester was employed directly by Less Cass Intermediate School District as an aide to a local elementary school. Last year, off work hours, she posted a picture of a co-worker’s pants around her ankles with the caption “Thinking of you”—meant to be funny—to her Facebook page.

Someone—Hester suspects a particular parent who is Facebook friend—saw the photo and complained to the school. A few days later, the district Superintendent began repeatedly asking her for access to her Facebook page. Each time, Hester refused.

Soon after, the district’s Special Education Director wrote to Hester, saying “[I]n the absence of you voluntarily granting Lewis Cass ISD administration access to you[r] Facebook page, we will assume the worst and act accordingly.”

Hester told the South Bend Tribune the district then suspended her and that she’s currently on unpaid leave.

“I did nothing wrong. I would not, still to this day, let them into my Facebook,” she said. “I don’t think that’s OK for an employer to ask you.”

There isn’t specific legislation protecting employees’ social media rights, but it’s a hot topic in Washington.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives struck down an amendment that would prevent employers from asking potential employees for Facebook passwords. In response, several senators say they’re drafting similar legislation to try again.

Meanwhile, Hester said she and her former school district are scheduled for arbitration in May.

Just as talking about income inequality can get you branded as a socialist by the right today, talking about racial inequality on a systemic level can lead to charges of reverse racism against whites. And the ultimate irony of having a black president is that it may make it harder for him to discuss race. The killing of Trayvon Martin has sparked national outrage and a heated debate over race, but the White House responded timidly. “Obviously, we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Monday. But that policy didn’t apply to Henry Louis Gates ’ run-in with Cambridge police just three years ago. Obama publicly condemned the police in the case, and was pilloried by the right for it.

Stefancic said Martin’s case is a perfect example of the importance of critical race theory. Without a racial lens on the incident, it would be a narrow legal question about Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense laws. But critical race theory allows us to see the whole picture that a strictly colorblind analysis might miss, she said. “When the law tries to redress an action that comes from a certain stereotype, it’s difficult,” she explained.

Contrary to the wishes of a University advisory body, Pitt’s transgender students will have to use the bathroom facilities that correspond to the one on their birth certificates, rather than the one they identify with.

A University representative delivered news of the new standard concerning transgender students to Pitt’s Anti-Discriminatory Policies Committee Tuesday.

Last month, the ADP committee, one of the standing committees of the University Senate, unanimously passed a resolution that would allow students to use bathrooms allocated to the gender they identify with, not their natal sex. The ADP committee does not make policy, but instead advises the University Senate. The committee includes Pitt faculty, staff and two Pitt students who do not have voting power: Board member Julie Halinan and Rainbow Alliance President Tricia Dougherty.

But at Tuesday’s meeting, an unidentified University representative said that students would be forced to use gendered facilities according to the sex listed on their birth certificates.

The person said in the meeting she represented both Pitt’s office of the General Counsel and Office of Human Resources.

In a statement signed by Jane Feuer, ADP committee chairwoman; Deborah Brake, a past chairwoman; Bruce Venarde, an elected member, and Mark Lynn Anderson, committee secretary, the committee members said that Tuesday was the first time they had heard of the University’s stance on “sex-separate facilities.”

“This came as a shock to us, since the Oakland campus practice has been, at least for restroom use (not showers or housing) to allow students to use the restroom that matches their lived gender identity, as long as there is some documentation from a health provider (confirming that the student identifies as a person of that gender),” the statement said.

Carol Mohamed, director of Pitt’s Office of Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, declined to comment on the issue.

The Office of the University Counsel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Dougherty said the new policy surprised her after the work the committee had done on the proposed policy.

“The general reaction [at the meeting] was horrified. There is an obvious consensus that this is ridiculous, that this wasn’t OK, and people were really upset, and they were working to change it,” Dougherty said.

But for all the educational strides being made and all the pro-social “vitamins” cleverly inserted into our kids’ media diets, there is one ingredient sorely missing. There is no God on Sesame Street. No clue will ever point Blue toward his Creator. No matter how far Dora explores, she will never bump into the divine. The world of children’s media, to put it bluntly, is as atheistic as a Richard Dawkins book club. And that missing ingredient will cripple our children if we let it.

In other words, why would we ever want to let children learn things for themselves? Or ask questions? Or discover that morality doesn’t come from above? Nope. Can’t have that. Must indoctrinate them with bullshit from a young age!

In Vischer’s world, if you’re not talking about god, you’re actively opposed to him. And teaching children how to be good citizens and critical thinkers can only happen through the Christian faith.

Though if a group of children did have a Richard Dawkins book club, that’d be one hell of a learning experience… great idea, Phil!

In South Carolina a teacher has been placed on administrative leave for reading excerpts of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction classic Ender’s Game to his middle school students.

“The parent that reported him to the school district complained that the book was pornographic,” Tod Kelly writes. “[T]hat same parent also asked the local police to file criminal charges against the teacher. As of today, the police have not yet decided whether or not to file charges (which is probably a good sign that they won’t). The school district, however, appears to agree with the parent, is considering firing the teacher and will be eliminating the book from the school.

“Commonsense Media does say that the book has some violence and should be read by children over 12*,” he continues, “but the children in this class were 14.”

A film adaptation of Ender’s Game is hitting movie theaters in 2013. I imagine it will be no more ‘pornographic’ than the book, which was written decades ago for teenagers and has, to my knowledge, never been described as pornography before now.

A Virginia High School teacher is under fire for asking the only Black student in her English class to read a Langston Hughes poem “blacker.”

9th grader Jordan Shumate had begun reading Langston Hughes’ poem “Ballad of the Landlord” when his teacher interrupted him, exclaiming, “Blacker, Jordan – c’mon, blacker. I thought you were black.”

When Shumate refused to continue reading, the teacher proceeded to read it herself, “like a slave.”

Shumate was then reprimanded for taking issue with his teacher’s actions.

From the Huffington Post:

“‘It’s very, very unprofessional, ‘ Shumate told WJLA-TV. ‘It should not happen. She didn’t do it to any other kids. Why did she have to do it to me?’

The student brought the issue to his mother’s attention after the teacher reportedly singled him out again during a lesson about stereotypes. Shumate said Bart asked him to explain why blacks like grape soda and rap music.

Shumate’s mother, Nicole Page, told WAMU that she is ‘very sad’ for her ‘child’s loss of innocence’ through the experience. The teacher had also previously asked the student to rap out a poem by black rapper and actor Tupac Shakur, Page said.”

The teacher is currently under investigation for her actions.

Now I don’t have a highfalutin’ “degree” from some fancy “college,” unlike Rick Santorum, who has three, but I do know that a lot of people seem to think “education” is a good thing. I know this because I read an article in which a guy from the Pew Research Center explained that nearly all American parents hope their children will attend college.

Anti-college talk is a fine rhetorical strategy when your target is snobbery against adults without college educations , but basically all parents — even blue collar parents who work with their hands like real Americans — want their kids to get degrees and good jobs because that is part of “the American dream.”

This is conservative class warfare totally backfiring, basically. Maybe Santorum’s grades were actually docked because he is dumb?

And now the Minnewaska school district in Minnesota stands accused of coercing a 12-year-old girl into giving up her Facebook and e-mail passwords, so that a school could spy with their little eye.

CNN reports that she was also twice punished for things she wrote on Facebook.

A lawsuit on behalf of the girl —brought in conjunction with the ACLU—declares that her First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

The girl—referred to in the court papers as R.S.—apparently felt that her hall monitor was mean to her and therefore described her as “mean” on her Facebook profile. She claims that no school equipment or property were used to make her postings.

It is unclear how a screenshot of her postings got back to the school principal, but it seems they did. Even one in which she wanted to know—using strong language—who had betrayed her.

It is alleged that the password-demanding incident occurred when the parents of another student objected to a Facebook post in which sex was discussed.

What seems even more pulsating is that the court papers state that she was called to a meeting at which a school counselor and the deputy sheriff were present.

It was at this meeting that she was allegedly “interrogated” and surrendered the passwords to her Facebook and e-mail accounts.

And, no, her mother had allegedly not consented to the search.

Thirty University of Rochester students held a protest Wednesday afternoon in the classroom of an economics professor who had defended Rush Limbaugh’s verbal assault on Sandra Fluke and said the Georgetown student deserved to be mocked.
In a blog post, Professor Steven Landsburg said he essentially agreed with Limbaugh stance, writing, “Her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves [no respect] whatsoever. It deserves to only be ridiculed, mocked and jeered . To treat it with respect would be a travesty.” He said he did not agree with Limbaugh’s use of the word of “slut” to describe Fluke, but said “prostitute” was mostly fair, while a “extortionist” was even better.

The post prompted a statement of condemnation from University President Joel Seligman, who said, “I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion. To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do. We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination.”

At the beginning Landsburg’s class Wednesday afternoon, the students, formed a line between him and the class as he continued the lecture.

Instead, let’s look at a good set of essential skills that I believe children should learn, that will best prepare them for any world of the future. I base these on what I have learned in three different industries, especially the world of online entreprenurship, online publishing, online living … and more importantly, what I have learned about learning and working and living in a world that will never stop changing.

The amount of student loan debt held by Americans surpassed $1 trillion last year, as the average student debt load surpassed $25,000 . The race for the Republican presidential nomination, however, has been largely absent of talk about higher education policy, particularly from front-runner Mitt Romney, who doesn’t list education as one of the topics on his campaign web site’s “Issues” page.

At a town hall meeting in Ohio today, Romney was asked how he planned to help students better afford college. Instead of offering substantive policy solutions aimed at bringing down the cost of college, Romney told students that they should “shop around” for an affordable school or “think about serving the country” in order to get a free education:

ROMNEY: The legislature in my state came together and said, ‘You know what, anyone that’s willing to serve in the National Guard, we’ll provide for tuition and fees for four years of college to make sure you get that start.’ So if you’re willing to serve, then we can be of more help . But my best advice is find a great institution of higher learning, find one that has the right price, and shop around. In America, this idea of competition, it works! […] I want to make sure that every kid in this country that wants to go to college gets the chance to go to college. If you can’t afford it, scholarships are available, shop around for loans, make sure you go to a place that’s reasonably priced, and if you can, think about serving the country ’cause that’s a way to get all that education for free .

While Romney tells students not to take on too much debt, he supports the expansion of for-profit colleges, which charge exorbitant prices that often leave students buried in debt without the education they need to get a job after their degree is finished (18 state attorneys general are investigating the practices of such institutions). Just last week, Romney announced his opposition to a recently-passed law that takes large banks out of the federal student loan process, saving the government millions of dollars that can be plowed back into student aid.

Serving in the military, getting scholarships, or choosing more affordable schools are all ways to reduce the cost of college tuition, but the government plays a key role (and has a key interest ) in providing financial aid and putting in place common sense regulations to ensure that students get a quality education for their money. It’s also worth noting that Romney has never served in the military, and the two universities from which he holds degrees — Brigham Young University and Harvard — are hardly “affordable” for the average college student.

Update

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a report today saying student loan delinquencies could be even higher than already expected . According to the report, 14.4 percent of students with outstanding debt had at least one past-due payment, with the late payments totaling $85 billion. But according to researchers, that rate doesn’t take into account federally-guaranteed loans that don’t require immediate payments. Taking those loans into account would bring the delinquency rate to 27 percent.

TAPPS’ refusal to be accommodating, despite its non-sectarian eligibility requirements, is just one more example of Christianity’s pride of place in American culture. It’s telling (but unsurprising) that an organization which, on its surface, promotes religious tolerance is really only welcoming to Christian schools.

In every field, at every level of education, men earn more than women. That’s the grim takeaway of this new report [PDF ] from the U.S. Census Bureau , which assesses the value of a higher education in the United States—and illustrates the persistent pay gap between male and female employees who hold comparable degrees. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.

Tanya McDowell was living as a homeless woman when she was arrested for sending her five year old son to a school district where she- surprise- didn’t have a permanent residence. Ms. McDowell has said that she only wanted a better education for her child. Despite a change.org petition that has generated over 15, 600 signatures asking for the charges to be dropped against her, she was just sentenced to 5 years in prison after pleading guilty in the case.

At an Americans For Prosperity-sponsored tea party rally here Saturday, Rick Santorum trumpeted his connections to the working class by attacking President Obama’s plan to make college more accessible to Americans.

“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!”

The crowd laughed and applauded wildly. But the last time Santorum ran for public office — his ill-fated 2006 Senate reelection campaign — he was right there with Obama, running on his promise to make college more accessible to all Pennsylvanians.

President Obama did not mention Rick Santorum by name Monday morning, but it was pretty clear who he had in mind.

Three days after Mr. Santorum accused Mr. Obama of being a “snob” and of trying to “indoctrinate” young people by encouraging them to go to college, Mr. Obama responded.

“I have to make a point here,” Mr. Obama said during remarks to the nation’s governors at the White House. “When I speak about higher education, we are not just talking about a four-year degree.”

Mr. Obama, who has often talked about the need to encourage vocational training after high school, seemed to take issue with Mr. Santorum’s assertion that he, being Harvard-educated, wanted to “remake” students in his own image.

“We are talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring

someone walking through the door handling a million-dollar piece of equipment,” Mr. Obama said. “And they can’t go in there unless they have some basic training beyond what they received in high school.”

“We all want those jobs of the future,” he added. “So we are going to have to make sure that they are getting the education they need.”

In his comments last week, Mr. Santorum said that Mr. Obama’s efforts to get people to go to college were part of an effort to get them into “indoctrination mills” led by liberal professors.

As Jezebel reported this morning , Utah’s legislature is on its way to approving an incredibly restrictive and convoluted sex education bill that would allow schools to choose whether they offer the classes at all. Oh, and even discussing the existence of contraception would be basically forbidden, the one exception being in cases where a brave student overcomes ignorance and/or fear of embarrassment to directly ask the teacher about it. Republican Rep. Bill Wright, who said he was moved to action after viewing sex education materials designed by Planned Parenthood, introduced the bill, arguing that abstinence was really the only lesson required :

“We’ve been culturally watered down to think we have to teach about sex, about having sex and how to get away with it, which is intellectually dishonest,” said bill sponsor Rep. Bill Wright, R-Holden. “Why don’t we just be honest with them upfront that sex outside marriage is devastating?”

Apparently many of Wright’s fellow politicians agreed with him; the measure passed the House 45-28.

Rick Santorum is working hard in Michigan to try and cast himself as the candidate of the working class. At a speech before a tea party audience here Saturday, he made his case by accusing President Obama of trying to turn America’s youth into liberal drones by sending them to college.

The idea was pretty well received by the crowd here at a rally hosted by the Michigan branch of Americans For Prosperity.

“Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands,” Santorum began. “Some people have incredible gifts and want to work out there making things.”

Then he went after the president’s call for making college easier for Americans to attend.

President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. “There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor.”

Santorum said he knows the real reason Obama wants more Americans on college campuses.

“That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said to more applause. “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

Rick Santorum incorrectly claimed that “one of three children drop out of school” in the United States. The 2009 dropout rate was 8.1 percent — slightly higher than it was in 2008, but down significantly from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and even early 2000s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

It’s true that a higher percentage of students in the U.S. fail to graduate on time — about 23 percent in the 2009-10 school year. But that’s still not “one of three children” and that doesn’t account for the many who take longer to graduate or who pass the General Educational Development (GED) tests, accepted by nearly all colleges and universities as evidence of high-school equivalency. The fact is that only 8.1 percent fail to graduate or get a GED by age 24. And by any measure you pick, the dropout rate has been generally declining for years.

The government’s attempt to reduce childhood obesity is moving from the school cafeteria to the vending machines.

The Obama administration is working on setting nutritional standards for foods that children can buy outside the cafeteria. With students eating 19 percent to 50 percent of their daily food at school, the administration says it wants to ensure that what they eat contributes to good health and smaller waistlines. The proposed rules are expected within the next few weeks.

Efforts to restrict the food that schoolchildren eat outside the lunchroom have long been controversial.

Representatives of the food and beverage industries argue that many of their products contribute to good nutrition and should not be banned. Schools say that overly restrictive rules, which could include banning the candy sold for school fund-raisers, risk the loss of substantial revenue that helps pay for sports, music and arts programs. A study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that about $2.3 billion worth of snack foods and beverages are sold annually in schools nationwide.

Nutritionists say that school vending machines stocked with potato chips, cookies and sugary soft drinks contribute to childhood obesity, which has more than tripled in the past 30 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about one in every five children are obese .

Lawmakers introduced bills in both chambers Thursday intended to close a loophole that enables for-profit schools to take advantage of G.I. Bill aid to rake in federal money.

Two of the sponsors — Senator Tom R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, and Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — told reporters the law would focus on for-profit schools that accept federal funds to educate veterans but sometimes leave them unprepared to enter the civilian workforce.

“It is clear that the business model of some of these for-profit colleges is to become totally reliant on federal funds, making billions in the process and spending a paltry amount on actually educating the students they spend billions to entice,” Ms. Speier said.

In 1998, Congress instituted the so-called “90-10 rule,” requiring that for every nine dollars of tuition covered by federal aid, there should be at least one dollar coming from private funds.

The law would close a loophole that counts military education benefits differently from Department of Education aid, which allowed schools to circumvent the rule by designating veterans’ education benefits as if the money were not paid by the federal government.

“Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

President Obama on Monday will propose a $8 billion Community College to Career Fund, with the goal of training two million workers for well-paying jobs in high-demand industries, officials said.

The fund, which would need Congressional approval, would be administered jointly by the Departments of Labor and of Education. The money would be used to bolster partnerships between community colleges and businesses to train workers in areas like health care, transportation and advanced manufacturing.

In his State of the Union address , Mr. Obama called for a national commitment to help create an economy built to last by training two million workers with skills that will lead directly to a job.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world’s top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online.

An electronics course, beginning in March, will be the first prototype of an online project, known as MITx.

The interactive course is designed to be fully automated, with successful students receiving a certificate.

The US university says it wants MITx to “shatter barriers to education”.

This ground-breaking scheme represents a significant step forward in the use of technology to deliver higher education.

Many low-income families cannot afford car insurance, at least in part because insurers price their policies in ways that cost them more, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America.

In fact, in some cases, the cost of insurance can be a greater impediment to car ownership than the cost of the vehicle itself, the authors said. That has broad economic implications since those without cars have a harder time getting to work, school, day care or the grocery store.

“There is much academic research that clearly shows that if you have ready access to a car, it dramatically improves your economic opportunities,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director at the Consumer Federation of America , who co-wrote the report with J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance at the group. The report, “Lower-Income Households and the Auto Insurance Marketplace: Challenges and Opportunities,” reviewed the existing literature from academics and regulators and includes findings from the authors’ own research.

“The release of the report is just the beginning of our initiative to try to inform the country, particularly state regulators, who can do a great deal to mitigate the problems,” Mr. Brobeck said.

Auto insurers price insurance based on a variety of factors, but the authors argue that many of their methods put lower- and moderate-income families — or households with roughly $20,000 to $40,000 in earnings — at a disadvantage. Homeowners, for instance, often pay less than people who do not own their homes, while people in low-paying occupations who have less education pay more. In fact, the study cited 2006 research that found that those with less education and working in less skilled occupations would pay premiums that were, on average, 40 percent higher. Meanwhile, consumers with thin or blemished credit histories are charged more, as are drivers who had previous coverage with lower limits on bodily injury.

It’s been in the works for some time, but the National Center for Science Education officially announced today that it is now stepping into the climate change arena . Always a strong voice and activist organization for keeping creationism out of science classrooms in the U.S., the NCSE is expanding its mission and its web site to include climate change issues.

Called “transfronterizos,” these students migrate between two cultures, two languages and two nations every day, straining the resources of public school districts and sparking debate among educators and sociologists over whether it is in American interests that they be taught in the United States. Although some Mexican families pay the steep tuition required of out-of-district students, most do not, and many that pay taxes out of their paychecks do not pay the property taxes that support public services.

Some of the students’ parents are American citizens and some are Mexican.

Students like Martha fly under the radar in some school districts, while other districts assign truancy officers to find who they are. They live with the anxiety of potentially having to lie about their residency and the very real possibility that the prize they are after — a decent education — will be taken from them. Though their exact numbers are unknown, their presence reflects the daily complexities of border life — among them, economic and educational disparities between the United States and Mexico and families splintered by deportation and unemployment.

Transfronterizos can be found from Calexico, Calif., to El Paso, where violence in neighboring Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, has led to the creation of a designated lane for 800 to 1,400 students daily, including American citizens who attend El Paso schools.

To the occupiers and their sympathizers, I say vote — not with the ballot, but with your feet. Now that your encampment has disbanded, don’t just leave Zuccotti Park: leave America.

For China. At least, that’s what I did. It was the best decision I ever made.

In February of last year, I moved to Beijing, having landed a job teaching American culture and English at Tsinghua University. While I was not a global neophyte, I had never set foot in Asia. China had 1.3 billion people, and I didn’t know any of them.

But now, after living almost a year here, I feel that China is my second home. My work is fulfilling and my workload is manageable enough to give me time to travel. I have found friends among China’s large expatriate community, my colleagues and, of course, my eager students. The food is outstanding and caters to both the gastronomically meek and the profoundly adventurous.

Most of all, my experiences here have been enriched by the Chinese people themselves. Their patience, courtesy and hospitality leave me in no hurry to return home anytime soon.

And guess what? I’m not so special.

China wants you. Job prospects are abundant. The effects of the Great Recession of 2008 may be felt in the United States for years, but they barely scratched China. Demand for native English speakers is white-hot. ChinaJob.com , TheBeijnger.com and Dave’s ESL Cafe are just a few of the places where you can search for work.

Jalkut wrote this piece, Learn to Code . Read it, it’s well worth your time. Simmons linked to Jalkut’s piece adding this, “I’m reminded of Matt Mullenweg saying ‘Scripting is the new literacy.’ Matt’s right.”

I appreciate where they’re coming from. I can, from a certain perspective, agree with the argument. But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of. We don’t, as a society, need more people who have the mechanical knowledge to turn RSS feeds into Twitter spam. We don’t need anything more posted to Facebook, we don’t need anything we photograph to appear on Instagram and Flickr. If “scripting” is the new literacy then we’ve failed. We’ve become Mario drowning on a Water Level.

Scripting isn’t the new literacy, it’s the new tinkering with the engine, the new re-wiring the house. The new DIY for the digital age. These sorts of skills are incredibly valuable, but they’re not now, and certainly won’t be in the future, anything close to being an art form that stirs our souls.

That’s what literature does — it communicates to humans by leveraging our understanding of words and our grasp of narrative. And, sometimes, it mixes them all up but we still get value from it. That’s not how writing code works. Writing code is a craft, we build upon the capabilities of the compiler, the libraries and the hardware. We don’t have the freedom to innovate, as an author would, unless we control the whole stack. And we don’t. We swim upon a shallow surface, we perform what amounts to an act of synchronized swimming. At times it’s beautiful, but we’re in a pool, and we can’t control how wide or deep it is.

If you’re reading this, it’s probably too late. I’ll say to you — don’t Learn To Code , just Learn. Whatever it is you’re good at, whatever it is that calls to you — do that. And do it again and again and again and again.

There’s never been a better time to be a developer. Thanks to an unprecedented range of open-source software, learning resources and useful web services at our disposal, we can learn new languages, get help , collaborate with others and, if our ideas win traction, there’s now a multitude of investors waiting in the wings to help us build companies around our products.

This is not to say that our work is easy. Standards must remain high. But the resources available offer us the opportunity to move faster and make even more progress. The nature of innovation means that many of our ideas will not succeed, making determination vital for seeing ideas through. But the opportunity is here, my friends. We are the kingmakers .

The good news is that this golden age has made you the developer you are and will continue to help you. The even better news is that you have the chance now to, in the slightly emetic language of the Valley, “pay it forward”.

Legos are still held up as a gateway to engineering and science, and despite my misgivings about the current state of their kits, I still believe they are (I bought my son a Mindstorms kit with my book advance). But if they’ve become toys marketed to a single gender, then we’re just reproducing the already awful gender imbalance in STEM education and employment.

Oh wait: Today NPR says “With New Toys, Lego Hopes To Build Girls Market.”

Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas issued a public apology today to a high school student who was disciplined for posting a disparaging Twitter message about him while she was attending a youth program at the state Capitol.

“My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize,” said Governor Brownback, a Republican, in a statement posted on his Facebook page. “Freedom of speech is among our treasured freedoms.”

A Kansas teenager is in trouble after mocking Gov. Sam Brownback during a mock legislative assembly for high school students.

Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, was in Topeka on Monday as part of Kansas Youth in Government, a program for students interested in politics and government.

During the session, in which Brownback addressed the group, Sullivan posted on her personal Twitter page:

“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”

On Tuesday, Sullivan was called to her principal’s office and told that the tweet had been flagged by someone on Brownback’s staff and reported to organizers of the Youth in Government program.

The principal “laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment,” Sullivan said. “He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.

“I’m mainly shocked that they would even see that tweet and be concerned about me,” she said. “I just honestly feel they’re making a lot bigger deal out of it than it actually was.”

Sullivan said the principal ordered her to write letters of apology to Brownback, the school’s Youth in Government sponsor, the district’s social studies coordinator and others.

Karl Krawitz, the school principal, did not return calls or e-mails Wednesday.

Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag said her office had forwarded a copy of Sullivan’s tweet to organizers of the school-sponsored event “so that they were aware what their students were saying in regards to the governor’s appearance.

“We monitor social media so we can see what Kansans are thinking and saying about the governor and his policies,” Jones-Sontag said.

“We just felt it was appropriate for the organizers to be aware … because of what was said in the tweet.”

Sullivan, 18, said she posted the comment because she doesn’t agree with Brownback’s policies, particularly recent cuts in state aid to schools. She is a registered Democrat.

“Some of my friends were joking about what they’d really like to say (to Brownback), so I just took out my phone” and tweeted, she said. “I guess it was kind of a heat-of-the-moment thing.”

She didn’t think much about it, Sullivan said, because her Twitter page – @emmakate988 – had only about 60 followers and was “pretty anonymous.”

Brownback’s office discovered the tweet via a Web search for his name, officials said.

Niomi Burget, Brownback’s scheduling secretary, e-mailed a screen shot of the tweet to the Youth in Government sponsor at Shawnee Mission East, writing: “I don’t know if this was someone with your group, but thought if it was, you might want it brought to your attention.”

The Shawnee Mission school district was not in session Wednesday. Leigh Anne Neal, spokeswoman for the district, said that district officials were not aware of the incident, but would look into it after the Thanksgiving break.

“In general,” she wrote, “students on school-sponsored field trips, in which they are representing the school, would be expected to conduct themselves in accordance with school district policies, including use of electronic devices. Students may express their personal beliefs, views, and opinions, as long as they do so appropriately and in accordance with school policies.”

Sullivan’s older sister, Olivia, a sophomore majoring in political science at Wichita State University, said she thinks the controversy amounts to Brownback “censoring the opinion of a student.”

“This is something she said on her personal Twitter account,” Olivia Sullivan said.

“It’s unacceptable, first of all, to censor her and punish her for what she said. But for the governor and his staff to waste their time getting a high school student in trouble? That’s ridiculous.”

As of Wednesday, the offending tweet remained on Emma Sullivan’s Twitter page despite a suggestion by her principal that she remove it. It’s still there alongside tweets from a recent “Twilight” movie marathon and her thoughts on Justin Bieber’s holiday CD (“Just found out justin bieber raps in his christmas album... #mixedfeelings”).

She said she plans to write the apology letters over Thanksgiving break and then put the episode behind her. She is awaiting word from the University of Arkansas, where she applied for college next year and hopes to double-major in psychology and sociology.

“I don’t regret what I said,” she said. “I guess I’m just kind of shocked right now.”

Right now the general public views the economics profession with a large measure of distrust and in some cases outright contempt. Students are entering the worst job market in well over a generation, without much prospect of improvement.  Many of them have seen their parents’ lives turned upside down by financial troubles.  They face being members of the first generation in American history with a lower standard of living than their parents.  Income inequality has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age.  There are over 4 million long-term unemployed.

In this environment, instructors who lecture on the superiority of free markets without acknowledging the dysfunction in the wider economy are at risk of appearing out of touch and exacerbating antipathy towards economics.

Ronald Reagan insisted on two things upon taking office as governor of California. One was the head of Clark Kerr, president of the University of California. The second was the imposition of tuition on UC students. Kerr was soon gone, replaced by Charles Hitch. The Regents of the University of California also agreed to impose education fees for the first time on the university's students. Excuses were made that the new fees were not really the adoption of tuition, but Senator Rodda insisted that the fees were exactly that—a violation of the university's long history of tuition-free public education. Tuition meant payment for education, while student fees were presumably payment for incidentals. The line between the two concepts was being blurred—or even erased.

Once the fees were in place, it naturally followed that the Regents could not resist raising them periodically. In this paper, prepared by Sen. Rodda to provide information to his Democratic colleagues, the Senator refers to a pending proposal to set student fees at $600 per year by 1971-72. By way of comparison, University of California undergraduate fees were $8129 in 2005-06.

Sen. Rodda also refers to the community college system in this paper. Tuition was later imposed on community college students, an explicit tuition system based on a payment per academic unit. Tuition-free higher education in California belongs to history, not the present. Rodda was prescient in his warning.

It is worth noting that in the Columbia photo, the one without helmets, guns, or chemical assault weapons, the student is being arrested for selling cocaine. In the Davis photo the students were defending public education.

Could Chancellor Katehi please explain what "serious health and safety concerns" were posed at Davis that were absent at Columbia? The only thing that involved a "serious health and safety concern" at Davis yesterday was the pepper spray. I just spoke with a doctor who works for the California Department of Corrections, who participated in a recent review of the medical literature on pepper spray for the CDC. They concluded that the medical consequences of pepper spray are poorly understood but involve serious health risk. As with chili peppers, some people tolerate pepper spray well, while others have extreme reactions. It is not known why this is the case. As a result, if a doctor sees pepper spray used in a prison, he or she is required to file a written report. And regulations prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. Any prison guard who used pepper spray on a seated prisoner would face immediate disciplinary review for the use of excessive force. Even in the case of a prison riot in which inmates use extreme violence, once a prisoner sits down he or she is not considered to be an imminent threat. And if prison guards go into a situation where the use of pepper spray is considered likely, they are required to have medical personnel nearby to treat the victims of the chemical agent.

Apparently, in the state of California felons incarcerated for violent crimes have rights that students at public universities do not.

A pretty remarkable thing just happened. A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.

A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).

The University of California, Berkeley announced this week that it plans to open a large research and teaching facility here as part of a broader plan to bolster its presence in China.

The public university, which is struggling under budget constraints imposed by the state of California, said the Shanghai center would cater to engineering graduate students and be financed over the next five years largely by the Shanghai government and companies operating here. The program is expected to begin in July 2012.

Berkeley’s announcement comes as other prominent American universities are racing to build closer ties to China, hoping to attract new students, deepen research capabilities and set up sites to train business professionals to succeed in the booming Chinese market. New York University and Duke University are each building a campus in the Shanghai area, and Stanford is building a $5 million research center on the campus of the elite Peking University in the city of Beijing.

This is a familiar story. All administrators care about is a couple of simplified parameters for “success”: the average time to degree completion, which is supposed to be around four years, and the percentage of incoming students that graduate. It’s throughput, baby, how fast can we shovel ‘em through and get ‘em out the other side with a diploma.

There is a good solution to this problem. That is, you hire enough faculty to staff all your programs with good teachers, they teach the students well, they have time to advise and guide students efficiently to degree completion, and they’re there to catch any students who threaten to fall through the cracks, and give them personal assistance. In other words, you give the students the best possible education and help them over any hurdles so they emerge from your program knowing stuff and best of all, knowing how to learn more.

Any faculty reading this are laughing cynically right now, because that’s not the solution we generally get to follow.

The poor and realistic solution recognizes the fiscal reality that state legislatures want to cut, cut, cut higher ed’s budget, and so administrators are looking at cheap ways to get graduation rates up and years to graduate down, and there is an easy way: cut graduation requirements. Standardize the curriculum. The job of the college is no longer to deliver an education, but to issue diplomas, which are awarded for attendance in a defined series of classes. I’m sorry to see that CUNY wants to get into the business of mass-producing diplomas.

President Obama visited a schoolhouse in this suburb of Philadelphia on Tuesday to announce stricter financing standards for the government’s Head Start program, which offers preschool training for children from low-income families.

Declaring that investments in early education are critical to the future competitiveness of the United States, Mr. Obama said that the government would, for the first time, require Head Start programs to meet certain standards to qualify for renewal of federal grants.

“If a program isn’t giving children the support they need to be ready for school,” the president told teachers and administrators, squeezed into a small auditorium on folding chairs, “then other organizations will be able to compete for the grant. We will take money from programs that don’t work and put it into programs that do.”

Like many of the stops on Mr. Obama’s itinerary over the last several weeks, this four-hour visit had three ingredients: a politically crucial swing state (Pennsylvania), a sympathetic crowd (educators), and camera-friendly backdrop (3- to 5-year-old children).

Before his speech, Mr. Obama dropped in on a classroom, where he watched several groups of children playing with wood blocks, Legos, puzzles, and toy cars and trucks. Later, he told the crowd that the children “choked me up” because they were “so huggable,” adding that his daughters were “still huggable,” though now 5-foot-9 and 5 feet, respectively.

For the president, who has crisscrossed the country in recent weeks to promote a $447 billion jobs plan that is largely economic stimulus, the visit on Tuesday had a different cast: a pledge to be more discriminating in how the government spends money.

But Mr. Obama renewed his criticism of Republicans in Congress, saying they had voted in favor of cutting the financing of Head Start and the Pell Grant program and had blocked a $35 billion piece of the jobs bill aimed at preventing layoffs of teachers.

“The Republicans in Congress have been trying to gut our investments in education,” Mr. Obama said. He described this initiative as part of a series of unilateral measures that the White House is taking because it does not want to wait for Congress to act.

In fact, many Republicans favor tightening standards for Head Start, and the reforms of the program announced by Mr. Obama on Tuesday date back to the Bush administration. White House officials said the Yeadon Regional Head Start Center, which serves 260 children from Delaware County, was an example of a high-performing center.

Mr. Obama’s criticism came during a week in which the Senate, after blocking several pieces of jobs legislation, seems likely to approve the first elements of the jobs package: tax credits to encourage companies to hire returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Obviously we look forward to passage of this very important provision of the American Jobs Act, hope it does pass, and the president will sign it into law,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said to reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One.

But the president was not softening his partisan tone, noting that his job-creation ideas could be paid for if Republicans were willing to allow millionaires pay somewhat more in taxes.

“There is no substitute for Congress doing its job,” he said to noisy applause. “If Congress continues to stand only for dysfunction and delay, then I’m going to move ahead without them.”

THE world hit seven billion people last week, and I think I met half of them on the road from New Delhi to Agra here in India. They were on foot, on bicycle, on motor scooters. They were in pickups, dented cars and crammed into motorized rickshaws. They were dodging monkeys and camels and cows. Somehow, though, without benefit of police or stoplights, this flow of humanity that is modern India impossibly went about its business. But just when your mind tells you that this crush of people will surely overwhelm all efforts to lift the mass of India out of poverty, you start to notice a pattern: Every few miles there’s a cellphone tower and a fresh-looking building poking out of the controlled chaos. And the sign out front invariably says “school” — engineering school, biotechnology school, English-language school, business school, computer school or private elementary school. India is still the only country I know where you can find a billboard advertising “physics degrees.”

All these schools, plus 600 million cellphones, plus 1.2 billion people, half of whom are under 25, are India’s hope — because only by leveraging technology and brains can India deliver a truly better life for its masses. There are a million reasons why it won’t happen, but there is one big reason it might. The predicted really is happening: India’s young techies are moving from running the back rooms of Western companies, who outsourced work here, to inventing the front rooms of Indian companies, which are offering creative, low-cost solutions for India’s problems. The late C.K. Prahalad called it “Gandhian innovation,” and I encountered many examples around New Delhi.

Bill Gates made a rare appearance at the University of Washington this afternoon, talking about how qualitative and measurable advances in technology are coming together for major advances in the areas he cares most about these days, including education and efforts to help the poor people of the world.

But the appearance in the UW Computer Science & Engineering Department was most memorable for the question-and-answer session with students at the end — including one student who asked Gates for advice on how she could become rich like him.

“I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger. Dick’s has not raised their prices enough,” he said, referring to the Seattle-area fast-food chain. “But being ambitious is good. You just have to pick what you enjoy doing.”

Here are notes from the presentation and the Q&A session with students, not verbatim quotes but a shorthand summary to convey what was said as accurately as possible on the fly. You’ll find lots of little gems sprinkled throughout, particularly in the Q&A session.

Codecademy, a Web site that teaches people how to program for free, just got a boost to its lesson plan: $2.5 million in venture financing.

On Thursday, the start-up announced that it raised a Series A round of cash from a bevy of noted venture capital firms, including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly Ventures, SV Angel and CrunchFund and from a number of angel investors, including Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious and Jig.

“Our main goal is to hire people to help manage content and add new features,” said Zach Sims, who co-founded Codecademy with Ryan Bubinski, a developer and former classmate at Columbia University. “Right now, there are still only two of us working on the company.”

Codecademy was introduced over the summer and has attracted a flurry of interest since then. More than half a million people have used the site and close to 1,000 developers submitted sample lessons to help others learn how to program. The new venture financing will help the company sustain that early traction, Mr. Sims said.

President Obama will announce new programs Wednesday to lower monthly loan payments for some students graduating next year and thereafter and to let borrowers who have a mix of direct federal loans and loans under the old Federal Family Education Loan Program consolidate them at a slightly lower interest rate.

At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the president would use his executive authority to expand the existing income-based repayment program with a “Pay as You Earn” option that would allow graduates to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 20 years and have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven. That plan would start next year.

Most of the 450,000 low-income student-loan borrowers currently enrolled in income-based payment must pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years before having their debt forgiven, although terms are easier for those in public service.

The lower caps of the new program were scheduled to go into effect for new borrowers in 2014, but, Ms. Barnes said, “because we know the frustration of crushing loan burdens, we have to act now.”

Ms. Barnes noted that over the last month, more than 30,000 people had signed a petition on the We the People platform at whitehouse.gov, asking for relief on student debt.

“It’s a message heard loud and clear,” she said.

The high cost of college and the growing debt burden of student loans have become increasingly potent political issues in recent years, high on the agenda of Occupy Wall Street and related protests across the country.

And the annual College Board reports on college prices and student aid, to be released Wednesday, make it clear that with the weak economy, the college affordability problem is getting worse.

In a zippy demo at TED U, AnnMarie Thomas shows how two different kinds of homemade play dough can be used to demonstrate electrical properties -- by lighting up LEDs, spinning motors, and turning little kids into circuit designers.

Squishy circuits are a project from the Thomas Lab at the University of St. Thomas. The goal of the project is to design tools and activities which allow kids of all ages to create circuits and explore electronics using play dough.

APPARENTLY Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, called two weeks ago for reducing funding for liberal-arts disciplines at state universities and shifting the money to science, technology, engineering and math, which he abbreviates to STEM. (Amusingly, if you Google "Rick Scott STEM" you end up getting multiple references to Mr Scott's apparently non-operative campaign pledge to ban stem-cell research in Florida. Between the two issues, you've got a sort of operatic treatment of the modern Republican love-hate relationship with science.) Mr Scott seems to have repeatedly singled out the discipline of anthropology for derision. On one occasion, he apparently told a right-wing radio host: "You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees...so when they get out of school, they can get a job." On another occasion, he's quoted as telling a business group in Tallahassee: "Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can't get jobs in anthropology? I don't."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made the rising graduation rate — to 61 percent in June, from 46.5 percent in 2005 — the No. 1 symbol of his educational accomplishments. But that rate is less impressive when paired with the percentage of graduates who need remediation in all three subjects when they enter LaGuardia or other City University of New York community colleges: 22.6 percent in 2010 (2,812 students), up from 15.4 percent in 2005 (1,085).

“A few years ago, we noticed the numbers really jump,” said John Mogulescu, the senior university dean for CUNY. Over all, 74 percent of city high school graduates enrolled at the system’s six community colleges take remediation in at least one subject, but those needing all three are at the highest risk of dropping out. So in 2008, CUNY started a program with a few dozen students to see if an intensive semester focused on just the three subjects — five hours a day, five days a week — could make a difference. The program, known as Start, has since expanded.

Of the 302 enrolled so far, 241 stayed the entire semester, 159 of whom were able to pass all three remediation tests. This semester, the plan was to have 630 Start students at the six campuses, but there was such demand, more than 700 were accepted.

A major attraction is cost. Full-time students at LaGuardia pay $1,800 a semester; three remedial classes would dominate a schedule without counting toward graduation. Start costs $75.

The US Senate has blocked a proposal by the Obama administration to limit potatoes in school lunches.

The lawmakers also backed an amendment which bars putting any limits on serving other vegetables in US schools.

The administration’s proposal had envisaged that pupils would have no more than two servings a week of potatoes and other starchy vegetables.

Government health officials say pupils should have more diverse diets, because they get enough potatoes already.

But opponents of the proposal argue that potatoes can be a source of fibre and potassium.

I feel like I just posted about this… but it’s happened again.

A Christian teacher at a public high school wrote about her anti-gay-rights bigotry on Facebook and people are calling for her to be fired.

When Jerry Buell did it, I defended him and argued that he had every right to say what he wanted… outside the classroom. For some reason, a lot of commenters here weren’t happy with that position. However, if we want to go after teachers who privately hold unpopular — and, in this case, reprehensible — views, then we have to brace ourselves for Christian groups who want to target openly atheist teachers as well.

When the evidence later showed that Buell preached his Christianity in the classroom, I supported his suspension. This was someone who clearly had no clue how to keep his private beliefs out of the classroom. He deserved to be punished (or fired) for that.

For a visiting head of state, the carpet does not get any redder than that, and it suggests that there may be something mysterious and powerful at play between Mr. Obama and Mr. Lee: Call it a presidential man-crush.

In some respects, South Korea’s leader has had the kind of presidency Mr. Obama would like to have. With less strangling government debt and a society driven to transform itself, Mr. Lee has been able to pursue much of the “win the future” agenda that Mr. Obama has advocated.

South Korea, as Mr. Obama likes to point out, has a high-speed broadband network that reaches more than 90 percent of its people, compared with only 65 percent of Americans. A larger percentage of South Koreans than Americans graduate from college. At a time when financially struggling school districts here are laying off teachers, South Korea is hiring them to satisfy demanding parents.

Indeed, Mr. Obama cites Mr. Lee’s views on education in virtually every speech he gives these days, including one in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, holding up the hard-working Asian country as an example of what the United States needs to do.

The two men have also built a personal bond, with Mr. Lee being among a small number of leaders — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey are two others — who seem to have pierced the president’s reserve. At a lunch in Seoul in November 2009, which aides said left a lasting impression on Mr. Obama, the two spent much of the time discussing education, not least the role of parents in schooling their children.

“They were discussing the place that teachers occupy in society,” said Daniel R. Russel, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on Asia at the National Security Council, who attended the lunch. “It was very human, and it’s not that common at those rarefied heights of leadership to have a real conversation in which the two people can speak openly about an issue they both care deeply about.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Russel said, also admires Mr. Lee for his determination to thrust South Korea into the front rank of world powers and his approach to his erratic neighbor, North Korea. While he has taken a tougher line than his predecessors toward the government in Pyongyang, he has also stopped short of military action in response to a string of belligerent acts, including the torpedoing of a Navy ship and the shelling of a South Korean island.

California Governor Jerry Brown on Saturday signed a bill giving illegal immigrant college students access to state-funded financial aid, the second half of two-part legislation known as the "Dream Act."

Michele Bachmann is wrong to say allowing illegal immigrants in Texas to pay in-state tuition is “an abuse of an executive power.” Gov. Rick Perry did not impose the policy by executive fiat. The Legislature overwhelmingly passed the bill in 2001, and Perry signed it.

Minnesota Rep. Bachmann — who has criticized Perry’s executive order on HPV vaccines as an inappropriate use of power — made her statement in a Web video posted Sept. 29.

Rick Perry’s tuition troubles have a lot to do with the difference between politics in Texas and politics everywhere else.

His support for in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants — and the fact that he’s sticking with it — started a political tornado. It was enough to make Herman Cain say he would vote for Mitt Romney for president but not for Mr. Perry.

In Texas, there was almost no controversy when the law passed in 2001 with nearly unanimous support from lawmakers of both parties, and it hasn’t been much of an issue since — or wasn’t, until that twister touched ground. Earlier this year, an effort to undo it died in the halls of the Capitol.

And there’s a way to sell it. John Sharp, the new chancellor of the Texas A&M University System and an on-again, off-again buddy of the governor’s, fielded a question about it at a Texas Tribune event last week. He made it sound easy, blaming the federal government for leaving the gate open and then turning the result into an issue of education and economic development that the state was forced to address. It looked, in that version, as if the governor had no choice. The audience — a Texas audience — appeared to swallow it whole. Maybe Mr. Sharp should join Mr. Perry’s debate prep team.

“Here’s what you’ve got,” Mr. Sharp, a Democrat, said in response to a question from the audience. “The federal government is allowing folks to come in — granted, allowing folks to come in that ought not be allowed to come in. O.K.?”

He said lawmakers had to react to that, sounding as if he were writing a new chapter for Mr. Perry’s book “Fed Up!”

“The governor, the Legislature, the 174 members who voted for that piece of legislation did not get the choice of whether or not those kids were there,” Mr. Sharp said. “Their choice is whether or not those kids are going to become productive citizens or become one hell of a drag on the Texas economy, and that’s it. It seems that common sense dictates that maybe, from a Texas point of view, we need to make sure they’re not that kind of a drag on the Texas economy.”

He’s echoing Steve Murdock, the former director of the United States Census Bureau, who is now teaching at Rice University in Houston. Mr. Murdock said illegal immigrants made up 6.7 percent of the state’s population and that leaving them uneducated would devastate the state economy by 2040.

Judging from the number of nodding heads in the audience, Mr. Sharp’s line worked in Austin. It might well have fallen flat on the presidential debate stage, though it could hardly have gone worse than the reaction Mr. Perry received.

Indeed, there is no “in” or “out” anymore. In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best,” and managers and entrepreneurs everywhere now have greater access than ever to the better and best people, robots and software everywhere. Obviously, this makes it more vital than ever that we have schools elevating and inspiring more of our young people into that better and best category, because even good might not cut it anymore and average is definitely over.

A pending Missouri law that would have blocked teachers from having private conversations with students on social networks was overturned late Friday. The law (PDF), which had previously received the approval of the Missouri Senate and was signed by Governor Jay Nixon in July, was reversed by a judge on Friday with the Missouri House passing a new bill that requires schools to lay out teacher-student communications policies by March 1, 2012.

The law is aimed at protecting kids from sexual misconduct, among a plethora of other threats, by focusing on the reporting of sexual abuse, keeping weapons out of schools, and the like. Despite its well-meaning nature, however, the Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) complained immediately about one provision in the bill that restricted teachers from using a "nonwork-related Internet site" that might allow a one-on-one exchange between a teacher and student. This would likely include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or any number of other social media sites that include the ability to send private messages, and included no provisions to allow for teacher-child communications if the teacher is the parent of the child in question.

The MSTA filed suit to stop the ban in August, saying the law was "so vague and overbroad that the Plaintiffs cannot know with confidence what conduct is permitted." Days later, a judge said the law had major implications on free speech and issued a temporary block of the law.

Now, a preliminary injunction has been issued to block the law in question from going into effect until February 20, 2012, with the judge saying it would have a "chilling effect on free speech." The Missouri House subsequently passed a similar, but separate, bill with a 139 to 2 vote that gives school districts the freedom to determine their own communications policies. The new bill, which would permanently block the previously one, now awaits Governor Nixon's approval.

Banned Books Week begins this Saturday and runs through Oct. 2.

This has nothing to do with books that are banned in totalitarian countries such as China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

It has everything to do with actual or attempted bans of books here in the United States of America, the supposed pinnacle of free speech.

The American Library Association and other publishing-related organizations have been sponsoring the week since 1982 to draw attention to ongoing efforts to remove or prohibit certain books in classrooms, school libraries and public libraries.

These efforts go beyond censorship, which has to do with sanitizing literature and history by deleting “offensive” passages. The book-banners want to deny both adults and children access to certain reading material.

Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty of trying to ban books. Leftists dislike books that are “racist,” “sexist,” “insensitive” and otherwise politically incorrect. Rightists oppose books that are sexually explicit, blasphemous and contrary to “traditional” family values.

The targets run the gamut from newer books such as “And Tango Makes Three” and the “Harry Potter” series to classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Brave New World” and “The Grapes of Wrath.”

I’m not saying every book should be in every library. Obviously, elementary school students should not be reading “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

However, banning books is an insidious practice that itself should be banned in a democracy. What do you think?

The hundreds of young people who converged on the New York Stock Exchange this weekend are calling their demonstration against Wall Street greed an "American Tahrir Square." While they have a long way to go before they create the tremors that brought down the Mubarak regime, their passion was clearly on display on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan.

The protestors were gathered in the square at the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, after police blocked them from the epicenter of American finance a couple of blocks away. Many had spent the night in sleeping bags and insisted they were prepared to spend many more to make their point.

"This country is in decline," said Jack Laxson, an 18-year-old Hampshire College student who was carrying a sign that read, "Corporations Run This Country -- Let's Do Something About It."

"Even with a good education, you don't have much to look forward to. No jobs, lots of debt."

Like many of the protestors, Laxson expressed strong disappointment with President Obama, but said the Republican presidential field was even more demoralizing. "They're a social psych experiment," he said.

My youngest daughter, Beth, started school last week. She's four and a half and has never known a world in which the iPhone did not exist. She has never known a world in which 24x7 connectivity to the Internet was an impossible sci-fi dream. I suppose her starting school led me to reflect on what her school life will be like.

Consider the basic timeline: Beth won't leave school until the summer of 2025. Assuming we still have universities by then, she'll be be launched into the world waving her degree from the University of Hyderabad in the summer of 2029.

The question is simple: is there any plausible non-apocalyptic scenario in which technology is less prevalent, less widely distributed and less embedded in our culture in 2029 than it is in 2011? I simply can't imagine one.

The GSMA predict that there will be 50,000,000,000 connected devices on the planet by the year 2025. Think about that: by the time Beth leaves school, there will be something like seven Internet-connected devices on the planet for every person.

To paraphrase William Gibson, ubiquitous computing is here - it's just not built into the furniture. We don't have smart floors or LCD walls, sensor grids in the ceilings or the Internet on our fridge. We are almost all, however, carrying a pocket device that connects at some level to the network. The flood of smartphones only increases their capabilities.

We are already at a point where the ratio of professionals to computers is 1:2. A laptop and a smartphone are standard equipment in our society. With the advent of the tablet, we may be moving towards or beyond three computers per person.

The fact of the matter, though, is that this ubiquity of computing devices is not reflected in most schools.

Democrat Bill White, the former Houston mayor running for governor, has said if elected, he'll "move Texas forward" — a vow he's said will include revamping education.

"Texas should be America's great state of opportunity," White says in his first TV ad, which started airing Feb. 1. "But how can we move forward when our graduation rate ranks 43rd out of 50 states, and we're lagging behind in test scores?"

Almost the bottom of the barrel? We decided to check.

White spokeswoman Katy Bacon pointed us to the the Legislative Budget Board's 2010 Texas Fact Book, which lists everything from elected officials' phone numbers to — we're not kidding — our state snack and tie (tortilla chips and salsa, and the bolo, by the way).

The fact book also ranks Texas' estimated public high school graduation rate for 2009 — 43rd, with 61.3 percent of students who were enrolled in ninth grade graduating.

John Barton, the board's public information and report production manager, said the agency pulled the statistic from State Rankings 2009, a comprehensive publication issued by CQ Press, a widely-regarded nonpartisan publisher of infomation related to American politics and policy.

The budget board's depressing ranking indeed matched CQ's, which used data from the National Education Association in Washington and the National Center for Education Statistics to compare the estimated number of public high school graduates in 2009 with the number who were enrolled in 9th grade in fall 2005.

Vermont ranked first, with 96.6 percent graduating. South Carolina ranked last with 55.2 percent; Washington, D.C., isn't included. The national rate of graduating students in 2009 was 69.3 percent.

Texas' graduation rate has been sliding. In 2001 the state ranked 35th, with 65 percent of students graduating from high school. In 2008, Texas ranked 42nd with 62.6 percent of students graduating.

We rate White's claim as True.

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

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, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools.

But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere—but not replicate. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.

WGU’s answer to the status quo is to offer a degree that is based on competency rather than time. By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”

Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all. At the beginning of a course, students are given a test called a “pre-assessment.” Then they have a conversation with their mentor—a kind of personal coach assigned to each student for the duration of their degree program—to discuss which concepts in the course they already grasp, which they still need to master, and how to go about closing the gap. The students are then offered a broad set of “learning resources”—a drab phrase, sure, but no more so than “crowded lecture hall”—that may include videos, textbooks, online simulations, conversations with a WGU course mentor (an expert in the subject matter who is on call to answer questions), or even tutors in the student’s hometown.

If the course material is entirely new to a student, she might make her way through it in eight weeks, or eighteen—or eighty, for that matter. Then again, maybe the student is, say, an ex-pastor who’s been selling Nissans in western North Carolina to make ends meet while he earns an MBA in human resources management—and maybe the course is Business Ethics. Ray Shawn McKinnon, the former pastor in question, studied ethics in his early twenties for his bachelor’s in ministry and theology, so he nailed the pre-assessment. Given that success, his mentor allowed him to immediately take the final, which he passed. With that, Business Ethics went down on his transcript—and McKinnon moved on to subjects that genuinely terrified him, like math. “If you can prove your competence,” McKinnon said, “why pay all of that money to sit through something you already know?”

This is where the real power of the Western Governors economic model comes in. Tuition at the school works according to the “all-you-can-eat buffet” principle: $6,000 covers as many courses as you can finish in two semesters. Given the freedom to move at their own pace, many students can finish more than a standard academic load each term. In fact, according to Western Governors, the average time to degree for people who complete their bachelor’s at the school is around thirty months. That’s a college degree in two and a half years—for a total of around fifteen thousand bucks.