Confessions of a Community College Dean

You know how a song can get stuck in your head, and you can’t get it out? That’s where I am with the idea floated in California to have students learn now and pay later.

Thank you to everyone who answered the call for suggestions earlier this week about running college classes in high schools. The point about class interruptions for announcements, proms, and such was a good one, and can be included in the words of warning we give the professors.

“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?” It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...

Like many community colleges, mine offers some credit-bearing courses onsite in some local high schools that are just far enough way that it would be difficult for the students to commute. In some cases, we’re just renting space in the high school and teaching at night. Those cases are relatively straightforward; we pay a room fee and otherwise do what we would normally do. But sometimes the school district wants a 100-level class offered to its students, on its premises, during its normal school day.

President Obama used the term “value” in outlining the criteria he’d use, if he had his druthers, in allocating Federal funding to higher ed.

Work doesn’t always look like work. Over the last week, I’ve had a couple of long, meandering conversations with professors as they’ve returned for the Spring. One was completely spontaneous, and the other was a focused discussion that quickly and thoroughly overran its purpose. They were the kinds of discussions that can only happen before the crush of classes gets fully under way -- deadlines aren’t looming yet, students aren’t hunting them yet, and everybody is still relatively well-rested. It’s a brief window.

A few follow-ups to issues that came up this week: In response to the “rejection” post earlier this week, one...

President Obama has put higher education “on notice” that if we keep raising tuition, we’ll get our public funding cut...