Blogs

CUNY’s New Community College, in New York City, is attracting plenty of attention in higher ed circles. It’s an attempt to apply a panoply of best practices in raising graduation rates to a population that desperately needs it. Whether it becomes an exemplar of a new model, or withers on the vine as an expensive boutique project, remains to be seen.

Summer is here, and for most of us it is also spelled as v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n: sunny days, ice cream, mint juleps, children at play, and long family evenings. But this is not all there is to it…

My wife and I were both born in 1969. Here is a short list of debacles, missteps, and failures that we've witnessed in our time on the planet: stagflation, the energy crisis (gas lines), the tech bubble, the 2nd Iraq war, the housing bubble, and the great recession (and you can add to this list). Another way we could describe the past 40 or so years, if feeling negative, could be: rising inequality, stagnant real wages, rapid increases in health care and education costs, growth in structural unemployment/underemployment, and political polarization and ineffectiveness in the face of these challenges.

I'm still recovering from my trip, so here are some shorter thoughts on current happenings.

During a rare stretch of warm, sunny weather in our waterlogged Vancouver region, I look for every excuse to be...

I’ve been thinking and writing about failure lately, but it seems as though this is the week to argue about where success comes from.

I am getting so tired of all this MOOC frenzy, and so I apologize in advance for penning yet another article on the topic. But I'm starting two new Coursera classes tonight and I'm already grumpy about the whole process.

I did not see this coming. Amazon.com is offering to pay up to $2,000 per year towards educational costs for its warehouse employees if they pursue Associate’s degrees in certain high-demand fields, including fields like aircraft mechanics that have no obvious value within the company.