Blogs

From time to time, I'm invited to visit our local ag/tech college, which trains quite a number of students to enter the food service industry at levels where you never have to ask whether someone wants fries with that. Program faculty, of course, cover all the material about industry standards and standardized procedures and more-or-less standard approaches to management. But they've kind enough to ask me in to speak about sustainability considerations, and I really enjoy interacting with students who learn (and think, and create) in hands-on mode.

The California Legislature is considering a bill "to require the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies.

A few years ago, some colleges in my neck of the woods flirted with the idea of partnering with more expensive for-profits to provide “express lanes” for students to get around long waiting lists for high demand programs, especially in nursing. The idea was that the colleges didn’t have the resources to build the needed capacity, so they would partner with institutions that did. Now, and on the other ocean, California is considering requiring public colleges and universities to accept MOOCs for credit when taken by students on waiting lists for regular classes.

How often do offspring repeat their parent’s profession?

Everyone in higher ed seems to believe in the power of innovation, while very few of us know how to change how we organize ourselves to move from ideas to execution.

During the summer, I committed to running a short program on Strategy and Competition in Higher Education – essentially a two-day non-credit version of the full length Strategy and Competition in Higher Education course - and asked people what they thought were the most important topics for discussion during such a program. And there was definitely some consensus.

Right now I am right smack in the middle of writing my dissertation proposal. Talk to any graduate student at this phase of the process and they will groan in recognition of the long slog it seems to be. At this point in my writing I have successfully organized my closets and my bathrooms have never been so clean. In spite of all this, I'm still managing to eke out a few pages a day and, slowly but surely, I am getting there.

You know how the hook of a song can get stuck in your head, or how you sorta, kinda recognize an actor in something and you can’t stop trying to remember where you’ve seen him before? (Actual conversation at home: “Hey, it’s that guy from...uh...” “Oh, yeah! That one with the girl from the show?” “Yeah, that’s it...”) Some questions have that same effect on me. Once I’ve either heard or asked them, I can’t let them go. This is one of those. Why don’t men return to college?