Blogs

In higher education, there are demand drivers for different degrees and credentials and institutions can choose to respond accordingly. One thing is certain - even a new degree or school created based on the most careful, accurate mapping of external trends with internal capabilities may fall short if the timing is off.

Things do seem to be coming together. I've got well over a hundred students, from around the world, and more and more names, each day, appear in my inbox (when a person enrolls, I get an email). Yesterday I recorded my third lecture, Distinguishing Between Good and Bad Poetry. (You can enroll in the series - it's free - by going here and scrolling down to Poetry.)

Call it dual enrollment, call it early college. I call it an opportunity to show high school how it can be done differently.

My husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary this past January; we have been together another two years. In the early days of our dating, my husband was game enough to seek out the odd and strange things that surrounded us in central Missouri. We have seen the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the largest salt lick in the Western Hemisphere, the world’s largest concrete goose, one of the purported world’s largest pecans, the room where Jesse James was shot and killed, and a “castle” in the Ozarks called Ha Ha Tonka.

With persistent pressure for increasing income entrepreneurial universities may pounce on any new market niche if it promises potential students. Domestic branch campuses are yet another element in the increasing commercialization of higher education.

Is a College Education Still Worth the Price? costs $2.99. I'm not quite sure if a college education is worth the price (something on my mind as I'll be paying two sets of tuition in 2017), but I am sure that the Schwartz's book is well worth this investment.

We are just completing our search for the founding dean of our School of Engineering and Applied Science. The finalists are all impressive but the search process itself has also been impressive.

Like many parents, I have been following the Trayvon Martin story with outrage and with deep grief for his family. And also like, I am sure, many parents of teenage boys, I am guiltily aware of feelings of relief and fear in the mix — relief that it wasn't my kid, and fear that next time it might be.