Opinion

In the last year or two, many challenges have been made to lower the cost of earning a degree, create differential pricing based on major, or allow individual professors to set the cost of their on-line courses. A high quality blend of liberal arts and professional training will never compete with pressures for new, low-cost options if price alone is considered. When playing the game Let’s Make a Deal, many excellent institutions will lose out to these economic pressures unless they respond with much more than good economic arguments.

Here are my suggestions for what higher education might resolve to do in the New Year. What are yours?

It's time to set your research aside and to think about the undergraduate classroom, writes John Fea.

In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook, Susan Herbst -- president of a university in the shadow of Newtown, Conn. -- assesses the tragedy's implications for her institution, and others.

My fellow IHE blogger, Lee Skallerup Bessette, got a bit of a discussion going on Twitter over the break when she posted a real estate listing for an abandoned college campus. In the context of adjunct activism, she proposed pulling people together to buy the campus and start their own college.

Getting the year off...somehow.

The most important change in higher education is not the growth in online learning, the rise of the MOOCS or the mobilization and digitization of curriculum. Rather, it is the change from courses as the product of one (faculty) practitioner to a team approach, where faculty (as subject matter experts) collaborate with learning designers, librarians, media specialists, and technology professionals to design, deliver and evaluate the course.