By Watson Scott Swail, President & Senior Research Scholar, Educational Policy Institute I like Mike Rowe. Rowe, the host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the new CNN program, Somebody’s Gotta Do It, is a complex guy. A former opera singer (really) and host for QVC (has great stories about Joan Rivers), Rowe has become an outspoken proponent for the blue collar jobs and workers in … Continue reading What Does Mike Rowe know about College?
By Watson Scott Swail, Ed.D. President and CEO, Educational Policy Institute The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recently released a report updating data on student retention and persistence. Unfortunately, the news was not good, as the fall-to-fall retention rate (e.g., freshman-to-sophomore) fell 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2012 from 69.9 to 68.7 percent. Although one percent does not sound like very much, in a national context, that … Continue reading Do We Have it All Wrong? Where Access & Retention Collide
By Watson Scott Swail, Ed.D. President and CEO, Educational Policy Institute In 1988, approximately 27,000 8th-grade students took both a survey and test for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the US Department of Education. For some of us, 1988 doesn’t seem that long ago, but in educational research, it is an eternity. However, this study has stood the test of time … Continue reading The Missing Link: College Aspirations & the Common Core
by Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute In my 30-plus years in education, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Unfortunately, they aren’t changes that have really improved much. Sure, since I graduated with my education degree back in the 1980s (that long ago?), I’ve seen the advent of the PC, the World Wide Web (as it was once known), smart boards and … Continue reading If You Want Change, Change the Rhetoric
by Dr. Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute I’m guilty. I did it. I Googled myself. I’m not sure why, but I did. Ego, I guess. It sounds worse that it is, but in the end, I Googled myself. And what I found astonished me. I found a 15-year old video of me speaking at an event in Washington, DC. The date … Continue reading The Song Remains the Same
The Swail Letter on Higher Education 