By Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute/EPI International There is a great article on the Huffington Post this week by Amanda Fairbanks called Peter Thiel’s College Bubble Theory Gains Few Believers. Thiel is one of the founders of PayPal and an investor in Facebook. He argues that higher education is on the bubble, just like housing was, and it will quickly devalue. … Continue reading The College Bubble
By Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, EPI International/Educational Policy Institute I like him. Charlie Sheen. He’s a fun actor to watch. Of course, it must be easy to act in a sitcom about, well, your lifestyle and life. Nonetheless, he has done some great acting in Platoon and Wall Street and… Hot Shots… Major League… Scary Movie(s). I admit: this isn’t the most educational … Continue reading Thank God for Charlie Sheen
This morning I sat in on the OECD Institutional Management in Higher Education Conference in Paris listening to a panel on the need to do more with less in higher education. The illustrious panel included representatives of Open University, Cisco Systems, and others, and was moderated by my friend and colleague, Peter Smith of Kaplan Higher Education. Continue reading The Problem with Higher Education
Yesterday, Yahoo Finance posted an article on the worst-paying college degrees in 2010 (see below). Among them are education ($35,100 starting; $54,900 mid-career), special education, child and family studies, and social work. For those of you that follow the trends on return on investment from advanced degrees, the stable outcome of the past decade-plus is that only advanced degrees, such as law, medicine, and other professional levels, are beating inflation. BAs are holding steady, but anything else, including the now-vaulted associate degrees, are losing ground. Continue reading The Worst-Paying College Degrees
The Boston Globe published a piece on Monday (thanks to Academica.ca for their reference) on the practice of adding a ‘gap’ year between high school and college. In Europe, many students take a gap year, sometimes through military service, sometimes through travel and other pursuits. But in Canada and the US, there is a push to continue education and get into the workforce. Continue reading PRESSURE: Two Perspectives on Pressure in Higher Education
The Swail Letter on Higher Education 