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
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
By Watson Scott Swail, President and CEO of Educational Policy Institute This past week I was privileged to speak with the faculty and Board of Governors of Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Fanshawe College is an example of a decades-old institution that has undergone massive growth in the new millennium. Today, Fanshawe serves 16,000 full-time students and approximately 30,000 part-time students. The campus is immaculate; state-of-the-art, … Continue reading (What) to Be, or What not to Be
By Watson Scott Swail, President and CEO, Educational Policy Institute With the “real” start of this election year in the United States, which is being followed with fervor around the world (e.g., “Is Obama or Clinton going to win the nomination?” says a European colleague to me in Ljubljana, Slovenia in April), much of the focus is on the “next generation” of voters. This group, which … Continue reading The Rise of The Millennials
By Watson Scott Swail, President and CEO, Educational Policy Institute Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the College Board Major Systems Meeting in Napa, California. The audience included superintendents and principals from mostly California, but also Washington state, Utah, and other states in the western region. The purpose of my discussion was to provide a macro overview of the changing world, ala my … Continue reading Living a Lie?
The Swail Letter on Higher Education 