Even as President Obama, a handful of governors, and several private foundations continue to push American higher education to graduate more students so that the United States has the world's highest portion of people with college credentials, a sobering report recently in The New York Times detailed the real-world...

Ever since the country's top universities teamed up last year in loose federations to offer free online classes to the masses, MOOCs have become a household word in higher-education circles. They remain a sensation and a curiosity on the higher-ed conference circuit this winter, where nearly every meeting seems...

One of the many criticisms about the current fascination with massive open online courses, or MOOC's, is that they fail to improve on a basic pedagogical problem that many universities face: the large size of lecture classes. Indeed, MOOC's exacerbate the problem by enrolling tens of thousands of students rather...

Every spring, millions of 18-year-olds graduate from high school and start on one of three paths: college, the military or work.

College is the choice encouraged most often by high-school guidance counselors, and for good reason. By 2020, two out of every three jobs will require some sort of higher...

Much is made of President Obama's goal that by 2020, the United States will lead the world in the proportion of college graduates. Less often discussed is that the president and others have also challenged Americans to commit to at least one year of education or training past high school.

For much of the first decade of the new millennium, Samuel J. Palmisano and A.G. Lafley led two of the biggest names in American business: IBM and Procter & Gamble. By the time they were named chief executive officers, the two iconic companies were in need of the makeovers the...

How much responsibility do colleges bear in helping launch the careers of their new graduates?

Until recently, not much. Many colleges followed the same tired playbook year after year: a career office tucked away in a corner of the campus, employer fairs, visits from corporate recruiters, and then, six months...

When Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this month that they were forming a partnership to offer online courses free to the masses, they pledged $60 million to the effort, dubbed edX. That's about twice the median budget of four-year colleges and universities in the United...

Part I of my conversations with students at six colleges and universities about the future of higher ed happened to appear the same day there was yet another announcement that has the potential to chip away at the legacy system. The biggest name brand in higher ed, Harvard University,...

"Do you actually believe in this stuff?" one of my colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me last week.

The stuff he was referring to were the disruptive innovations that are supposed to revolutionize how higher ed is delivered in this country, a topic I've been writing...

Scottsdale, Ariz. -- Michael Crow, the ubiquitous president of Arizona State University, opened the Education Innovation Summit here this week by giving his views of what ails higher ed. He called it "filiopietism," or the excessive veneration of tradition. Not enough students are coming into the system, he...

In discussions about the future of higher education, there's often plenty of hand-wringing over the precarious fate of the hundreds of small, tuition-dependent private colleges scattered throughout the country. With many of them located in out-of-the-way places, their isolation means that merging or even collaborating with other institutions to reduce...

In public forums about the drastic changes that higher ed may undergo in the coming years, one question inevitably gets asked of those advocating market disruption: Would the alternatives to the traditional degree pathway be good enough for their own children?

The answers are always nuanced, and I have never...

College campuses are full of long-held assumptions about how academe works. A perilous one for the future of American higher education is that high-school students pick a college, enroll, and -- two or four years later -- graduate from the same institution.

That pathway hasn't been the norm for a...

The lifetime wage premium that accompanies a college degree has long been the best selling point for colleges trying to attract students. The marketing pitch went something like this: Don't worry how much you spend on our degree, we all know that getting a college credential is worth it.

President Obama couldn't have picked a more opportune time to put colleges on notice about their rising costs. Within days of threatening colleges with the loss of some federal aid during his State of the Union address, hundreds of private-college presidents descended on Washington for their annual meeting. A...

The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace...

Since the late 1970s, when some type of a college education essentially became a requirement for a solid, sustainable, middle-class job, the cost of that education has skyrocketed.

The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign...

Student loans are not going away, despite calls by Occupy protesters in recent weeks to have the federal government finance public colleges entirely and write off all student debt.

So rather than debate the impossible, we should instead discuss better ways of financing a college degree.

The higher-ed establishment...

Employer unhappiness with college graduates is nothing new. As the president of the University of Washington, Michael K. Young, told me recently, "employers have never been happy with the graduates colleges are producing."

Still, with three million unfilled jobs in a bad economy, it stands to reason that some employers...