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“I am merely an honest American like yourself - and of the best descent - for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.” — Mr. Scratch, The Devil and Daniel Webster
 A few months ago, I commented on a smear piece against e-learning published by Bloomberg's BusinessWeek written by someone named Daniel Golden. Well, Mr. Golden has struck again, this time with a piece about the purchase of Daniel Webster College by ITT Educational Services, a large company that has a number of online schools, most notably ITT Technical Institute. It seems that Daniel Webster was in dire financial straits, and since they have regional accreditation, something that ITT lacks, it was worth it to ITT to spend a great deal of money to acquire them, and it was being acquired that was allowing Webster to keep existing at all.
Mr. Golden, similarly to his previously displayed kneejerk opposition to for-profit education, seems to find that this mutually beneficial partnership is terrible news. And once again his objections stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of how federal aid to college students actually works. His complaint this time seems to be that because ITT is projecting that they can turn Daniel Webster College into a billion dollar enterprise, that this is a billion dollar subsidy of ITT coming from taxpayers. Unfortunately, his analysis contains a double helping of fail. The main reason it's wrong is that ITT doesn't plan for students using federal financial aid to be the target market for Webster. They're more interested in building relationships with large firms wherein their employees will be able to attend Webster as part of those firms' human resource development. In other words, the money ITT will make here will come from the tuition reimbursement programs of other firms, not from taxpayers. But let's assume that Mr. Golden is right, and that ITT, as the devil, is lying about what sort of students Webster will be targeting. Let's say all the new students that they attract are paying their tuition with the help of federal financial aid. That's all money coming from taxpayers, right? Wrong. Except for Pell grants, which are pretty limited, that's money that comes in the form of loans to students that they then use to pay their tuition and other fees. It's money students have to repay, and the rules on repayment are so strict that it usually can't be escaped unless the student dies or becomes totally disabled. Even bankruptcy doesn't get rid of student loan debt! Now, it's true that guaranteed student loans distort the market for higher education. By increasing the amount of money available, Pell grants and federal student loans tend to push tuition rates up, and many economists believe this is one factor why college has become so expensive so much faster than most other things in the last few decades. And if Golden had complained about that, I'd have been supportive. But that's something that affects all sectors of higher education, for-profit, non-profit, even public universities, so writing about that wouldn't fit his agenda. But, ever the optimist, I still hope that next time he chooses to write on this subject he'll connect the dots right. Like the saying goes, third time's the charm.
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“We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.” — Friedrich August von Hayek
 A number of times over on the forum, the issue of an unusual school called Swiss Management Center has come up. My usual advice when this happens has been to say that the school is clearly legitimate, and even noteworthy because of their reasonable tuition rates and their dual degree programs with other international universities. The only downside as I saw it was that although they have programmatic accreditation from ACBSP, which is a CHEA-recognized organization, they do not have institutional accreditation, since they're not eligible for the Swiss equivalent because of cumbersome regulations there that no standalone business school could meet and that have nothing to do with educational quality. In fact, today's quote is aimed squarely at the Swiss university system.
Now, this is a confusing and highly unusual set of overlapping statuses, and my opinion has been that while they may be a great choice for consultants and other businesspeople, for those specifically interested in a full-time tenure-track faculty position at a U.S. university, they may not be ideal, at least until the matter of their recognition by the more conservative U.S. institutions can be better addressed.
A few months ago, the issue flared up again, with one SMC student being so vehement in defense of his alma mater that I agreed to contact the school to get their take on things. I'm very glad that I did. I ended up corresponding with Michael Schmelczer, the Chairman and CEO of SMC, and it was a very enlightening conversation. They're aware of the inconveniences that their current situation may cause students who have certain goals like full time teaching, and they're determined to resolve the matter in some useful fashion this year, whether it means finding a better recognized status within Switzerland or even institutional accreditation through some other system.
I discovered something else as well. Professor Schmelczer told me that they're starting a PhD program in Economics, and as someone with a fairly strong interest in that subject, I went to check it out. The sentence that really caught my eye was this: “However, most current PhD Programs in Economics are still preoccupied with the quantitative side of socio-economic issues and brush aside the crucial analysis of the philosophical foundations of societies, markets, or cultures.”
Now, I've been a libertarian my whole adult life, and I know a description of the Austrian school of economic thought when I read one, and that description fits very well. So I read the faculty biographies of those in their Economics department, and I have never been more impressed by any department in any online school. As an example, their department chair, Kurt Leube, was a longtime student of the late Friedrich von Hayek (pictured), a Nobel laureate who wrote influential books for both specialists and lay people. And the others in the department are no slouches either. Simply put, for anyone interested in the Austrian school of thought, or anyone who just wants to learn economics from people who are skeptical of government action and who apply logic to the analysis of economic issues rather than treat them like physics problems, Swiss Management Center is clearly a leader.
Now, at this point, many of you may be thinking that this is pretty geeky stuff, and that I'm only so impressed because I happen to be a fan of this Austrian school of economic thought, whatever that is. And sure, that doesn't hurt. But the point is that it almost never happens that an online school is in the top tier of anything, even something that's as specialized as this. So regardless of whether one cares about this specific subset of economics, it speaks extremely well of SMC.
What does that do to my recommendation about them? For those who are interested in getting a PhD so as to get full-time tenure-track faculty positions at U.S. universities, I wish I could completely change my recommendation, but I can't, at least until they resolve their unusual status. I'll say that yes, even those people should take a look at SMC, but tread very cautiously, as I suspect their having ACBSP accreditation will be good enough for some institutions but not for others. But for anyone who is interested in doctoral study of business or economics for any reason other than full-time teaching, I cannot think of an online doctoral program at any school that looks more interesting and I'm happy to recommend that those people look very closely indeed at Swiss Management Center.
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“When they see a big problem, some people think, 'The government should do something.' Then they have two big problems.” — author unknown
 Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that supposedly addresses the problem of degree mills, those entities that take on the guise of being universities, awarding bogus credentials to anyone who pays a fee.
Nobody likes degree mills, so I suppose we're all supposed to cheer, but I've always thought that those who are the most vocal about this really want to go about it the wrong way. If accreditation is important to you, then it's already trivially easy to find out whether an institution is accredited or not, and if so then by which accrediting organization. All one has to do is drop by CHEA's web site and search their database. Go check it out for yourself; it's free and takes maybe one minute.
See? Wasn't that easy? The problem, then, is not that government isn't Doing Something. The problem is that HR departments, in both the public and private sectors, aren't doing their jobs when employment applications are being vetted. This legislation does nothing to address that problem, and until something does, then nothing is going to change.
So with all that said, if this legislation isn't going to do any good, can we at least say that it's harmless? Sadly, no. While the bill doesn't totally mess up when it comes to recognizing the difference between being unaccredited and being a degree mill, it does require unaccredited institutions to wear a "scarlet letter" in all of their marketing. Why is this bad? Because new institutions are inherently unaccredited, and by requiring them to falsely imply that they're not as good as their competitors, those new colleges and universities are placed at an unnatural disadvantage.
Worse, as it's written, the legislation seems to completely prevent new accreditors from entering the market, closing the door to those who would threaten the control of those that now exist. Ineptly, it even potentially reclassifies legitimate accreditors of academic departments and some types of specialty schools as "accreditation mills". What kind of consumer protection bill does things like that?
The tools needed to make informed decisions when it comes to external validation of degree legitimacy are already freely available, both to students who are deciding which university to attend, and to employers who want to hire university graduates for their open positions. This bill would create problems while solving none. Here's hoping it dies in committee. Next up, an update on Swiss Management Center.
Image courtesy of Selena Marie
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“Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.” — Rita Mae Brown
 The New Bern (N.C.) Sun-Journal is reporting on the decision of Craven Community College (that's their actual name, not an editorial comment) to remove a work of art that was made by students and was on display in the student center, because it depicts one of their faculty members engaging in a particular act.
Ooooo, sounds juicy, doesn't it? It was something terrible, right? Was it pornographic? No. Was he making some sort of offensive gesture, like a Nazi salute or something like that? No. Was he doing something illegal, like blowing up a building or robbing a bank? No. So what was this intolerably controversial act?
He was smoking a cigar.
I know, disappointing, but that's it. The guy is one of their faculty members. He's a grown man, and smokes cigars, evidently a lot. So when his students airbrushed a picture of him, they did him justice by showing him as he really is. So it's a picture of him that the administration won't allow displayed on campus because... and my fingers hurt just to type this... because it "sends the wrong message" to students.
Why do administrators insist on treating college and university students as though they were still in middle school? If your student health office wants to post useful information about smoking cessation programs around campus, and students can take it or leave it, sure, that's great. If they want to say, "Smoking is incredibly short-sighted and foolish!" then no problem. But in a circumstance like this where administrators talk in doublespeak about not sending the wrong message, the only message they really send is that they have no respect for the independent decision making abilities of their students and no interesting in maintaining an environment where those abilities can develop.
Now, don't get me wrong, I realize that young adults do foolish things. Ask anyone who knew me when I was eighteen and they'll probably tell you they're amazed I've survived to be twice that age. But in the long run, we learn from those blunders. We have to make them for ourselves in order to become adults who know enough to avoid bad decisions. In olden times, teenagers were considered old enough to take care of themselves, even to start raising families (like in a good way). But in the last few decades our society has artificially extended adolescence for longer and longer periods of time, and while that may protect our children in the short run, in the long run we do them a disservice to treat them that way.
There's a saying that it's easier to teach your kids to wear slippers than it is to carpet the world. The folks who run Craven Community College, and the rest of us, ought to take note. Next up, speaking of meddlesome administration, a bill has been introduced in Congress supposedly to fight degree mills, but the cure is worse than the disease.
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“The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” — The Wall Street Journal
 Why is it that people lose their minds whenever something new comes out with an Apple logo on it? I mean, sure, they make decent products, their hardware works properly and it's tightly integrated with the software they write for it. And I appreciate the security and stability they brought to Macs when they switched over to OS X, their own user-friendly version of the powerful Unix operating system. They're not bad.
But there's a difference between something being perfectly fine and something deserving all the hoopla that the arrival of the iPad just got. Take, for example, Joshua Kim over at InsideHigherEd, who's written a piece on the possible use (and danger) of the iPad as a piece of educational technology. Now, his piece raises interesting issues, and it's worth reading. But even when he points out some of the potential drawbacks for mass adoption of this device by universities for their students, he still seems to have an unreasonable adoration for it, as when he concludes, "...I'm totally excited to get my hands on a shiny new iPad. How about you?"
Well, Mr. Kim, since you asked, I couldn't care less about getting my hands on one. So far it looks like it's a big iPod Touch, along with everything bad about that, like how it's locked down like Alcatraz so that only approved apps can be installed. And I don't like how it doesn't have unfettered web surfing. Flash as a way to deliver video has its problems, but in the absence of a widely adopted alternative, being able to view it is a must for any serious computing device. Most importantly, though, Apple seems to want to position the iPad as a device for e-books, but it's also not perfectly designed for that. Books may be cumbersome, but at least you can read them anywhere. The iPod's screen isn't designed such that you can read it in bright light. Some people actually like to read and study outside or at least have the option to do so. By comparison, for all its faults, this is something that Amazon's Kindle does well. But my main concern is that the locked down nature of the device makes me nervous about trusting it as a textbook repository. When you buy a physical textbook, no one can take it away from you. When your book is data in a device that can report back to the mothership in Cupertino, what guarantee do you have that your books won't "expire" or simply be removed by some corporate mistake? Before you call me paranoid, remember that this has already happened to some people who've bought e-books for their Kindles.
The other thing that gets me about all this hype is that people are talking about this as though no one had ever come out with a
tablet-shaped computer before. But they've been around for years, and never found a significant constituency. Will the magic that seems to come along with an Apple logo change all that? Maybe so; it wouldn't be the first time. But before people place their trust in this device, especially as a place for their e-books, they deserve to hear more about why 2010 won't be like "1984". Next up, should adolescence last forever?
Image courtesy of Balazs Gal
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