Interesting Reads This Week

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Our society puts too much emphasis on getting things and much less about keeping things or helping flourish what is already in place. This is also true for higher education and EdTech.

They need to work hard for their money

This week brought another wave of bad news for many universities. Extensive cuts have been announced at several institutions but especially focused on colleges in Ohio. Outside of the Midwest, things aren’t necessarily much better. A report on enrollment in California shows big drops in enrollment at the CalState University and California community colleges, There is some good news buried in there, e.g. increased minority enrollment, but the outlook is still grim. For some context, the CSU and the community colleges enroll substantially larger numbers of students than do the University of California campuses. Orders of magnitude more.

Given demographic realities, there is only so much that  institutions of higher education can do about enrollment. Retention on the other hand is another matter entirely, but you tend to hear far less about that in many of these discussions. That is why this week I was fascinated by a pointed letter from the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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