Outsell Inc. :: Thinking Out Loud – Education » 2008

You thought getting into a US college was tough?

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 30, 2008

Many countries have famous or infamous cram schools to get into prestigious colleges. In India, competition to get into one of the seven Indian Institutes of Technology is so harsh that some high school students leave two years early to move to Kota, which has been called “India’s cram school capital”. A front page article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal discusses one of these schools and its off-shoots started by Vinod Kumar Bansal.

The payoff for graduating from one of the IITs is huge, but the road is arduous. Students study six full days a week and one Sunday a month they take a practice test. This is a two year program and not for the faint of heart.

However when the seven ITT schools are statistically harder to get into than Harvard or Cambridge, people go to great lengths. This past April, 310,000 students took the entrance exams for ITTs, only the top 8,600 were accepted. The best advertising for Kota’s rigorous programs is that one third of those 8,600 were graduates of one of their cramming schools.

It helps to have some perspective.

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Where does the money go?

By Harry Henry - Oceanside, California - on September 30, 2008

We are frequently asked to examine various data found in the NCES data made available from the Department of Education in the U.S. On one such exercise we looked at the expenditures by all 16,600+ school districts across the US.

In 2006, they spent approx $540 billion — not quite “bailout” proportions, but healthy nonetheless. This was 6% more than 2005. Of that $540 billion, about 50% was for items categorized as Instruction. There are other categories, like support, administrative, capital expenditures, etc. — but about 1/2 our dollars go to instruction.

Inside of that instruction category are salaries, benefits and related personnel costs — teacher, essentially. Those represent approx. $244 billion or 89% of the instruction budget. The remaining 11% goes to instructional materials.

So, of all the money spent in the US K-12 school districts, approximately 5.5% is spent on instructional materials. I don’t know about you, but that feels small.

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Smiles and confidence may be hiding some understandable anxiety

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 29, 2008

Earlier this month at the EdNet conference, I detected a strong current of nervousness amid the friendliness, optimism and belief that the industry was still waiting for the next Big Thing rather than wrestling with very difficult problems in a contracting economy.

I hadn’t been to an EdNet conference before and I went as a researcher not as an investor or salesperson. I had some interesting discussions with some of the folks but once they figured out I didn’t have money to invest or know anyone who might, some of them definitely lost interest.

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Not the Model for District Operations

By Laurence Bloom - Boston, Massachusetts - on September 29, 2008

In an article today in the NYTimes, district officials in Detroit are unable to confirm the report that enrollment in Detroit Public Schools has declined to 88,000 students vs. nearly 105,000 last fall. Even though the district acknowledges a drop in enrollment, they were expecting it to be closer to 96,000 and have not been able to confirm the number to be 88,000. According to the article, the loss of each student costs the district $7,660 in state aid – totaling the loss to $61 million.

There was an official enrollment count last Wednesday – and get this, some districts actually had a drawing to give away cars for students that show up for the count. OK – when you’re already running a deficit, do you think it’s a good idea to spend money for car(s) for students just to show up for attendance?

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Open Teaching – No need to apply or pay, but feel free to accept the home made certificate

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 29, 2008

In today’s Campus 2.0, an article reported that David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate, even if they weren’t enrolled. About 25% of the unofficial students did end up with “ a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley, who at the time directed the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and is well-known in the area of online learning.”

Some students feel that these certificate will be credible signals in the marketplace or expertise or knowledge. Time will tell if that is the case. In the MIT OCW initiative, the thought was that the real value was in the interaction was in the classroom so they weren’t giving away the store when the materials were made available for free.

Professor WIley graded the unofficial students’ papers and they took part in class discussions; hardly a scaleable model. Still, it will be interesting to see the development of this grass roots movement especially given the high costs of tuition, the move toward more employment useful education and the growth of online education.

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Is a college diploma “worth it” even if you can afford one?

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 29, 2008

Recently, Charles Murray, no stranger to controversy wrote that the US idea that a college education for all people is a worthy goal was completely wrong headed. For many students, it isn’t a question of should they attend, but can they even afford the option? A recent report from commissioned by the National Education Association and released two weeks ago showed that 70 percent of parents and 65 percent of students said making college affordable was an important issue for them in the fall election.

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reported: “America’s higher-education enterprise — which in terms of colleges’ spending has become a $375-billion industry — is, as even its most ardent defenders are beginning to acknowledge, anything but a model of efficiency or frugality. It is often needlessly duplicative, overly reliant on outdated approaches to teaching and management, maddeningly slow in adapting technology to save money, and notoriously, even proudly, resistant to change.”

That publication as well as many others and several groups of stakeholders will be watching this debate and look for signs of restoration to a more reasonable price per unit value cost.

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An Education City in the Gulf

By Harry Henry - Oceanside, California - on September 28, 2008

We noted an interesting item in the news today of a new agreement in Qtar between that country’s educational foundation and Total, the french energy giant. Part of this is a major corporation helping an area educate the local workforce with more training resources.

The other interesting part is the center of education that Qtar is building in the region with partnerships with major universities in North America and Europe. has lots of potential.

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Nice To See Some Things Still Are Free

By Laurence Bloom - Boston, Massachusetts - on September 26, 2008

Reading Partners, a San Francisco-based children’s literacy non-profit organization, is expanding its operations to include Los Angeles. The organization offers free services to high-need, Title 1 public schools to help struggling young readers from low-income families succeed in reading. The organization recruits local volunteers, ranging from high school students to retirees, and trains them to use a structured curriculum.

Given the resource (monetary and/or human) constraints faced by district, this organization appears to be doing great things – at the right price for districts. See…you don’t always get what you pay for – sometimes you get much, much more!

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A sloodle is not a new type of poodle mix breed

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 26, 2008

Huntington Junior College is taking part in an innovative program with enterprise software company Campus Management Corp to participate in their early adopter learning system. A second life platform is fused with Moodle (giving rise to the name “sloodle”) and students go into the second life environment as a one-stop portal to go to job fairs, to sign up courses, and all other types of administrative management tasks. Early reports suggest that both students and faculty are happier with this new system. Distance Education students stay more engaged, and with student retention a worrisome issues for some institutions, this benefit is valuable. Both students and faculty report more and more valuable and rich collaboration within the sloodle. And Huntington Junior College (with 900 students in West Virginia) becomes a showcase for cutting edge technology.

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Others really do read your personal profiles and musings

By Lisa Abrams - Cambridge, MA - on September 26, 2008

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article noted that one in ten colleges report that they consider an applicant’s online presence (Facebook, My Space etc.) in their admissions process. In a second recent note, a senior at Colgate University was fined $5000 to pay for the security and police costs when he wrote on a campus blog how easy it would be to make a threat to kill students in order to shut down school for the day. That senior was not considered a credible threat but these days it is likely a mistake to ignore any such posted message. I’ve heard for years that online image management is a serious issue and one that people ought to consider before posting those holiday pictures. These two instances show evidence of those identities being checked as a matter of course and that there are real consequences to sharing with a wide open ended audience what one may have considered a diary musing or a shared conversation in a dorm room in the past. The Colgate senior was not expelled or suspended but the details of his deeds and its consequences can be in a wide variety of online forums.

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Who's thinking out loud?

Archive for September, 2008

You thought getting into a US college was tough?

Where does the money go?

Smiles and confidence may be hiding some understandable anxiety

Not the Model for District Operations

Open Teaching – No need to apply or pay, but feel free to accept the home made certificate

Is a college diploma “worth it” even if you can afford one?

An Education City in the Gulf

Nice To See Some Things Still Are Free

A sloodle is not a new type of poodle mix breed

Others really do read your personal profiles and musings

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