NEW YORK TIMES Editorial: …The new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has developed a preliminary version of a one-page “shopping sheet” with data from the colleges that will allow students to learn how much they will need to pay, what they will owe, how the school ranks nationally in net cost, and whether students who have graduated are earning enough money to repay their loans.
The Department of Education has also created a preliminary version of a “college scorecard” with data to help students compare colleges on affordability and value. A scorecard for all colleges should be available later this year. (By federal regulation, for-profit schools are already required to report similar information, including student earnings and debt, to the government.) Some of this information can be gleaned from federal records, but making it readily available to students would be a new use of the federal data.
President Obama wants to expand campus-based aid to about $10 billion from the current $2.7 billion. He has proposed moving money away from colleges that fail to control tuition increases or provide good value to others that do a better job. That is a worthy idea in principle, but he will need strong data-based evidence to determine how colleges are doing… (more)
EDITOR: Our predominently campus based college education hearkens back to the Middle Ages. We need to adapt to a mixture of campus and Internet classes including a sharing of college laboratories in order to reduce the cost of education by at least a half. Not many famlies can afford over $50,000 a year for an Ivy League school or its equivalent nor should students have to graduate owing over $100,000.
After a year on campus, undergraduate could spend a couple of weeks on campus each semester and take the rest of their courses via interactive ‘real time’ Internet. Such services are already provided at some universities for students who cannot make classes.
Harvard Busienss School offers a pathway for promising young executives to spend several weeks on campus and then study and communicate via the Internet, getting together for a couple of weeks each year.
