Friday, November 8, 2013

A Bit of History from The Other Jeff

I've been blogging on higher education, among other topics, intermittently for a while at The Other Jeff. I'll start this new blog with a few highlights from the old.

One of the big themes in higher education policy has been cost. Soaring costs. Uncontrollable costs. Extravagant costs. Administrative bloat costs. I've had a couple of posts on that, one responding to the 2013 State of the Union Address and one to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Both take the perspective that that "cost" problem confuses cost per student with cost to students, and thus is really a very different problem for different institutions. For UVU, the problem really is state appropriations. Our inflation-adjusted spending per FTE has remained basically constant since the 1990s. During that time funding has been slashed. Students, of course, pay the price. Cost was also one of 12 supposedly inconvenient truths about higher education that economist Richard Vedder posited that I got about halfway through taking down before other duties called.

Another big theme that I've addressed repeatedly is my research on how educational institutions use data. I've argued at several conferences that "big" data processes such as data mining and predictive analytics raise some very serious ethical concerns. That has morphed into a more argument that we need to think about data as an issue of social justice, both within and beyond higher ed. This spring I'll be presenting papers on the constructive nature of educational data processes and how that embeds a host of normative issues in the data itself and the conclusions we draw from it.

"The Other Jeff" wasn't a higher ed planning blog specifically, so there's a lot of other content there: a good bit on teaching, a lot of rather abstract political analysis and philosophy (strange for a former political theorist, I know), and a few rather random musings on life, the universe, and everything.

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