The Midterm Exam. Election. I mean Election.

In a profoundly moving tribute to the American spirit of civic duty, the barely one-third of eligible Americans who bothered (or were allowed) to vote gave control of both houses of the US Congress and the majority of state legislatures to the Republican Party. The last polls closed less than 12 hours ago, but that hasn't deterred the higher education punditocracy from declaring last night either the end of the world or the end of history.

Nor, of course, will it stop your intrepid higher ed futurist. UVU put that in my job description, after all, and part of that job is to cut through the sensationalism of the higher ed punditocracy. There are usually some gems beneath the hype, and election analysis is no exception. There are some things that we can expect, and we do need to understand why many of the dire/triumphal predictions aren't likely to come through.

LWRT October 13, 2014

This week in Last Week in Retweets, we consider what might be an actual good argument for MOOCs, a less impressive argument about the software that makes MOOCs possible, jobs, skills gaps (or lack thereof) among minorities, adjuncts, the Carnegie Classifications, rankings (as always), and uh, the loo.

LWRT October 6, 2014

Fresh from a hiatus for the Rocky Mountain Association for Institutional Research Conference, this week's Last Week in Retweets covers for-profits, competency-based education, Academically Adrift, tuition, and (like you didn't see it coming) rankings.

LWRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 22, 2014

Topics last week include high-stakes testing, predatory lending, retention alliances, City College of San Francisco's accreditation battle, student evaluations, and (I'll bet you thought I forgot about) college ratings.

LWIRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 15, 2014

Introducing a new feature for this blog: Last Week in Retweets. I'll be consolidating the more interesting items on higher education that I've found via Twitter over the past week with some summary and commentary, and posting them every Monday. Subscribe to the blog for great source for keeping up on news about the future of higher ed beyond the hallowed walls (lawns? parking lots? ring road?) of Utah Valley University.

Topics last week include college rankings, credit hours, civility, rankings, competency-based assessment, nanodegrees, rankings, unbundling, and rankings. Oh, and ratings, because the proposed federal government system will only rate institutions, not rank them. They're very particular about that.

Rating the Rankings: University Ranking Processes and Methodologies

With the release of the US News and World Report College Rankings this morning, the annual college rankings season comes to a close. There is a wide range of different rankings, with schools at the top of one ranking looking mediocre in another.
[cough]Yale University
[cough]Reed College
[cough]Babson College
What do we make of these? In the spirit of the forthcoming (and, perhaps, always will be) federal Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS), I rate (but not rank!) five of the more prominent systems, and consider where UVU fits into the rankings.