One more bit from a New York Times article about Arizona State’s plan to offer a year’s worth of freshman courses online:
“The monopoly that used to exist in terms of how higher ed is done is over, and this is part of a continuum of things that are welcome new approaches,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, the president of the Lumina Foundation, an Indiana-based nonprofit group concerned with educational attainment. “It has big potential in giving students a jump start on completing their degree. And because of the A.S.U. imprimatur, the likelihood that the credits will be transferable is pretty high.”Characterizing higher education as a monopoly is a curious move: a little like characterizing the practice of surgery as a monopoly because it is limited to surgeons. Mr. Merisotis presents MOOCs as a monopoly-busting alternative, but the alternative still trades upon the reputations of name brands: Arizona State, and behind that name, Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford.
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OMG, this cries out for one of your How-to-Improve-Writing mop ups.
I mean, "educational attainment"?
--Frex/Fresca
I know. But I wouldn’t want to do anything to aid and abet the enemy. :)
I keep thinking about this.
Is educational attainment what we used to call learning?
Another series I'd like to see is
How to Write Badly, Well.
(Not sure how to phrase this...)
There's an art to writing badly, don't you think?
Wait. No, not "art", which implies conscious effort. But maybe some kind of genius?
Most people can write badly at a mediocre level, but the stuff that truly flays you, that's something else.
There’s a famous (or once-famous?) piece, “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words.” Early editions of The Practical Stylist have something along these lines too.
“Educational attainment” sounds to me like a way of talking about credits and degrees, as “assessment instruments” is a way of talking about tests.
It would be instructive to Google Lumina Foundation's Form 990 for the tax year 2013. A long and boring read to some, I found it fascinating. For a 501(c) tax exempt corporation to have many of its related groups organized in the Cayman Islands, as well as Canada and the UK, and for an IRS-approved tax exempt foundation to state that its secondary function is "passive investments" of some $1.4 billion in funds, all the while the corporate leadership is supposedly paid $26K for a full time job, perhaps the statements made by this foundation's spokesperson are nothing but marketing. How much money of that "passive investment" of over a billion has been distributed to schools? Precious little. The New York Times article's writer could have applied some few minutes with a search engine to have learned that Lumina is not higher education's friend, but a local office of many offshore tax havens, for so it seems. Google "2013 Form 990-T 4.1M - Lumina Foundation for Education" for the PDF.
A little more skepticism for the day: EDX in Cambridge is a 501(c)3 "public charity." Guidestar notes that $25,836,362 in government grants are the lion's share of its funding suggests that MIT and Harvard as institutions are not funding it directly. The administration for this charity paid itself $3,299,943 in the fiscal year ending 2013. It claims a million enrollees for its courses online. Couple EDX paid with government grants with a Lumina which involves itself in Cayman Islands "passive investment" behaviors, and one sees a far different picture than philanthropy or broader education. Something in Denmark might be rotten?
Anon., thanks for these comments. I wish (I’m not kidding) that you were writing on a page of your own and not letting your finds just serve as comments here. Here is Form 990 for 2013. Searching for lumina criticism also yields interesting results. Non-profit and reform are words about which to be wary.
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