A recent study showed that sixty percent of college students say the pandemic has made it harder to access mental health care, even as they are under so much more stress. Maybe it says something good about colleges, or maybe it says something unsettling about society, but in the modern era offering mental health services […]
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In a Time of Instability, Are Online Colleges a Safer Bet? The cynics appear to have been right: a large number of traditional colleges announced they would conduct in-person classes, only to cancel at the last minute, or stayed open for a few days – weeks at most – before returning to an online format. […]
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U.S. colleges have still not found a clear path towards safely resuming in-person classes. Michigan State joined the list of universities that, despite publicly planning to resume in-person instruction, returned to an all-online format at the last minute. And Notre Dame has suspended in-person classes for two weeks while it re-evaluates its ability to conduct […]
Read more about Students Became Customers, and Education Suffered
The United Nations Secretary-General has called the covid-19 pandemic “the largest disruption of education ever.” But it’s not just a crisis for education. The impact on students who “remain out of reach” of the education system will be catastrophic, and have implications for areas ranging from economics to child nutrition to gender equity. “We already […]
Read more about A Crisis in Education is a Crisis for Everything
This is an important message. This may be the most important message that education has for the economy right now: Creating more opportunities for the people left behind creates more opportunities for everyone. The more people can participate fully in the economy, and do well in it, the bigger the economy gets and the more […]
The conversations around online learning are unusually heated right now because they’re literally life and death for many people. Whether or not to open schools, hold in person classes, bring students on to campus … and if so, how … are questions with actual fatality rates attached. There is no bigger picture than that, at […]
Okay, so, we’ve been through the “online education is going to save us all!” phase, and then the “online education is terrible and we have to get everybody back to classrooms!” phase. The good news is that now it looks like the conversation around what online education is and how it works is finally getting […]
The coronavirus presents as significant a challenge to the business models of California’s colleges as it does to their teaching models. A series of recent articles shows that colleges are struggling with almost paradoxical problems: they’re afraid that covid-19 surges are going to reduce their enrollment and raise their dropout rates … but the students […]
As the coronavirus puts the already teetering business models of higher education under massive strain, there are more and more calls to re-invent college. That’s a worthy goal. But if we’re not careful, we may just end up perpetuating long standing problems. We may end up “fixing” education for the people who don’t need it […]
When the pandemic forced schools and colleges to shove all their classes online, a lot of proponents of online learning felt triumphant: at last, online learning’s time had truly come, and nothing could stop it now! A month ago we predicted there would be a backlash. And, wow, has it arrived. Writing in the New […]
Read more about "Online Learning" is a great tool, but not a cheat code for social progress
