Unintended Consequences

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Grades and ethics

Jane Robbins at Inside Higher Ed asks,  Is Grade Integrity a Fairness Issue?  "It seems that when we stop looking at our own (internal) interests for raising grades [getting better evaluations, making our students look good to employers, avoiding fights with parents and grade appeals from students] it becomes harder to justify grade inflation because …

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“If you don’t have enough jobs….you cannot train your way to victory.”

  Higher ed is great.  It's a public good and a private good.  If it weren't for higher ed, I'd have to set my murder mysteries somewhere else. But training displaced workers doesn't make jobs magically appear; not only that, the time spent retraining may have been better spent looking for employment: "What is more surprising …

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Aaaaaaauuuuuugh! (Or, if you prefer, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)

From Discover Magazine online: "Their research is already yielding surprising results. Pace’s studies of residential showers have raised serious concerns that showerheads may act as delivery vehicles for bacteria that cause pulmonary disease. Dunn’s microbial transects of the American house are turning up shocking similarities between the ecosystem of your pillow and that of your …

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The Completion Agenda

These universities have signed up for Project Degree Completion, the goal of which is to increase the number of baccalaureate-degree holders by 3.8 million by 2025.  I'm sure they've thought through all of the possible consequences of a single-minded focus on increasing the number of college graduates.

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