Special Reports July 14, 2013 The Gates Effect The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent $472-million (so far) on higher education. Why many in academe are not writing thank-you notes.
By Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Beckie Supiano Terry Crosgrove, who works in an Ohio plant that makes Slim Jims, is studying for an associate degree through Southern New Hampshire U.'s competency-based program, which was begun with money from Gates. In Bill and Melinda Gates's vision for higher education, more students will get a college experience similar to Terry Crosgrove's. Each morning, Mr. Crosgrove clocks in for the 5:30 a.m. shift packaging Slim Jims at a ConAgra plant in Troy, Ohio. On days off, he chips away at an associate degree offered through an experimental online program at Southern New Hampshire University. The low-cost, self-paced education lacks courses and traditional professors. Instead, students progress by showing mastery of 120 "competencies," such as "can use logic, reasoning, and analysis to address a business problem." The program is an important guinea pig. The U.S. Department of Education recently allowed Southern New Hampshire to become the first university eligible to award federal aid for a program untethered from the credit hour, the time-based unit that underlies courses and degrees. The move, wrote one advocate, "could signal a new era for higher education." The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at $36-billion the world's largest private grant-making foundation, has done much to orchestrate that new era. Its largess and sway helped get Southern New Hampshire's program off the ground, supported a key think-tank report that advocated moving beyond the credit hour, and helped persuade a risk-averse Education Department to open federal coffers to competency-based education. full: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Gates-Effect/140323/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
