Every college student is forced or encouraged to take a bunch of general education classes that are unrelated to his/her major. There are administrators on both side of the argument, lobbying for their case, according to an article in the Washington Post. One group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has been compiling research to argue for its case. It found that many colleges require three or fewer of the basic subjects, such as math, science, foreign language, composition, the fundaments of U.S. history, economics, literature, composition, etc. The group analyzed 1,007 colleges and found that three fifths of those schools do not ...Read More About Why A General Education

Another higher education program, The University of the People, just set out with the mission of extending affordable education to more people, according to an article in the New York Times. It hopes to spread education to poor students around the world. The university was started in Haiti, after the earthquake destroyed most of the country’s higher education infrastructure. The school set up three computer centers in tents and invited English-speaking students from nearby tent cities to come and work for about four hours a day. “They don’t have electricity, they don’t have computers, there are university studen ...Read More About How One University Is Offering Affordable Education

Two Stanford professors have announced that they will offer a free online class on artificial intelligence, according to an article in the New York Times. Stanford professors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig – two of the world’s best-known artificial intelligence experts – will teach the course. Over 112,000 and counting people have already enrolled in the class, which is nearly six times the entire Stanford student body. Students range from high school to retirees, and the course will represent students from 175 countries. Thrun and Norvig said that they will teach this course as part of an education experiment ...Read More About Stanford Offers Free Artificial Intelligence Class Online

The price of college never seems simple to calculate. There’s tuition plus room and board, minus scholarships, plus random fees, minus financial aid, and on top of that, colleges are always changing those numbers. But good news for your migraine – The U.S. Education Department recently stepped into the college rankings business to release a public Web site that lists the most and least expensive college, along with those with the steepest tuition hikes, according to an article in the Washington Post. The new site, collegecost.ed.gov. seeks to create more transparency around the net price of colleges, giving prospective students h ...Read More About How To Find The True Cost Of College

In terms of bang for your buck – public colleges may have a better return on investment that previously thought. An article in the Washington Post cited an article from SmartMoney magazine, which measured the value of colleges by their graduates’ salaries in proportion to the tuition they paid as students. However, this is only a “value” metric, and SmartMoney magazine admitted that its scale is far from perfect. Its analysis does not take financial aid into consideration. Some colleges post high tuition prices but offer huge scholarships to nearly every student. It’s a marketing ploy. Many Ivy League sch ...Read More About Assessing ROI Of A College Degree