Dive Summary:
- President Barack Obama’s plan to rank colleges and tie federal financial aid to those rankings — and to focus more on student outcomes such as earnings and competency in subject matter — could lead to a big shake-up in higher education if it materializes.
- The president's support of new technologies to improve student outcomes — namely, MOOCs — could give this technology a big boost and mean that more students do not step foot on a college campus.
- Colleges that focus on academics for their own sake may run into trouble with career- and earnings-based metrics when vocational schools outscore them on some counts.
From the article:
... In a competency-based education world, we’ll have data on exactly what students know when they graduate. Schools will have an incentive to adopt standard measures of competency related to communication skills or computer programming ability. Every student can be judged based on how they score on common tests, rather than if they spent buckets of money attending a household name university. ...
