Higher Education in America

In the most rigorous evaluation yet conducted of an online course, William Bowen and his colleagues found that students in dozens of courses who were taught statistics in the blended, Carnegie Mellon manner learned as much as those taught in the conventional lecture course format.

undergraduates spent either in class or doing their homework dropped by almost one-third—from roughly 40 hours per week to only 27.

twenty pages in length during the entire year.

“who can predict the impact of exponentiating technologies on social institutions, such as universities, corporations, or governments, as they continue to multiply in power a thousand-, a million-, and a billion-fold.”

Still remaining is the possibility of achieving major cost reductions through the use of online courses. It is quite possible that technology will permit colleges to offer an education of equal (or better) quality with fewer professors and thus bring the same type of cost savings to higher education that industry has long enjoyed through substituti

By this standard, only 32 percent of all students who enter high school and fewer than half of all high school graduates are capable of succeeding at a four-year college.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reports that more than two-thirds of the almost 300,000 students in its 2012 survey used social media “sometimes” during class, while 39 percent of freshmen and 31 percent of seniors did so “frequently.” Promoting Student Learning and Institutional Improvement: Lessons from NSSE at 13 (2012), p. 18.

sections achieved this result while spending an average of 25 percent less time on the course, resulting in cost savings to the institution ranging from 19 to 57 percent compared with carefully selected control groups enrolled in courses with different types of conventional formats.

From 1961 to 2004, according to a series of self-reports from large samples of students, the average amount of time that