Monthly Archives: October 2011

We’re happy to report that EdTechDigest.com just published a feature interview with our CEO, Burck Smith. We’re happy for two reasons, actually. First, the interview does a great job of explaining what StraighterLine is all about. Second, it offers a thought-provoking glimpse of where American higher education is headed in the months and years ahead.

As a service to students who are thinking of entering the medical and medical support professions, StraighterLine is running short posts on medical terminology. Each post will define one medical problem or condition. Today’s term is . . . Gallstones

 Back in 1961, president Johnson announced that things were about to get a lot better for students! Why are we still saying that today?

A new report, “The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges,” just released by American Institutes for Research, points out that there is a huge downside too. Community colleges, the report finds, are costing American taxpayers nearly $1 billion annually – an expense that is ramping up due to the high dropout rate at community colleges.

After years of trying, it looks like Disneyland Paris, the French version of a Disney theme park, has finally gotten stabilized and is attracting visitors.  The question is, how long will it take for foreign versions of American universities to put down roots and become part of the landscape in the countries where they are located?

If you’re a student who is sinking in debt, we don’t have to explain what the effect has been on your life. Chances are you have moved back home with your parents. If you have a job at all, a huge percentage of your earnings is probably earmarked for repaying your loans.  

That’s right! StraighterLine’s newest Partner College is the University of Phoenix, the largest private university in America.

We realize that we are in a period when lots of people favor cutting the funding for all kinds of government programs. But is cutting tuition support for Marines a good choice to make? And will it be only the first of more cuts to educational funding for service people and veterans?

“Starting to Worry,” a new article by Kevin Kiley for Inside Higher Ed, offers further evidence that certain smaller colleges are growing increasingly anxious about how long they can continue to charge high tuition and offer exclusive educations to a small number of students.

Many students are reporting that they are paying a lot more money and getting less from the colleges that they attend. But even if that is the case for you, chances are that you are still getting a lot more than the students who would like to enroll in one section of a Psychological Statistics course at California State University Northridge. According to the University Ventures Newsletter, here are some of the absurd, insulting requirements that the course’s professor has placed on students.

We’ve just learned that the city of Chicago, in cooperation with IBM, is planning to open five new schools where students will complete high school and earn two-year associates degrees at the same time. It’s an innovative idea, even though it may take some students more than four years to earn both the high school diploma and associates degrees.

If you want to learn a lot about trends in American higher education and have fun at the same time, you should spend a little time playing around on Good Transparency’s Trends in Higher Education website. The people who created this page took statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics and plugged them into one of the niftiest interactive websites anywhere that lets you slice up the data in a number of interesting ways.