US Higher Education’s Billion-Dollar Liability
I am not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a literal-minded engineer who loves education...
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Category: 21st Century Skills
A Simple Metric to Align Higher Education with the Workplace
It is now widely accepted that the job of college is to get you a job. While schools are talking...
Read MoreThe Kids Can’t Write? They Write All Day…
Cross-post from 11trees.com… Infographics are often quite silly. They try to boil down complex issues into simplistic graphics, with stick figures and stylized pie charts. The good ones, though, unveil some central truth...
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Designed for Suffering: Student Retention Through Adaptive Pain
I was catching up on my reading and came across a wonderful essay on the economist Albert O. Hirschman (who I’d never heard of). My wife asked me what I was doing, and I said, “I’m reading this wonderful...
Read MoreWhat Can Higher Education Learn from the Disney Store?
What do students get for investing four to six years in higher education? The opportunity cost, the tuition dollars, the resulting debt? What is the return to taxpayers footing billions of federal and state dollars for loans,...
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Design Lessons: Focus and Mission, Elegance and Efficiency
One of my favorite design stories has nothing to do with software. Building software, especially...
Read MoreWhere Do Our Students Go?
I created the early versions of Waypoint to begin answering these questions for myself – and only myself. I was teaching 100+ first year engineering students per term, with 50% turnover across three terms (a trimester...
Read MoreGiving Manufacturing a Bad Name: Sir Ken Robinson and Education
It is easy to slam manufacturing: manufacturing is synonymous with pollution, lost American jobs, and an overall national slide from prominence. American ingenuity is focused on big budget Hollywood films, reality TV, and...
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