Two articles on higher education

The Economist this week has an article on online learning. I interpret it to say that it has reached the stage of being a disruptive technology for higher education. Students in residence in colleges and universities are now sometimes taking courses online rather than attending lectures, showing up in person only for proctored examinations.

An analysis of over 1000 studies of online-course results conducted by America’s Department of Education found that people who complete such courses do better on average than students in face-to-face instruction.

The result may be bad news for many of the thousands of colleges that offer services of average quality at relatively high costs to average students. I may be good news to star educators whose courses may gain huge numbers of students, all of whom pay a little to very high salaries to the folk putting on the course.

Pew Research in a new report provides these graphs showing how much better the college grads are doing in the USA than folk in their age group who have only two year degrees or only high school.