Notes in the Margins: Millennials, rankings and state funding

The Flaw of Overall Rankings Many college administrators are uncomfortable with rankings of colleges and universities, such as those found in U.S. News & World Report. Perhaps they don’t like the idea of measuring the quality of an institution of higher learning, or they don’t like the way the measurements are done. But from a psychological point of view — psychology is my field — there is a more fundamental problem. Overall rankings obscure what is most interesting about an institution. (Inside Higher Ed)

Secretaries Duncan and Geithner Host Student and Parent Town Hall on Paying for College Expanded tuition tax credits for working class families, larger Pell Grants for low-income students, and making student loans more affordable for all college graduates were on the docket today as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, D.C.’s Wilson High School Assistant Principal Charlette Butler for a town-hall style forum. (ed.gov)

Meet the Millennials: Our most educated generation faces a most challenging time Ushered in with the first Baby on Board signs in the early 1980s, Millennials were cocooned, coddled and chauffeured by over-protective parents, correcting for the hyper-individualist, anti-child times they grew up in. They expect to get jobs befitting their hard work and talent. But Millennials are often misunderstood. (Seattle Times)

For-profit college group sues to block federal rules A group representing for-profit colleges sued the Education Department on Friday to try to block new federal rules relating to how the schools pay recruiters, how they represent themselves to prospective students and how states oversee their activities. (Washington Post)

Public Universities Relying More on Tuition Than State Money In most states, it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget. And the increasing dependence on tuition has disturbing implications for access to higher education. (New York Times)

Business Schools With a Social Appeal Business schools are starting to offer degrees in social entrepreneurship based on the principle that social problems can be tackled in similar ways to business problems.

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