Notes in the Margins: Floating schools, misleading rankings and unbundled education

UC programs in lieu of affirmative action show limited success In the nearly two decades since California voters banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the two most competitive University of California schools — UCLA and Berkeley — saw enrollments of black and Latino students plunge and have struggled to recover.

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 (Los Angeles Times)

‘Floating Schools’ Bring Classrooms to Stranded Students In Bangladesh, where floods regularly disrupt education, a nonprofit group has found a way of using wooden boats to deliver classes and books to rural communities. (The New York Times)

Liberal Arts Collides With Economic Necessity As Colleges Explore New Paths Post-Recession Determined to learn their way out of the Great Recession – or eager to rise above the deprivation of developing lands – unprecedented millions of people have enrolled in colleges and universities around the world in the past five years. What they're finding is an educational landscape turning upside down. (Associated Press via The Huffington Post)

Rankings mislead with unstandardised scores Recent research into university ranking methodologies has uncovered methodological problems within the most well-known systems currently being produced. One key problem is the summation of unstandardised indicators for the total scores used in rankings and this weight discrepancy can misinform and hence mislead. (University World News via NAICU)

Four ways higher education is being ‘unbundled’ Here are four trends whose origins predate the Great Recession, but which have been unmistakably fueled by it. (Associated Press via NAICU)

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