Thoughts on College Board's National Forum

I am currently flying back from the College Board’s National Forum in Miami, FL.[1] I was there as part of the College Board’s ELA program.

My impression of the conference (or forum) was that there is a great deal of passion, hope, and energy in the education professionals who were gathered there. The amount of talent there makes me believe that change is possible even in the face of all of the barriers, all the way through the education pipeline. From pre-K through the highest levels of graduate education there are people working to make the world a better place.

It is great to spend a few days with people who are willing to go base-jumping to make education better for all students. I met many people who are willing to think big, execute and risk everything for students. We need more people like this who are ready to go base-jumping.

It will be very interesting to see where the College Board moves under the new leadership of David Coleman in order to support these people and the education of today’s and the future’s students.

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1. Since Hurricane Sandy did not hit Miami, I guess I can only really say that it was rather windy and rainy while I was in Miami, but not that I experienced an actual hurricane?  ↩

Kayak.com for Net Price Calculators

I bet on this happening at some point with the introduction of the Net Price Calculator requirement on college websites. College Abacus has launched their Kayak.com-like service for price shopping colleges. I was certainly not the only person to perdict this.

Right now they say they have over 2,000 schools available to search but it is not clear if the colleges agreed to be a part or if the service is simply scraping results from their sites (just like kayak.com has done in the past and run into issues with the airlines, see here and here).

If College Abacus is not asking permission of the colleges, what might the reaction be? Should be interesting to watch, especially that they try to tackle some of the more complex (some have over 50 questions) Net Price Calculators.

College Board National Forum - October 24-26 - Miami, FL

As part of the College Board’s Enrollment Leadership Academy I am headed to Miami, FL in two weeks for the College Board’s National Forum.[1] The sessions and presentations are looking really good and I am looking forward to meeting/speaking with a bunch of people in higher education and K–12 from around the country.

If you will be there and want to meet for coffee or drinks, send me a message on twitter @scottcline or if you are more bleeding edge App.net @scottcline.

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1. Call me strange, but one of my favorite parts of traveling from coast-to-coast for conferences is the five hour flight of uninurrpted time to get work done without phone calls (even though more and more I still have internet access). It is great for getting large sections of writing done. It might have been cheaper and more efficent to book more cross-country flights while writing my dissertation then paying for coffee at a coffee shop.  ↩

"Open Enrollment" at the California Community College →

Lee Gardner for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the latest survey of the California Community Colleges system:

More than 472,000 of the 2.4 million students in the California Community Colleges system were put on waiting lists for classes this fall

While 472,000 students seems like a very large number of students on the waiting list (and it is in real numbers) it is still less then 20% of all community college students.

But what is more concerning:

[California Community College] open-enrollment system served 2.4 million students in 2011-2012, down from 2.89 million students in 2008-9

Over 400,000 students disappeared from the California community colleges during one of the worse economic recessions of the current college-going age when it would be expected that more students would be incentivized to stay in or go to college.

That is rationing, in an open-enrollment system, by any name.

Few spots left for first NASFAA University's online course →

I am still not sure if this is the future of educating and training people who start or work in financial aid and enrollment managment, but it is worth watching to see how it develops compared to the more traditional "training" opportunities.

There is only a few spots left for the first course on the basics of financial aid. If you have someone completely new to financial aid, it might be worth $199.00 investment. At least worth taking a look at the course syllabus.

Again, it will be interesting to see how this develops since there certainly a great deal of interest in this space for all levels of professional development.