Quote:Michael Horn, Contributor
4/12/2012 @ 11:33AM
Yes, University of Phoenix is Disruptive; No, That Doesn't Make It the End-All

Many of my friends in the education world are fond of talking about how the University of Phoenix is not in fact a disruptive innovation.

They don’t just stop this statement with the University of Phoenix of course. I’m using the University of Phoenix as shorthand. What they mean are many of the distinctly online universities that have emerged over the last couple of decades—everyone from Kaplan University to DeVry to Bridgepoint.

They are wrong. These online universities are disruptive innovations relative to traditional universities. They are now on their own sustaining innovation track, which every disruptive innovation moves to as it grows, expands, improves, and marches up market. It’s also true that not all of them will succeed in these endeavors.

The fact that I’m saying they are disruptive innovations in the face of many saying they aren’t strikes me as ironic, given that I often find my job is to correct people who want to declare nearly everything disruptive and misapply the term. I also readily admit that online learning isn’t inherently disruptive; when it’s used in a hybrid format to complement or extend traditional brick-and-mortar learning, chances are it’s being used as a sustaining innovation. No technology is inherently a disruptive innovation, as all technologies can be applied to sustain or disrupt the industry’s incumbents.

I’ll explain though why online universities are disruptive in a moment, but one more word. Just because these universities are disruptive relative to the traditional universities doesn’t mean that what they do is for the common good per se. For a variety of reasons, I personally tend to think that is often the case, but disruptive innovation isn’t a normative term; it doesn’t imply that something is morally good or bad.

Nor does the term imply that these universities are the end-all be-all of disruption in the higher education space. Over the last couple of years—and in a flurry in the last few months—we’ve seen another wave of disruptive innovations launched in higher education that I suspect may disrupt the first disruptors. Combined with continued up-market movement by some in the first wave, I suspect this new wave will have far reaching consequences for the higher education sector over the next decade.

But let me first explain why the University of Phoenix and its peers are disruptive relative to traditional institutions.

A disruptive innovation is one that transforms a sector by introducing a product or service that is more convenient, simple to use, and/or affordable than the existing products or services in a market. Disruptions tend to start as not as good as the existing products or services as judged by their historical measures of performance, and then, over time, they are able to march up market such that they are able to handle more complicated tasks. Many people flock to the disruptive innovation over time as it becomes good enough, as the customers are delighted by something that carries this new value proposition around convenience, simplicity, and/or affordability. As a result of these dynamics, disruptive innovations first serve nonconsumers (people who previously could not participate in the market) or people who have been overshot by the incumbents in the market. A critical thing to keep in mind is that this process does not occur over night; sometimes it occurs over several decades. And not every incumbent or traditional institution will be wiped away. Some will continue to perform important jobs for which a, relatively speaking, small set of customers are willing to pay.

Lastly, for something to be a disruptive innovation, it has to have two components: a technology enabler and a business model that together allow it to extend a low-cost value proposition up market.

In Disrupting College, we discussed that this is why land-grant universities and community colleges have not in fact been disruptive innovations. Although they have many of the characteristics of disruptive innovations—entities more affordable than their higher education predecessors that extended access to populations previously unable to participate in higher education—they didn’t have a technology core that allowed them to take a low-cost value proposition up-market. To move up market and serve students at the higher end, these institutions instead had to replicate the costs of the existing institutions—research faculty, buildings, and so forth—which meant they ended up taking on the same business model as the incumbents and, as they went up market, ultimately offered the same value proposition.

We asserted that online universities, however, had this technological core that allowed them to extend their new value proposition around, in this case, the disruptive attributes of convenience and accessibility, up-market.

Many have been quick to take a swipe at this assertion. Kevin Carey, who authored an insightful piece in the New Republic recently about the next wave of disruptive innovation, said that because these online universities were still offering degrees, they were ultimately offering the same value proposition.

I don’t think this is true.

When minimills disrupted integrated steel mills, for example, they were still offering steel ultimately. It was simply at a lower cost.

“Aha!” skeptics claim. That’s just it. Look at the prices that the University of Phoenix and others charge, and you see that it’s not all that different—and sometimes it is even a bit higher—than their traditional competitors. Doesn’t that mean they are not disruptive?

Not necessarily. When the minimills were disrupting the integrated steel mills, prices only really fell in a given tier of the market each time the minimills succeeded in chasing out all of their higher-cost competitors. So long as there are high-cost competitors in the market, there is little incentive in place to price significantly lower. Once the integrated mills were gone, for example, prices collapsed by 20 percent in the market—which represented the cost advantage that the minimills held over the integrated players.

A typical traditional university today incurs operating deficits of 10 percent of revenues, even as the disruptive online players report operating profit as a percentage of sales to be roughly 30 percent. In other words, these online players have a cost advantage of roughly 40 percentage points. Western Governors University—one of the few disruptive institutions that truly prices its offering lower—shows how much room the leading online institutions likely have to price lower if they had to (although Western Governors University likely actually costs less than many of the other online universities because of its innovative teaching model that leverages technology in some more purposeful and innovative ways).

Stay tuned in other words—although it is important to acknowledge that this picture is complicated by the role that the government (at the state and federal level) plays in propping up costs and prices in the market through its subsidies, grants, and loans. Carey also does an excellent job of capturing this dynamic in an article he authored in the New Republic. In the case of the online players, because of the existence of Pell Grants and because institutions are unable to limit the amount of loans students may take out, the government has in essence created a price floor below which it hasn’t historically made much sense to price oneself (although some of the newer disruptive players like New Charter University, which will not take any federal funding, will change that). In addition, the picture has been complicated because traditional universities receive a significant amount of funds from these and other sources, which means they have historically been able to keep tuition prices relatively low, even as their costs have increased rapidly. As the fast-rising tuition prices in California and elsewhere suggest, however, that game is nearing its end, particularly as government sources of financing continue to dry up in the years ahead.

Indeed, when disruptive innovation takes hold in a market, as Clayton Christensen wrote in The Innovator’s Dilemma, often the basis of competition goes through several phases—from first competing on functionality, then to reliability, then to convenience, and then finally to price. Today’s dominant online universities do seem to compete much more heavily on convenience than anything else, which signals that the price competition is still to come.

Furthermore, there is one other critical difference in the value proposition that many of the online universities offer compared to their traditional university peers. For the traditional colleges and universities, the way they go up market is by climbing the Carnegie Classification “ladder” to gain prestige—and more money. How do they climb the ladder? By looking more and more like Harvard. Becoming a research institution is a good jump for many. As a result, a critical—one might even say overriding, as judged based on what faculty tend to prioritize—value proposition traditional institutions offer is around knowledge creation.

For the online universities, however, this isn’t their path to greater returns and more money because adding a research mission would in fact cause their margins to decline. As we identified in Disrupting College, one of the critical reasons for climbing administrative costs in traditional universities is the complexity of managing the fundamentally different business models of research and teaching under one umbrella. Taking on this complexity for focused online universities therefore makes no sense, which ensures that their value proposition will continue to be built around proliferating knowledge and learning—not research.

Even though both traditional and online colleges and universities offer “degrees,” they have different value propositions in some critical respects.

I do tend to agree with Carey, however, that the disruption that will, in many cases, have more weight across the entire sector when all is said and done is from the entities that are starting to offer certificates—and are modularizing the university and eating away at the monopoly on credentials that the market has historically valued. As any industry becomes more modular, the brand that is valued in a market tends to shift to the component level—so those institutions offering courses (like an MITx) will begin to be what is valued. The parallel will be similar to what happened in the computer industry where there was a transition period in which people swore by the power of their Silicon Graphics server and just couldn’t imagine a Dell server ever being good enough. And then all of a sudden Silicon Graphics filed for bankruptcy protection, but what mattered in the server market wasn’t the fact that what replaced it was a Dell, but rather the Nvidia processor inside.

Indeed, there are a substantial number of students today for whom a degree doesn’t matter, which is why the focus out of Washington, D.C. and other quarters on bolstering the percentage of Americans with degrees is somewhat worrisome. More than that, the “job to be done” that many students hire education institutions to do today isn’t even to get a credential per se, but to help them get access to a better or different job, get promoted—or hang on to the job that they have now. A credential is merely a key attribute of the solution for many, but not all.

But that doesn’t mean that the University of Phoenix and its brethren aren’t in their own right disruptive—and won’t necessarily have something to say about all of the exciting entrepreneurial action taking place in the market now either. Stay tuned because the disruption in higher education is heating up.

Ever wonder how a notorious stalker and crackpot like George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) could have gotten the time of day from the SS? The FTC laughed him out of the building, as did all other reputable law enforcement agencies.

Now we are seeing the real SS in action. No character, no morals, no common sense...just the kind of losers and degenerates who think an ass-scratching, armpit-sniffing nose-picking stalker has any credibility.

I guess the SS figured that after consorting with a national embarrassment like George Gollin there really was no conduct low enough to be considered "infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful."

Quote:Inquiry points to wider Secret Service scandal involving as many as 21 women
By David Nakamura and Ed O'Keefe, Tuesday, April 17, 6:31 AM

Investigators believe that as many as 21 women were brought by U.S. Secret Service and military personnel to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, Colombia, last week during a night of carousing, a dramatic increase in the number of women previously disclosed by government officials.

Officials said 11 Secret Service and 10 military personnel are suspected of misconduct that took place before President Obama arrived in Colombia for an economic summit. Initial reports suggested that the military personnel, some of whom were confined to their rooms after the scandal broke, had violated curfew, while the Secret Service members had engaged with the women, who were allegedly working as prostitutes.

But Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Tuesday that Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told her that the preliminary investigation has determined that 20 or 21 women were brought to the hotel last Wednesday night. Agency investigators in Cartagena have obtained copies of the women's identification cards, which they were required to present at the hotel, and are attempting to interview some of the women, said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), head of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

King said investigators have determined that none of the women were minors.

In a statement, Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said that Sullivan briefed Collins on the investigation "and advised her that 21 U.S. personnel were involved, to include 11 Secret Service personnel. The allegations involved misconduct with women. The exact number of individuals beyond the U.S. personnel is still under investigation."

The disclosures make clear that what first appeared to be an isolated case of misbehavior was in fact a night of more widespread debauchery that included heavy drinking and a trip to the Pleyclub, a strip club where the men allegedly paid for women's services. The participation of two Secret Service supervisors, according to people with knowledge of the investigation, suggests that the men had little fear of repercussions -- until hotel workers and Colombian police reported the matter to the U.S. Embassy.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama has "confidence" in Sullivan's leadership of the Secret Service and is awaiting the results of an internal investigation.

"Sullivan acted quickly in response to this incident, and he's overseeing an investigation as we speak," Carney said. "This incident needs to be investigated, and it is being investigated. We need to see what the investigation reveals. We're not going to speculate about the conclusions it might reach."

Collins, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Sullivan told her that "the most important quality for a Secret Service officer is character. If the facts prove to be as reported on this, this is an incredible lack of character and breach of security, and potentially extremely serious."

The Secret Service has revoked the top-secret security clearances of the 11 men under investigation and placed them on administrative leave. The men have also turned in their agency BlackBerrys, said King, who said the men did not have any sensitive documents in their hotel rooms. He added that some of the men said they did not know that the women were prostitutes.

"Even if they weren't prostitutes, it's not right to bring foreigners back to their rooms," King said. "It would probably be safer if they were prostitutes because then we would know who they were working for."

Two of the Secret Service personnel are senior agents paid at the higher levels of the government's pay scale, according to congressional officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The two agents, whom one official referred to as "GS-14s," are near the top of the General Schedule, the compensation system for federal employees. Depending on where the agents are based and other factors, they could earn $110,000 or more annually. Two people with knowledge of the investigation described the men as supervisors.

. . .

The rules at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, are more vague. According to the regulations, employees are prohibited from engaging in any "criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, or other conduct prejudicial to the government," an official said. . . .

Read all the way to the end. ANSI is getting into the accreditation game. "[W]e have to require some sort of mandates, or they’re going to be all over the place,” says ANSI's Roy "Not So" Swift.

The higher ed cartel always squirms whenever somebody says "quality assurance." They don't want anyone to learn that "accreditation" and "quality assurance" are two different concepts.

On the other hand, so what if they are "all over the place"? God forbid that free markets and innovation should determine product content. "Mandates" from faceless bureaucrats should let the statist clones sleep better at night.

Quote:The ‘Cash Cow’ of U.S. Universities: Professional Certificates Instead of Degrees
By Jon Marcus | April 9, 2012

Reggie Herndon returned to college because he wanted to change careers. What he didn’t want was another degree.

Herndon, a University of Tennessee graduate from Lynchburg, Va., is on his way instead to finishing a nine-month professional certificate in counterintelligence from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa., which he hopes will bolster his odds of landing a job as an intelligence analyst with a defense contractor or government agency.

“I decided that I wanted to re-engineer myself,” said Herndon, 56, who handles marketing for an employment program runs under contract to the Social Security Administration. “But I didn’t want to go back and do the whole graduate program, and come out with a tremendous amount of debt.”

Responding to demand from more and more students like Herndon, universities are jumping into the business of providing professional certificates that were once the domain of community colleges and for-profit providers like the University of Phoenix.

“The growth is huge,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which is studying this new phenomenon.

Certificate programs can be added and updated more quickly than conventional academic ones. And they can help workers keep up with fast-changing fields such as information technology and intelligence, or get raises or promotions.

But a main reason for the explosion in the number of professional certificates at traditional universities, administrators concede, is that they bring in revenue, largely from mid-career students who pay the full cost without needing institutional financial aid, or whose employers reimburse them for tuition.

“It’s a good side-business for four-year colleges and graduate schools,” said Carnevale.

At a time when higher-education budgets are being further and further stretched, universities want a piece of what the Georgetown center estimates is $140 billion a year spent on formal career training nationwide, about 40% of which is siphoned into educational institutions.

“They’re playing precisely that game,” said Robert Ehlers Jr., director of the Center for Security Studies at Angelo State University in Texas, which has added professional certificate programs in criminal justice, border security, counterterrorism and cybersecurity.

Ehlers Jr. said he’s heard officials at other universities refer to professional certificates “as both cash cows and as a means of attracting students who might not otherwise come to that school to sample the kinds of education it might have to offer.”

Ashland University in Ohio, for example, is adding professional certificates this fall in outdoor education, educational technology and educational assessment to build back enrollment in its graduate school of education, which shrank after the state dropped a requirement that teachers have a master’s degree in education.

“This is basically survival for the graduate programs,” said Jim Van Keuren, dean of the university’s Dwight Schar College of Education. “It’s a realignment of graduate education, at least for our college.”

Not only do students in certificate programs fill seats and pay tuition—a few stick around to get graduate degrees.

At Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, for example, some of the students who are drawn to new certificate programs—in areas such as healthcare technology management, nuclear engineering and digital architecture—often stay to get a master’s degree, said Stephen Flavin, WPI’s vice president of academic and corporate development. “We have an extremely high adoption rate of those who progress on to the full master’s. So it works for the individual, and it also works for us.”

The boom in certificate programs at traditional universities also comes at a time when some are being criticized for failing to provide graduates with skills required in the workplace.

“It’s derivative of an entire revolution in higher education,” said James Breckenridge, executive director of the Institute of Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst University (which changed its name from Mercyhurst College this year). “Increasingly, certificates are all that’s required for entry into particular lines of work, so if you’ve got your eye on a particular profession, sometimes a certificate is going to be all you need.”

Professional certificates are also increasingly valuable for mid-career professionals who don’t have time to plod through the programs of study required for advanced degrees but who need to update their skills regularly.

“The old model is, you got qualified and then you went to work,” said Carnevale. “Now qualification never ends, because of changes in skill requirements and new skill requirements. New technologies create whole new demands.”

Pace University’s Lubin School of Business has added a certificate program in the fast-changing field of financial regulatory compliance, for example.

“A global economy and the rapidity of progress in technology require continuous education,” said Neil Braun, the dean and a former president of the NBC Television Network and CEO of Viacom. “Certificate programs are very useful for people who see the world around them changing faster than they can keep pace.”

Students see the benefit of a professional certificate more narrowly: to distinguish them from other candidates for scarce jobs.

“It gives me an identification that sets me above the rest because I have this certificate that says I’m trained in a specialty,” said Meredith LaBeau, 29, who hopes her professional certificate from Michigan Technological University in sustainable water resources systems will give her a leg up on a job in civil or environmental engineering.

Even undergraduates are racking up professional certificates.

“When jobs are as tough as they are to come by, you have to separate yourself from everybody else,” said Matthew Lombardo, a 20-year-old junior at Angelo State who has added professional certificates in Middle Eastern and African security to the courses required for his eventual degree in international studies. “It will add another dimension that will set me apart when I’m applying for a job.”

That kind of thinking has made students “pretty quick to jump into certificate programs,” said Angelo State’s Ehlers, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. “They know from trends in the marketplace that certain programs, if they are in the right areas, convey more pay and more opportunities for promotion.”

Still, some observers are concerned about the speed with which universities are adding certificate programs without a way to measure their comparative quality—or to know whether there will be enough students who will want to take them.

“It’s probably a little bit out of control, frankly,” said Georgetown’s Carnevale. “A lot of this is speculative investment. The issue is always, to what extent does the demand match the supply?”

So fast has been the growth in this area that the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI, which makes sure that everything from computers to appliances produced by different companies are standardized, is now developing standards for professional certificate programs. Some government agencies already won’t recognize professional certificate programs unless they’ve been accredited by ANSI.

“We definitely see a trend,” said M. Turan Ayvaz, manager of ANSI’s new Certificate Accreditation Program. “Even state-funded schools are struggling with funding, and certificate programs are a quick revenue source. But at the same time, unfortunately, we don’t see much of an initiative, especially from universities, to make sure their certificate programs have all of the relevant safeguards in terms of quality assurance.”

Ayvaz’s boss, Roy Swift, nonetheless expects more certificate programs to be added by universities.

“Every day we hear about a new one,” said Swift, ANSI’s senior director of personnel credentialing accreditation programs. “But we have to require some sort of mandates, or they’re going to be all over the place.”

Quote:Video of Meramec College Brawl Goes Viral
Michael Calhoun
April 13, 2012 11:20 AM

KIRKWOOD (KMOX) – It’s the latest video seen around the world, capturing a huge fight at a [regionally accredited] St. Louis Community College campus.

The incident, which happened Monday, begins with a woman getting into an argument with another woman while holding her young daughter. One of the women begins to attack the woman as she holds the child.

Eventually, she backs away and puts the child down and the two really start to go after each other.

More fights erupt. At one point, a pile of people rolled around in the bushes while throwing punches at each other.

The first woman even shrieks, “Where’s my baby?!?”

First faculty members, then campus police step in and try and calm things down. A circle of stunned students stood and watched.

Of those involved, three were arrested and charged with assault. Five were expelled from the college.

It looks like Degree Discussion is in the throws of final extinction, with only RCD making any contribution. Sadly RCD's contribution is totally incorrect when he claims that DL degrees are inferior to B&M degrees. Just to mention two DL facilities, the Open University (UK) and the Open Polytechnic (NZ), with degrees from these two providers being recognised as 'superior' to many others.
Having worked for the University of Leicester RCD should know that there is life outside the USA!

Bob Dylan fans? Wonder why they didn't spray it on the White Cultural Center?

Quote:"Long Live Zimmerman" Spray Painted On Ohio State's Black Cultural Center
April 6, 2012 9:18 AM



COLUMBUS, Ohio (CBS Cleveland/AP) Officials say graffiti spray painted on the wall of a black cultural center at Ohio State University likely stems from the nationwide unrest over the fatal shooting of a black Florida teenager.

The graffiti painted early Thursday said "Long Live Zimmerman." Columbus media outlets report that officials believe it's a reference to George Zimmerman, the neighborhood-watch captain accused of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in February.

Larry Williamson, executive director of The Frank W. Hale Black Cultural Center, wants the person that did this brought to justice.

"We want the person brought to trial, caught," Williamson told WBNS-TV. "We want to make sure these kinds of things don't happen."?

Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee says university police are "vigorously investigating."

"I was really outraged by this on a university that takes great pride in civility and respect," Gee told WBNS. The graffiti has been removed.

It was discovered the same day a campus rally was held for Martin and Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi woman who was fatally beaten last month in her El Cajon, Calif., home

Zimmerman is white and Hispanic. His family insists he's not racist.

Looks like notorious stalker George Gollin's fan club on YouTube has been busy again.  Somehow I doubt Mr. Spock was at the actual graduation, but he's a welcome addition to an otherwise not very interesting journey through Gollin's vacant mind.  After about 20 seconds of that self-important nonsense I was kinda wishing for a Vulcan "neck pinch" myself.

Quote:These rambling, incoherent statements are excerpts from an ACTUAL SPEECH made by Crackpot CHEA director George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) on May 17, 1998.

President Soetoro and Hillary are both Saul Alinsky acolytes. Soetoro began working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project in 1985. Hillary's senior thesis was entitled "There Is Only the Fight . . . ": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.




Here is Alinsky himself in a 1972 Playboy interview describing what he learned during his college years and who he learned it from:

Quote:College and Criminals

PLAYBOY: Were you politically active in college?

ALINSKY: Not in any organized sense. I started going to the University of Chicago in 1926, when the campus was still shook up over the Loeb-Leopold case. I suppose I was a kind of instinctive rebel -- I got into trouble leading a fight against compulsory chapel -- but it was strictly a personal rebellion against authority. During my first few years in school, I didn't have any highly developed social conscience, and in those placid days before the Depression, it was pretty easy to delude yourself that we were living in the best of all possible worlds. But by my junior year, I was beginning to catch glimpses of the emperor's bare ass. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of courses in sociology, and I was astounded by all the horse manure they were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I'd lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities. It was at that time that I developed a deep suspicion of academicians in general and sociologists in particular, with a few notable exceptions.

It was Jimmy Farrell who said at the time that the University of Chicago's sociology department was an institution that invests $100,000 on a research program to discover the location of brothels that any taxi driver could tell them about for nothing. So I realized how far removed the self-styled social sciences are from the realities of everyday existence, which is particularly unfortunate today, because that tribe of head-counters has an inordinate influence on our so-called antipoverty program. Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

PLAYBOY: Was sociology your major in college?

ALINSKY: God, no. I majored in archaeology, a subject that fascinated me then and still does. I really fell in love with it.

PLAYBOY: Did you plan to become a professional archaeologist?

ALINSKY: Yeah, for a while I did. But by the time I graduated, the Depression was in full swing and archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks. And anyway, much as I loved it, archaeology was beginning to appear pretty irrelevant in those days. I was starting to get actively involved in social issues, and during my last year in college, a bunch of us took up the plight of the Southern Illinois coal workers, who were in a tough organizational fight -- tough, Christ, the poor bastards were starving -- and we got some food and supplies together and chartered some trucks and drove down to help them.

PLAYBOY: Was it at this time that you became active in radical politics?

ALINSKY: It was at this time I became a radical -- or recognized that I'd always been a radical and started to do something concrete about it. But I wasn't a full-time activist; I remained in school, and I suppose a lot of my ideas about what could and should be done were as muddled as those of most people in those chaotic days.

PLAYBOY: What did you do after graduation?

ALINSKY: I went hungry. What little money my mother had was wiped out in the Crash and, as I've told you, my old man wasn't exactly showering support on me. I managed to eke out a subsistence living by doing odd jobs around the university at ten cents an hour. I suppose I could have gotten some help from a relief project, but it's funny, I just couldn't do it. I've always been that way: I'd rob a bank before I accepted charity. Anyway, things were rough for a while and I got pretty low. I remember sitting in a crummy cafeteria one day and saying to myself: "Here I am, a smart son of a bitch, I graduated cum laude and all that shit, but I can't make a living, I can't even feed myself. What happens now?" And then it came to me; that little light bulb lit up above my head.

I moved over to the table next to the cashier, exchanged a few words with her and then finished my coffee and got up to pay. "Gee, I'm sorry," I said, "I seem to have lost my check." She'd seen that all I had was a cup of coffee, so she just said, "That's OK, that'll be a nickel." So I paid and left with my original nickel check still in my pocket and walked a few blocks to the next cafeteria in the same chain and ordered a big meal for a buck forty-five -- and, believe me, in those days, for a buck forty-five I could have practically bought the fuckin' joint. I ate in a corner far away from the cashier, then switched checks and paid my nickel bill from the other place and left. So my eating troubles were taken care of.

But then I began to see other kids around the campus in the same fix, so I put up a big sign on the bulletin board and invited anybody who was hungry to a meeting. Some of them thought it was all a gag, but I stood on the lectern and explained my system in detail, with the help of a big map of Chicago with all the local branches of the cafeteria marked on it. Social ecology! I split my recruits up into squads according to territory; one team would work the South Side for lunch, another the North Side for dinner, and so on. We got the system down to a science, and for six months all of us were eating free. Then the bastards brought in those serial machines at the door where you pull out a ticket that's only good for that particular cafeteria. That was a low blow. We were the first victims of automation.

PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any moral qualms about ripping off the cafeterias?

ALINSKY: Oh, sure, I suffered all the agonies of the damned--sleepless nights, desperate 'soul-searching, a tormented conscience that riddled me with guilt -- Are you kidding? I wouldn't have justified, say, conning free gin from a liquor store just so I could have a martini before dinner, but when you're hungry, anything goes -- There's a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit -- And just in case you're getting any ideas, let me remind you that the statute of limitations has run out.

But you know, that incident was interesting, because it was actually my first experience as an organizer -- I learned something else from it, too; after the cafeterias had outflanked us, a bunch of the kids I'd organized came up to me and said, "OK, Saul, what do we do next?" And when I told them I didn't have the slightest idea, they were really pissed off at me. It was then I learned the meaning of the old adage about how 'favors extended become defined as rights.'

PLAYBOY: Did you continue your life of crime?

ALINSKY: Crime? That wasn't crime -- it was survival -- But my Robin Hood days were short-lived; logically enough, I was awarded the graduate Social Science Fellowship in criminology, the top one in that field, which took care of my tuition and room and board -- I still don't know why they gave it to me -- maybe because I hadn't taken a criminology course in my life and didn't know one goddamn thing about the subject -- But this was the Depression and I felt like someone had tossed me a life preserver -- Hell, if it had been in shirt cleaning, I would have taken it. Anyway, I found out that criminology was just as removed from actual crime and criminals as sociology was from society, so I decided to make my doctoral dissertation a study of the Al Capone mob -- an inside study.

PLAYBOY: What did Capone have to say about that?

ALINSKY: Well, my reception was pretty chilly at first -- I went over to the old Lexington Hotel, which was the gang's headquarters, and I hung around the lobby and the restaurant. I'd spot one of the mobsters whose picture I'd seen in the papers and go up to him and say, "I'm Saul Alinsky, I'm studying criminology, do you mind if I hang around with you?" And he'd look me over and say, "Get lost, punk." This happened again and again, and I began to feel I'd never get anywhere. Then one night I was sitting in the restaurant and at the next table was Big Ed Stash, a professional assassin who was the Capone mob's top executioner. He was drinking with a bunch of his pals and he was saying, "Hey, you guys, did I ever tell you about the time I picked up that redhead in Detroit?" and he was cut off by a chorus of moans. "My God," one guy said, "do we have to hear that one again?" I saw Big Ed's face fall; mobsters are very sensitive, you know, very thin-skinned. And I reached over and plucked his sleeve. "Mr. Stash," I said, "I'd love to hear that story." His face lit up. "You would, kid?" He slapped me on the shoulder. "Here, pull up a chair. Now, this broad, see . . ." And that's how it started.

Big Ed had an attentive audience and we became buddies. He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.

PLAYBOY: Why would professional criminals confide their secrets to an outsider?

ALINSKY: Why not? What harm could I do them? Even if I told what I'd learned, nobody would listen. They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail 'em on an occasional income tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn't touch their power. Capone was the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn't any city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren't afraid of some college kid they'd adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.

Once, when I was looking over their records, I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer. I called Nitti over and I said, "Look, Mr. Nitti, I don't understand this. You've got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?" Frank was really shocked at my ignorance. "Look, kid," he said patiently, "sometimes our guys might know the guy they're hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together. But you call in a guy from out of town, all you've got to do is tell him, 'Look, there's this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.' So that's a job and he's a professional, he does it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it's a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there's gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping -- Christ, it'd be murder." I think Frank was a little disappointed by my even questioning the practice; he must have thought I was a bit callous.

I guess we all heard the news about that guy who shot up that school over in Oakland. Well I did find some interesting stuff about the school he was at.

The Chronical of Higher Learning, the unbiased bastion of truth and honesty (he he) has an interesting post mortum on this:

http://chronicle.com/article/Former-Stud...in/131419/

The comments afterward are kind of interesting. Note how its all focused on the gun issue.

Whats odd, considering that it is posted in the CHL is that there is little discussion on the unaccredited status of this school or the fact that it caters to the Korean community of the bay area.

Interesting also, this Goh fellow dropped out of the Nursing program but was not refunded.

I would guess that this school is not as fortunate as other unaccredited schools in that it actually has a physical campus and a really pissed off ex-student can actually walk in and shoot up the place.

A really odd thing, that the Chronical failed to pick up on was that this school was under scrutiny by California authorities for its low passing rate of its nursing program.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_20317785

This being in a state known for its liberal academic policies. Well, I am guessing that we have not heard the last of this tragic story. I do hope that the survivors of this horror are able to get on with their lives. But I do fear that some kind of back lash is in order. Seems that law makers always over react to tragic incidents like this one.

Note one inconsistancy: The Chronical described this school as being unaccredited but in the inteview with a state official, the Mercury quotes that official as stating that the accredition for the nursing program may be lost. I believe what Mr Heimerich really meant to say was that the school might loose its license to teach nursing.

Quote:An unusual portrait emerged of Goh, with his nursing instructor saying that he was consumed by an inability to get along with women before he left the school a few months ago. The teacher, Romie Delariman of San Leandro, said Goh didn't fit in at a college where women make up the vast majority of the nursing faculty and student body.

Delariman said Goh - a former construction worker with a string of debts but no criminal record that would keep him from buying a gun - was a good and eager student. But he added, "He just can't deal with women. ... I always advised him, 'You go to school to learn, not to make friends.' "

Excerpt from a recent National Review article:

Quote:March 19, 2012 4:00 A.M.
The College Cartel
(Page 3 of 4)
By Vance H. Fried & Reihan Salam



...The trouble with regulating the lucrative higher-education industry is that it won’t necessarily force colleges, whether explicitly for-profit or “non-profit,” to lower their prices. The reason is that the flow of new entrants into the higher-education industry has been severely restricted by regional accreditation bodies, which effectively determine whether colleges are eligible for the lucrative federal subsidies. These accreditation bodies present themselves as the guardians of high standards. In practice, however, they serve as cartels that protect higher-education incumbents by setting difficult and sometimes arbitrary hurdles to accreditation for new schools. In the past, for-profit colleges simply bought faltering accredited institutions outright to avoid having to go through the onerous accreditation process. Now, however, regional accreditation bodies have closed off that option, further limiting competition.

The existence of accreditation cartels is not in itself a reason to abandon regulatory efforts, but it does suggest that addressing accelerating cost growth in higher education might require more radical solutions, such as dramatically reducing federal funding and creating a process through which innovative schools can do an end-run around regional accreditation bodies.

There is good reason to believe that actually eliminating federal subsidies for higher education would lead to lower tuition even as it reduced federal spending by $60 billion a year. This doesn’t mean, however, that federal loans should be eliminated; such loans serve the valuable function of guaranteeing that everyone, regardless of family income, can secure a long-term loan with interest deferral until graduation. Rather, loan programs need to be redesigned and operated on a break-even basis.

Even given today’s high in-state tuition, it is quite possible for people with a net worth of zero and no family support to work their way through college and graduate owing no more than $30,000, a very serviceable debt. The problem with the current loan program is that it doesn’t adequately protect the interests of students and taxpayers. The default rate has risen considerably, in no small part because many young adults who can’t finish their degrees are nevertheless burdened by an enormous amount of loan debt. Imposing reasonable caps on the amount students can borrow, and implementing better monitoring and collection policies (such as reducing the amount students are eligible to borrow if they fail to complete some number of credit hours), can do a great deal to limit the burdens upon students.

Improving the design of the federal loan program will greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the need for the Pell Grant program, which currently subsidizes 40 percent of students. Only students with extremely low incomes will require any additional assistance, which state governments are well positioned to provide. In a similar vein, it is important to eliminate the provisions in the tax code that subsidize tuition, which overwhelmingly benefit relatively affluent households.

Will reducing the flow of subsidies into higher education simply starve colleges and universities out of business? That is the claim we will no doubt hear from members of the cartel. But returning to 1980 prices just means returning to 1980 profit margins. While this will certainly be painful for colleges, it is doable. However, it would be naive for policymakers to expect established universities to take a lead in reducing their own profits. That is where competition comes in.

As Bowen observed, cost containment must come from the outside — either from state legislatures, or from students and their families, or from competitors. At the time Bowen wrote, most state legislatures were actively involved in controlling cost. Tuition increases required lawmakers’ approval, which was often hard to come by.

Then legislatures began to cede the power to set tuition to their colleges. Not surprisingly, the colleges chose to raise tuition aggressively. Prices have risen so much that many legislatures have become alarmed. There is a natural tendency for policymakers to try to micromanage individual colleges — something that will not work, either politically or practically. They can, however, create a competitive higher-education system that places the power to keep costs down in the hands of students and families.

State governments would be wise to pursue two complementary strategies:

First, break up existing higher-education cartels. State governments often insulate incumbent schools from competition. For example, State X might prevent the University of State X from competing with State X U by barring it from opening a campus on the other school’s turf. This might make sense if our goal were to preserve the market share of both schools, but it does not make sense when our goal is to foster robust consumer-friendly competition. Prices are often fixed by the state so as to eliminate any potential for competition. States should let their individual public colleges freely compete with one another. Some colleges will be winners and others losers, but the consistent winner will be the student, who will get lower tuition and a higher-quality education.

Second, level the playing field. State higher-education subsidies are generally paid only to state-owned colleges, giving such schools a huge competitive advantage over private colleges: State colleges can spend just as much as a private colleges, but then charge a substantially lower price, because of the subsidy. States should instead allow private colleges to receive the subsidy as well. One approach would be for state governments to develop partnerships with private colleges. For example, private colleges located within the state could become private charter colleges, akin to K–12 charter schools. In return for the state subsidy, private charter colleges would agree to charge in-state students a lower tuition than the most expensive public college currently charges. The goal of leveling the playing field would be to pressure the most expensive public colleges to spend public resources responsibly, not to run the public colleges and universities out of business.

Not all states will take such steps, and very few will take them quickly. But the federal government might contribute to breaking up higher-education cartels by providing an alternative route to accreditation. The aforementioned Kevin Carey of Education Sector has called on the federal government to create a mechanism through which high-quality providers of instruction — for example, a program exclusively devoted to teaching college-level calculus or Mandarin — can get approval to accept federal loans. Carey would require that such educators offer their services at low cost and provide transparency regarding their effectiveness. If they meet these criteria, any college or university that accepts federal loans would have to accept the credits they provide. While some may find Carey’s approach heavy-handed, it has the potential to strongly encourage the adoption of low-cost business models in higher education. Existing schools that can’t compete with the new providers will die out as they see their business cannibalized. Those that rise to the challenge will do so by improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of their offerings.

There have been a number of promising recent developments in higher education. The most impressive may be the rise of Western Governors University, a highly innovative institution built around entirely online delivery and a competency-based degree — i.e., WGU grants credits based on test performance, and does not require class attendance. A WGU student who is already very knowledgeable about software programming, having worked as a coder before starting work on her degree, might secure a credit in computer science by passing a final exam without actually taking a course. In essence, WGU offers the equivalent of a CPA exam for every subject.

Moreover, WGU charges its students based not on the number of credits they complete, but rather on an “all you can eat” basis over two semesters: If you can demonstrate competency in seven or eight semesters’ worth of credits in only two semesters, you pay the price for two. The beauty of the WGU model is that it allows students to seek instruction anywhere they can find it — they can read independently, study with a tutor, enroll in some other school, etc. — while turning to WGU to certify that they’ve mastered the relevant material.

In a somewhat similar vein, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sponsored MITx, a program through which students who take free online courses offered by MIT can, for a modest fee, secure an MITx credential by demonstrating a thorough understanding of the material.

It’s not just online programs that show promise. Grace College, a small institution in northern Indiana, uses a much more traditional, residential model. But it has recently trimmed some unnecessary spending and moved summer school totally online. As a result, a Grace degree can now be earned in three years for total tuition of $38,000, about the same as an Indiana resident pays over four years to get a degree from Purdue or Indiana University Bloomington.

The combination of low profit margins and innovation-encouraging models might even allow higher-education costs to fall well below 1980 levels — and if current levels of state-government subsidies were maintained, higher education could even be tuition-free. Through competition and innovation, we can achieve the dream of left-wing higher-education visionaries — but without breaking the bank.