Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=1

an article about graduate education in US

End the University as We Know It

I don't agree with all of his solutions, but I do agree that higher education, like much of our society, is too much about producing a product rather than about helping individuals learn, change and grow.

From New York Times

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

Higher education is structured in a way that encourages insular departments and hyper-specialization

Ekachai and Menck see it as their responsibility to teach students about Twitter because social media knowledge is becoming essential to their future fields - communications, advertising, public relations and marketing.

Professors experiment with Twitter as teaching tool

Como usan algunas universidades al social media

Universities are constantly exploring new ways to use social media to fulfill their missions of engaging and sharing knowledge with their constituents. Below are just 10 highlights of how universities are using social media for public affairs. As always, please share other examples you have used or come across in the comments below.

some very pretty websites

College and university websites have a lot of roles to fill. They need to provide information for prospective students (both new and transfer), parents of students

College and university websites have a lot of roles to fill. They need to provide information for prospective students (both new and transfer), parents of students and prospective students, current students, and alumni. In many cases, they’re also the gateway to the school’s intranet and the public face for both academics and athletics. They often need to include reams of information in a way that makes everything easy to find. It’s a huge challenge. And the truth is: most college and university websites are horribly designed. Either they look like they were designed fifteen years ago and then forgotten about, or they’re so overloaded with information that it’s almost impossible to find what you’re looking for. But not every college or university website is horrible. There are some excellent sites out there, and below are some of them. If you know others, please share them in the comments to this post!

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of...

Seth Godin is a marketer, not an educator, but as a marketer he predicts the downfall of higher ed. "I'm afraid," he writes, "that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it... Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass market degrees... Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem."

College might be overrated.