Veterans Start Over As Colleges Ignore Experience

Original Article

Personally, I am fully aware that for-profits could credit low quality students, however, it is the un-willingness of the accredited school to evaluate students that bothered me most.

Do you surprised? You probably should not!

With current accreditation system and the practice of schools, especially the regional accredited schools, you really should not be surprised. If you follow these issues and read the responses from regional accredited schools, you know they will not evaluate students on an individual cases. As long as your credits are not from a 'reputable' ( read regional accredited) schools, you are out of luck. The national accredited or the for-profit schools have argued this in vain.

I suppose military can setup agreements with these accreditation agency and get it to work. But this is missing the point! We all knew that not all students from the same school possess the same quality. Even students taking same courses from different instructors possess different quality. It's very possible that an A students from a non-reputable school could out preform a C student an accredited school. Why should we punish students just because they attended a non-reputable schools but work hard to learn.

Personally, I fully aware that for-profits could credit low quality students, however, it is the un-willingness of the accredited school to evaluate students that bothered me most.

American higher education is sliding lower and lower

Original Article

Summary goes here!

It is my believe that we need strengthen the K12 first for both moral and economic reason.

I have seen too many kids wasted their talent and time just to glide through the K12. Our system, then, expand the postsecondary education downward to give them a second chance. The message sent is that: play as you want, we will always try to save you!

I am sorry. The second chance should be for those unfortunates who are victims of uncontrollable events. It's not for everyone.

There was a saying in Chinese that God helps those who helped themselves. I think that is what is lacking in our K12 education. The first things in education is to teach the responsibility.

A word about t-test (statistics)

A real scholar is a one with solid understanding of the topic and can address the concept in various terms. Just like a good teacher can address concepts in students' terms.

The t-test by virtue of its definition is a measurement of the separation of means. By adding the statistical flavor, we then asked the question of under what situation should we consider the means are well separated or, in other word, that the means are really not equal. Or in the statistical sense that the separation are statistically significant.

Like a lot of tests in statistics, the probability of the separation is too complicate to provide intuitive understanding of the problem. As in most of these kind of cases, a tabulated approach is used. In this case, a t-value is used to map to the probability. The t-probability table, however, usually only listed for positive t values which correspond to cases when the mean is greater than the referenced mean. Depend on the hypothesis of interest, researcher may need to included the probability for the corresponding negative t-value.

A good understanding of the underlying question that the t-test trying to address enables people to communicate with various terminology. A real scholar is a one with solid understanding of the topic and can address the concept in various terms. People with shaky ground are those that hanging to the jargon. Accusing people of alien-tongue is just a sign of it.

IPEDS Higher Ed Residence and Migration - 2008 state level data released

CL Higher Education Center

Do you like to know where your high school graduates went to college? What percentage of your high school graduates went to out of state colleges? To what kind of colleges? Private or public? The recent data release from CL Higher Education Center can answer your questions.

The CL Higher Education Center just put out the early release of the state level summaries for the 2008 NCES IPEDS¹ residence and migration survey. Institutions reported the state of residence of their fall-term first time degree seeking students to the Residence and Migration section of the IPEDS fall enrollment survey. The CL Higher Education Center release aggregates the institutional level data into the state level summaries. Sector information is maintained through the aggregation process. What this mean is that, for a given state, user can tell how many of their students went to public(or private non-for profit) 4 year institutions outside of their state. Separate files are also published for people interested only in degree-granting institutions.

The data show that, on average, 16% of high school graduates who went to public 4 year institutions went to out of state institutions. On the other hand, only 3 percent of high school students who went to 2 year public institutions went to out of state institutions. Looking at private 4 year non-for profit institutions, it shows that 47% of high school graduates who attended private 4 year non-for profit institutions went to out of state institutions.

¹The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System managed by the National Center for Education Statistics of US Education Department.