Last week The Chronicle rolled out a new design for all of its newsletters, making them easier to read, especially on mobile. Between that change and the still-new format, it seemed a good time to say bye to Re:Learning and hello to … The Edge.
Coming up with a name wasn’t any easier this time than it was three years ago. The experience did leave me with a little more sympathy for the challenges of naming a new venture. You’d think that might keep me from privately mocking some of the goofy tech-company names I encounter, but honestly I doubt it will. And trust me, I’ve already gotten my fill of Bono jokes from our copy desk.
Still, we think the new name conveys the spirit of this newsletter. If I’m doing my job right, when you get The Edge, you’ll be better equipped to play a role in shaping the future of higher ed. If you know others who you think should be reading it too, please share the love.
Thoughts on the new look? Send them my way (my email is below), or to feedback@chronicle.com.
Coding boot camps go Ivy League.
Coding boot camps might be the MOOCs of 2019. That’s a compliment, not an insult.
Just as MOOCs have found a way to keep their post-hype relevance — see these offerings from Coursera and edX, for example — boot camps continue to make inroads. To be sure, this young sector has seen a flood of closures and mergers in the past few years, and the number of graduates annually, an estimated 20,000 in 2018, probably doesn’t justify all the media attention paid to them.
But I think there’s still something notable in the recently announced relationship between Trilogy Education and the Harvard Extension School, an arrangement that lends a little cachet, even though it’s not for credit. And there’s even more to note in the new relationship between the Flatiron School and Yale University.
The Yale partnership, which calls for Flatiron to offer a 10-week “Intro to Full-Stack Web Development” course during the summer, seems significant because the course will count for two credits toward a Yale degree and might even count toward satisfying one of the undergraduate distribution requirements for “quantitative reasoning.” (That’s being decided right now.) And since it will be offered under the Yale umbrella, the $8,200 program will even be covered by federal financial aid for students who qualify.
Yale officials told me they had given the course a hard look, including a review by professors in the computer-science department, before agreeing to make the Flatiron program eligible for credit. “It’s not just an applied kind of course,” said Jeanne Follansbee, dean of the Summer School. “That’s what made it the right fit.”
I realize it isn’t remarkable that computing classes count for credit. After all, colleges offer plenty of such courses themselves. (I satisfied one of my “science” requirements at Colgate by taking a computer class in which I learned to program a “do loop” in Fortran. I got an A, but mostly because of extra credit I earned by writing essays on the readings.)
Follansbee said the decision to award credit for a course developed by an unaccredited entity should not be read as “a precedent for anything,” other than Yale’s determination that this particular course had met the college’s liberal-arts bar and that it would prove useful to students, whether they went on to work or to further education upon graduation. But given the growing attention on ways to tweak the liberal arts to make graduates more employable, I wonder if this move might signal an opening of the door for coding programs at other colleges.
Will students be interested at Yale? We’ll know soon enough. The catalog was published in December. Applications open up this month.
Quote of the week.
“But now, the drought is over.”
—From a blog post by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, commemorating Public Domain Day, on January 1, 2019. On that day, works of art, literature, and music began entering the public domain after being covered by a 20-year extension of copyright law enacted in 1999.
The adult students’ student guide.
More colleges have begun to focus attention and resources on older students. Now the students themselves are getting some added help. In cooperation with The Washington Monthly and a team of writers associated with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, the New Press has just published Never Too Late: The Adult Student’s Guide to College.
Unlike my recent report, “The Adult Student,” which focused on helping colleges and policy makers improve their services to older students, the book is aimed directly at the students. It features state-by-state rankings of colleges based on the same criteria the magazine uses to produce its “Best Colleges for Adults” listings. Among them: ease of transfer, loan-repayment rates, and earnings of graduates.
I’m glad to see this kind of guide on the market. It’s yet another marker of the importance for colleges to serve this vital population.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com.
