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The GED Testing Service requires test-takers be 16 years of age or older. However, most states require that a person be 18 years or older. This needs to change: Anyone age 16 or older should be permitted to take the GED. High achieving students deserve the ability to verify their proficiency in key subjects so they can get on with college. Going even further, states should deem that anyone who scores high enough shall have satisfied the state’s graduation requirements and can leave school.

The Coming Higher Education Bust: “Some Will Survive” . by John Rubino on March 1, 2013 · 17 comments To understand how close many US universities are to catastrophic failure, let’s start with the story of Robert (not his real name, but all the rest is true). He’s 19, a freshman at a state university, a smart kid with eclectic interests but no sense of what he wants to be when he grows up. His favorite class, which he had to battle to get into, is an upper-level creative writing seminar taught by a successful author in which six students,...

The $10,000 bachelor's degree could be coming to a campus near you. What began as a challenge from billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates to make college more affordable is now catching on with governors eager to stem spiraling tuition costs and mounting student debt. Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced recently that 23 state-run higher education institutions will soon offer the four-year degree programs for $10,000, following similar calls by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. At least one lawmaker in California is calling for that state's vaunted university system to embrace the idea, too. The bargain baccalaureate...

Oklahoma Virtual High School (OKVHS), a full-time, completely virtual public school serving students, grades 6-12, throughout Oklahoma, announced today the start of its open enrollment period for the 2013-14 school year. Students and families interested in transferring are invited to submit applications for open enrollment into Oklahoma Virtual between now and March 31 during the Oklahoma State Department of Education`s annual open transfer period. For more information or to apply, call 888-425-7178 or visit www.OklahomaVirtualHighSchool.com. OKVHS, a tuition-free program offered by participating schools and districts across the state, combines rigorous online courses and a flexible schedule that lets students work...

As college costs rise rapidly in most places, Texas and Florida are trying to implement something that has become a radical notion: a degree that costs only $10,000. Texas governor Rick Perry announced this goal for his state last year. (Perry was inspired by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who had remarked that online learning ought to make it possible for students to pay just $2,000 per year for college.) In November, Florida governor Rick Scott announced that he, too, wanted to see state colleges offer bachelor’s degrees for $10,000 or less. In Texas, ten colleges have signed on (some of...

Two thousand years ago, somebody (like the future Alexander the Great) who wanted to learn from a famous philosopher (like Aristotle) had to visit him in person, or vice versa. Written correspondence was of course possible, but every letter had to be written by hand, and it could take months to reach its destination. It was hardly possible to have an ongoing, two-way exchange of ideas under these conditions. With the invention of the printing press, it became possible for one teacher’s ideas to reach hundreds or thousands of students, and the mass production of books increased literacy rates enormously....

Here are a few suggestions that would cost the taxpayer nothing and possibly save them BILLIONS : 1) Open up the GED to any child of **any** age. Remove all age restrictions on these exams! If they pass this exam, or similar private exam, award them an official high school diploma from their local government owned and run socialist-entitlement K-12 school. 2) Encourage employers to use SAT and ACT scores as measures of a young adult's capacity to learn the job. (Honestly, why does the event's planner at the local Marriott need a bachelors degree? )Most of the work done...

My son is in homeschool. He is an experiential kind of guy and is taking couses (some self taught) in tiling, heavy equipment and CDL. I may be able to graduate him as a two year senior with full CDL license. There are a number of other courses I could have him take after highschool, from building post and beam homes, to basic plumbing and electricity, engine repair, to gunsmithing and others. many are available to adults and provided by the private sector. I would love to be able to provide him with a post high school experiential program which...

Student debt is nearing a record $1 trillion in the U.S. Jobless law school grads are suing their alma maters for false advertising. Needless to say, the cost of higher education -- not to mention the return on the investment -- has become a sore spot for many. With an election on the horizon, the Obama Administration has not been deaf to the grumbling. The president addressed the topic in his State of the Union, and his administration has since launched a campaign to stem the rise in college tuition by tying a school's federal aid prospects to its affordability....

‘Race to the Top” federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees, despite President Obama’s bluster in his State of the Union address. If only it were that simple.The truth is that over the next decade, many universities may bankrupt themselves by clinging to an educational approach that confuses lecturing with learning and protects highly paid, tenured faculties and administrators from a tsunami of technological change that soon will deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs.There’s a word for business models that have high and increasing...

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that's not an issue; I believe higher education is broken. I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us. Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity. We think of college as a stepping-stone to success...

President Obama has stressed that a college education is critical to the future of America and our ability to compete in the world marketplace. To achieve that aim, our government is spending 60% more in 2011 than 2008 and providing 123% more in tax breaks for post secondary education (i.e., college). The Government has taken over all federally backed student loans, pushing almost all private lenders out of the 100 billion a year market. But are we getting our money's worth? One of the hallmarks of bad government is spending that is out of proportion to what is actually...

The Higher Education Problem and Some Solutions Abraham H. Miller A recent study of college undergraduates showed that there was no significant learning, critical thinking development, or writing improvement among nearly half of college students by the end of the sophomore year. At the end of four years and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, more than a third of college students learned little to nothing. No one who has taught in a college or university in the last several decades would be surprised by those findings. A lot of people go to college...

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/schoolid/2271/articleid/389125/newspaperid/2257/Northwood_dropout_rates_decrease.aspx So Principal Blice calls my daughter a High School Drop Out by law and will have to explain for the rest of her life why she didn’t graduate from a public school, what a crock!! My wife and I worked hard with the our daughter and the public education system but it was not working for her. We spent hours after school trying to assist her with homework and even consulted a personal tutor. Yet when we as a family decided what was best for our daughter, we choose to have her complete her education at CCCC to complete...

Across the region and around the country, parents are kissing their college-bound kids -- and potentially up to $200,000 in tuition, room and board -- goodbye. Especially in the supremely well-educated Washington area, this is expected. It's a rite of passage, part of an orderly progression toward success. Or is it . . . herd mentality? Hear this, high achievers: If you crunch the numbers, some experts say, college is a bad investment. "You've been fooled into thinking there's no other way for my kid to get a job . . . or learn critical thinking or make social connections,"...

Slashdot posted about Bill Gates touting the Khan Academy, khanacademy.org. Glenn Reynolds linked to the Slashdot post so khanacademy has been Instalanched, i.e., may be overloaded. Khan Academy looks like it may be good. And it's gratis.

SUNDAY REFLECTIONS CONTRIBUTOR — It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar. The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy. Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues...

ORLANDO, Fla.- Parents of a home-schooled 13-year-old Florida girl say they are filing a complaint because she's being denied entry to college because of her age. The retired engineer parents of Anastasia "Annie" Megan say they have gone as far as they can go in educating their daughter. She's almost completed her high school education and they've applied for Annie to take dual-enrollment classes at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida, but they've been turned down by college officials, who say she's not ready to be in classes with older students, the Orlando Sentinel reported Sunday. The parents have filed...

BOISE, Idaho – Every high school has at least a handful of them, gifted students who blow through Faulkner as if it were a comic book, teenagers who catch on to calculus as if it were checkers. These students are often just marking time in high school and typically become bored and withdrawn as they long for a bigger academic challenge. States are responding to the problem by making it easier for gifted students to head off to college sooner. Idaho lawmakers have proposed giving scholarships to high school students who enroll in college early. Eight other states are participating...

Each semester, my undergraduate history-of-education students ask their parents 10 questions about their time in high school. The interviews usually confirm what we discuss in class—the impact of protests in the late 1960s, the rise of special education, more female sports, and contrasts between rural and urban, Catholic and public schools. But the replies to one question have surprised me: “If you could travel back in time, what would you change—in your own behavior or in the school itself—to make your high school experience better?” Rather than fault their schools, most parents criticize themselves. Of the 178 respondents since 2007,...