From the article: "So why not do it? "Kamenetz's plan doesn't lack for details. An as-yet unpublished appendix lays out exactly where spending at Cohort Colle

From the article: "So why not do it? "Kamenetz's plan doesn't lack for details. An as-yet unpublished appendix lays out exactly where spending at Cohort Colleges and Adult Online Us would go, down to the instructor salary level. But it also would uproot thousands of workers in the higher ed sector and radically change the careers of those who remained. Kamenetz acknowledges the concern, but thinks reform is too important to not do something drastic. "'I recognize the political pain involved, but the purpose of public higher ed is to educate people, not to employ them,' she e-mails. 'One of the travesties of the current system is the percentage of classes taught by low-paid adjuncts. I envision a system that might have fewer jobs, but they're better jobs.'" And my comment on that is that this always requires political courage. To make a large government appropriations plan (and higher education is often the second or third largest budget category in a state budget) work, you have to keep your eye on the people who are supposed to be served by the program. But the people who are employed by the program will almost always be more organized to lobby for their benefit before the state legislature, especially because they can use purported benefits to students as a fig leaf for demands for more administrators and less checking of the effectiveness of how higher education is delivered. Most of the suggestions in the article seem sound. They also sound rather radical compared to what is usually proposed to improve the bang for the buck of colleges in the United States. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is of any of these ideas.