There are moments where the same event is viewed in two entirely different manners. This is one of those moments. Normally, TFA will only list the preface of an individual article, with an option to view the entire article from the source that it was provided by. However, in light of this being an election year, TFA has decided to approach this particular event with two diametrical opinions. Please remember to vote in the upcoming elections, and thereby add your voice to the many that will decide which direction this state and nation should take. The entire future of higher education in Texas is at stake.

What Will $10,000 Get Me?

By Kevin Kiley

$10,000 may not be able to buy as much as it used to, but Texas politicians and higher education administrators think that with a little experimentation it can buy a pretty good bachelor’s degree.

That was the challenge issued by Texas Governor Rick Perry in his February 2011 State of the State address, when he called on the state’s public universities to provide a bachelor’s degree for $10,000 or less (for a full four-year degree, books included), a challenge that was met with both criticism and praise from inside and outside the state. Since his announcement, however, a number of Texas universities have responded to the call, offering a range of $10,000-degree programs and receiving significant public attention in the process.

But while the governor's call led to experimentation, particularly with the pathway to a degree, the result has been mostly niche programs that don’t address the costs of educating students and can’t be broadly replicated. Most of the proposed inexpensive degree programs take advantage of community college and dual-enrollment high school credit – which are cheaper to students than university credit – and are not available to students in most disciplines. This leaves experts questioning whether the much-heralded $10,000-degree programs are really all they are touted to be.

The problem, economists say, is that providing a quality college education is expensive. Until universities start to address cost drivers in higher education – including a highly trained, expensive labor force; a student body that expects certain services; and employers who expect graduates to be trained in specialized technologies – then the chances are minimal that universities can offer quality degrees for most academic disciplines for a cost anywhere close to $10,000.

Full article

Foundations' Newfound Advocacy

By Doug Lederman

To many of the policy experts and researchers who work with them, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation have driven more significant (and beneficial) change in five years than American higher education has seen in decades.

To their critics, the two behemoths and a band of collaborating groups and think tanks (call them the "completion mafia") have hijacked the national agenda for higher education and drowned out alternative perspectives.

One doesn't have to fall squarely into one of those camps to acknowledge the extent to which the two foundations have remade the philanthropic landscape in higher education. A paper to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association aims to document -- through an admittedly impressionistic mix of data, interviews and other means -- just how thoroughly the two philanthropic giants (and others) have altered both the traditional foundation role in academe and (by extension) the public policy discussion about higher education.

While the generally evenhanded paper acknowledges that the foundations' approach has accomplished a great deal, it cites significant concerns about what may be lost in the process.

At its core, argue the authors Cassie Hall and Scott L. Thomas, Gates and Lumina "have taken up a set of methods -- strategic grant-making, public policy advocacy, the funding of intermediaries, and collaboration with government -- that illustrate their direct and unapologetic desire to influence policy and practice in numerous higher education arenas."

Full Article

New Report Questions Texas' Higher-Ed Priorities

By Reeve Hamilton

A new study on Texas’ higher-education policy that is being released today lays out the tough choices that state lawmakers are facing and throws some cold water on one of their prize programs: the initiative to create more tier-one universities.

With a mere 32 percent of adult Texans older than 25 with at least an associate degree, the study notes, Texas ranks 39th among states. University of Pennsylvania researchers Joni Finney and Laura Perna conducted the study in conjunction with Patrick Callan of the National Center for Public Policy.

“We wanted to look at a large state that had a very fast-growing Latino population, because the country is changing that way, obviously,” Finney told The Texas Tribune. The study is the fourth in a series of five reports they are doing on higher-education policy in different states.

To remain economically competitive, the state needs to produce more graduates, the study says. But public higher education is getting less affordable — according to the report, students in 2009 were paying 72 percent more for college than they were six years prior, when the Legislature deregulated tuition.

“Texas was once known as a state where low financial aid was offset by low tuition,” the authors write in the report. “Now, the low tuition is gone, leaving only low financial aid.”

Well, it looks like Campus Carry, also known as Concealed Handguns on Campus, will be back in the next Legislative Session. Jeff Wentworth tells us that this will happen "...because there was overwhelming support in both the Senate and the House, that someone will file it and it will be debated vigorously next spring,..."

Please start calling your Senator and Representative regarding this issue now. If you do not know who represents you use the following link and look on the right hand side of the site for "Who Represents Me?" http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/

Read more here: 'Campus carry' debate likely to return in next session of Texas Legislature