Learning Ecosystems

Who’s investing in ed-tech?: Tech investors and their education portfolios — from hackeducation.com by Audrey Watters

Excerpt:

Below is by no means a complete list of technology investors who have education companies in their portfolio. Nor is it a list of the “top” or the “best” or the “most profitable” or “most active” ones, although for what it’s worth the list does match closely the answer on Quora to “Who are the top (active) VCs in the education technology space?”

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Student loan default rates jump — from money.cnn.com by Blake Ellis
The Department of Education said 218 schools had three-year default rates of 30% or more, putting the schools at risk of losing their federal student aid.

Excerpt:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Borrowers are having a harder time repaying their student loans.

The percentage of borrowers who defaulted on their federal student loans within two years of their first payment jumped to 9.1% in fiscal year 2011, up from 8.8% the previous year, according to U.S. Department of Education data released Friday.

Too high a price? — from InsideHigherEd.com by Kevin Kiley

Excerpt:

Grinnell College, which this year reported the fifth-largest endowment of any liberal arts college, announced Thursday that it would spend the next few months engaged in a conversation with campus stakeholders about changing its financial aid policies – including potentially, but probably not, going as far as making changes to need-blind admission. That makes it the second high-profile liberal arts college, following Wesleyan University this summer, to broach the topic in recent months.

Grinnell’s announcement stands out for two major reasons. Grinnell is one of the wealthiest liberal arts colleges in the country, so the idea that it would view its current financial aid model as unsustainable could be a bellwether that the sector as a whole is reconsidering the model. Second, the college’s administrators are taking an unusually public approach to a discussion that arouses strong emotions, trying to educate all campus constituents on why they think change might be necessary and hoping that, in doing so, they can mollify potential critics.

Addendums/also see:

• White House: FY 2012 Deficit $1.089 Trillion — from  finance.yahoo.com
• Higher Ed Shrinks — from InsideHigherEd.com by Doug Lederman
• Let’s make a deal— from InsideHigherEd.com by Kevin Kiley
• What’s driving debt — from InsideHigherEd.com by Kevin Kiley
  Excerpt:
  In a new paper released by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, University of Richmond business professor James Monks finds that when it comes to getting burdened by debt, the increase in price isn’t an innocent bystander, but it has several accomplices, particularly the admissions and financial aid policies at a given institution.
• Pearson doubles down online — from InsideHigherEd.com by Doug Lederman
• Apollo Group to close 25 University of Phoenix campuses — from bizjournals.com
  Excerpt:
  The majority of its 328,400 students take classes online, which means those campuses aren’t in demand, said Alex Clark, spokesman for the Phoenix-based Apollo (Nasdaq: APOL). Plans call for closing 115 locations, impacting 13,000 students. Of those, 90 are learning centers and 25 are campuses. Following the closure, 112 locations in 36 states will remain.