I just read in an article by Donna Gordon Blankinship that Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has proposed new federal regulations which would no longer allow all colleges (nonprofit or for-profit) to pay people to aggressively (and deceptively) recruit students. The rules would take effect July 2011.  Under the proposed rules, colleges would be required to:

  –Tell recruits their graduation and job placement rates.

  –supply data to the government about student debt level and incomes after graduation

The new rules are supposed to make it easier for the federal government to clamp down on deceptive advertising and recruiting.

 Apparently, Senator Tom Harkin will be holding hearings about federal education spending at the for-profit colleges beginning June 24th.

I don’t know how much punch there is behind the rules, but I hope they will address some of these offensive and damaging practices.

Greetings to all of you who will be attending the CASAE pre-conference on John Ohliger’s life and work on May 29th.  As I pack my bags for Montreal, I think about the breadth of John’s life, writings and work. I will be talking about a small portion of that. John once said in a talk about Eastern attitudes towards death, that one cannot characterize an avalanche by describing a single snowflake. I shall try to not make that mistake. On the other hand I think of William Blake’s poem,  “To see the world in a grain of sand…”  Perhaps if one sees with the eyes of the soul… 

 I am looking forward to meeting with all of you, those of you who knew John and those of you who know John through his writings.  I hope we have a lively discussion, with lots of laughter and maybe even a few tears.  And we HAVE to sing a song - and it HAS to be one of social significance! 

I hope we can use this “blog” to be more of a “multilogue,” a kind of round robin of letters that John participated in pre-Internet.  I don’t want to be the decider of topics, the owner of information, I want us all to participate in this equally. Please join me! Chris Wagner

I think it was John’s friend, Sudie Hofmann who took the “L” off the word “Learning” to make this spoof of the mantra of adult educators a couple decades ago and expose the profit-motive behind some of it. Please understand that both John and I as life-long learners ourselves, understood the truth of the original phrase and hated the sabatoging of it by those who abused it.I was reminded of this phrase yesterday when PBS ran a special on for-profit colleges in the U.S. called College, Inc. If you would like to watch it, you can do so on the Internet by going to www.pbs.org and clicking on Frontline.  I would love to start a discussion around the issues raised.  Clearly these colleges are largely aiming at older students, nontraditional students, working adult students, etc. So, this is not (in my opinion) a crisis that those of us who call ourselves adult educators can ignore.