Let us start the week with something not so negative

I found this interesting, but not necessarily for the reasons one might think:

“WASHINGTON — Right after the election in November, it seemed that Congressional Republicans and the Obama administration had reached a rare policy consensus: both supported requiring colleges to disclose more information about graduates’ outcomes in general, and a bill from Senators Marco Rubio and Ron Wyden that would require the disclosure of salary data (among other statistics) in particular”.

(http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/13/political-winds-shift-federal-unit-records-database-how-much)

They are talking about tracking student beyond college, something that many colleges try and do, or could do anyway. The good news is that this is step in the right direction to track military/veteran students; this is something that is not currently being done.

I focused my dissertation on this subject (much smaller scale), and one of my conclusions are that in order to support our military/veterans in college, we must understand how they are achieving.

The data is actually there, and if we started letting all those eager graduate students take a crack at collating the data, we might actually start getting some surprising results. Too much useful information is hidden away in silos when it should be available for responsible and ethical research. As for cost, the good news is that it probably would not cost anything because graduate students need topics anyway.

Imagine the possibilities if they get this database right! There could be some real growth in student services.

Dr Flavius A B Akerele III

The ETeam