By Carl Camden

While speculation rages about who will win the presidency, there is no mystery over what will define the 2012 election. The candidate who makes the best case for putting people back to work and creating jobs will triumph, period.

As someone who has gone from public assistance and food stamps to tenured university professor and department chairman to CEO of one of the largest corporate employers in America, I've felt the pressure both to get a job and to create jobs. As I see it, America needs to get out of its own way.

By Charles Kolb for Change Magazine

The forces of globalization are finally hitting American postsecondary education. For nearly three decades, since the 1983 publication of A Nation At Risk launched a sustained focus on our mediocre, if not failing, K-12 system, American postsecondary education has avoided the accountability spotlight. Our postsecondary policy debates have focused mostly on input problems such as access, the cost of the federal student-loan program, the value of the Pell grant, and diversity. Issues such as graduation rates, the quality of learning, and cost- effectiveness were rarely addressed: Everyone simply assumed that America had the best postsecondary education system in the world.

By Jamie Merisotis and Charles Kolb for the Christian Science Monitor

In fact, the current generation of college-age Americans is on its way to being less educated than their parents - a shameful first in America's history.
Read more...