One of the factors discouraging innovation in higher education is what is known as the credit hour. As its name implies, the credit hour is a measure of instructional time and is used to track a student’s progress toward a degree. Think of the credit hour as a type of currency. Each semester-long course is [...]
The much-anticipated listings of the nation’s best colleges put out by U.S. News & World Report and other similar national rankings look at metrics that are usually more pertinent to the “traditional” college student. These rankings are based on measures such as the entering class’s test scores, high school class rank, admission rates (the harder [...]
The credit hour, sometimes also referred to as the Carnegie Unit, has since the early 20th Century been the commonly accepted measure of the quantity of college education someone has completed. Credit hours have played a surprising number of roles over the last century. They were originally designed to standardize measures of learning in secondary [...]
