Management

Should Community College Be Free?

Tennessee’s governor is shaking up higher education, Microsoft finds its new CEO, and more.

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Should Community College Be Free?

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has had it with tuition hikes. He has proposed that his state make two years of community college or technical school free for his citizens. His suggestion has been met with a positive response, largely because the cost to the state would be relatively low — $34 million — and would be paid for with lottery funds.

As Haslam told The New York Times, he is looking to draw more attention to the value of community college:

Governor Haslam argued that for students, the importance of his plan is not just economic, but psychological. Students may not be aware that the sticker price of college is not the true price, and explaining the difference can get complicated.

“It is more affordable than most people think, but if they don’t know that, that doesn’t help us,” he said. “If we can go to people and say, ‘This is totally free,’ that gets their attention.”

Microsoft Finds Its CEO

Microsoft’s search for a new CEO finally came to an end this week. Satya Nadella, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft, will take the helm, bringing his deep experience with enterprise IT and cloud computing to the forefront of the company. In a post on Time magazine’s Technologizer blog, Harry McCracken put together a nice profile on Nadella, who has a background in business and technology. McCracken points out that Nadella’s experience in IT is key to the company’s future:

He’s currently responsible for a huge, largely invisible part of Microsoft’s business. Among the products Nadella heads up: Windows Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and the software-development tools that are Microsoft’s original business, dating all the way back to 1975. Consumers have no reason to pay attention to these areas, but they’re thriving — a big reason why Microsoft just posted robust quarterly results despite the PC industry’s struggles and Windows Phone’s failure, so far, to make much of a dent in Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Read the full article here.

Tweets of the Week

Half of #highered #CIO's “don't believe their institution’s economic situation will improve in the next 3 yrs.” http://t.co/C6sicbvh8I

— Stephen Landry (@landryst) February 5, 2014

Shameless self-promotion. Michigan's World Class: Gaming the classroom: http://t.co/BUDmcyR5B8 #highered #gamification

— Mika LaVaque-Manty (@mmanty) February 6, 2014