Interesting Reads This Week

The importance of small tweaks and intentional design

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I spent last summer in Tucson, Arizona, and it was hot, even by Tucson standards. I would sit and watch British TV shows, which seem all to be set in Yorkshire, and crave the rainy overcast cool weather. Right now, I have that weather in Salt Lake City, and it is as glorious as it seemed to be last summer. But what did I read while drinking my tea in the weather that doesn’t make my eyeballs sweat?

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

Yesterday, Richard Cordray, the head of Federal Student Aid and chief architect of the FAFSA fiasco, announced he was stepping down. Not immediately mind you, but at the end of June (i.e. he is doing a Robbins). Cordray’s three-year term ends in early May, and I guess that the writing on the wall was not obscured by the giant piles of incorrect FAFSA forms hanging around his office.

Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent him off in her usual style in the Washington Post coverage.

“Cordray will be remembered for his ineffective leadership, blatant partisanship, and his failures regarding FAFSA rollout and return to repayment,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the chairwoman of the House Education Committee, said in a statement. “The Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid needs a leader that students, families, and institutions can rely on to put politics aside and faithfully administer the law. Mr. Cordray, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

There was a time when I never thought I would agree with anything that Foxx said, but lions, lambs, etc.

Losing our way

This week I watched the third installment of Simpson Scarborough’s presentation of the results of its annual survey of higher education Chief Marketing Officers. The focus of this phase of the results was higher education websites.

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