The changing needs of today's workforce are transforming our system of higher education. For-profit colleges are an integral part of that change, but controversy plagues them, including worries over low graduation rates and the high volume of federal loans for its students. How is higher education going to continue to transform in the future, and what role will for-profit colleges play? Host Frank Stasio poses those questions and others to Jack Henderson, president of the Brookstone College of Business and president of the North Carolina Association of Career Colleges and Schools; Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy; Chris Fitzsimon, founder and director of NC Policy Watch; and James Morrison, professor emeritus of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Listener Call-in.
Alex Granados joined The State of Things in July 2010. He got his start in radio as an intern for the show in 2005 and loved it so much that after trying his hand as a government reporter, reader liaison, features, copy and editorial page editor at a small newspaper in Manassas, Virginia, he returned to WUNC. Born in Baltimore but raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Alex moved to Raleigh in time to do third grade twice and adjust to public school after having spent years in the sheltered confines of a Christian elementary education. Alex received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a minor in philosophy, which basically means that he used to think he was really smart but realized he wasn’t in time to switch majors. Fishing, reading science fiction, watching crazy movies, writing bad short stories, and shooting pool are some of his favorite things to do. Alex still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he is holding out for astronaut.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.