This morning, we had another conversation about higher education, this time with Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Carnevale is the co-author of a new study called "Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018," and those projections are dire.  According to Carnevale, "the post-secondary education system is not aligned with the jobs in the economy."

If colleges aren't training students for the careers that will need to be filled, putting us "on a collision course with the future," as the study says, then what, exactly, is the point of going to college? We asked you, why did you go to college, and what did you get out of it? Is the importance of the college experience in the experience itself, or should colleges place more emphasis on career training? As always, our opinionated listeners had plenty to say about the subject.

Four years ago, the Microsoft-designed School of the Future opened its doors to Philadelphia high school students with the goal to serve as a model for 21st-century learning communities around the world.  This week, the school graduated its first class with a 100 percent college acceptance rate.  Some believe, however, there is room for improvement at the multi-million dollar partnership between Microsoft and the School District of Philadelphia.

At a time when we have a 9 percent unemployment rate, a new study shows we may soon face a shortage of 3 million qualified workers. There are plenty of people to fill those jobs, but there won't be enough educated people trained for the positions, according to the study published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

The report finds that by 2018, 63 percent of the jobs in the United States will require post-high school education. At the current rates of high school and college graduations, there will not be enough workers with higher education degrees. And colleges aren't doing enough to emphasize the importance of employability. 

A little over a year ago, the Obama administration and Congress doled out $100 billion in education money via the stimulus package. However, that money is running out, and slowly school districts across the country are having to cut funding and lay off teachers.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal said that NATO forces have stopped the Taliban's momentum, but no one is winning the war. And as attacks this week on U.S. and NATO forces in Kabul and at Bagram Air Base indicate, there are still tremendous challenges ahead. We look specifically at the offensive in Marjah to see if the U.S. strategy is working.

After passing State Senate Bill 191 at 12:00 am this morning, Colorado is at the heart of a national debate on teacher performance. The bill removes some job protections for tenured faculty, and aims to increase student performance. It was an emotional fight, with teachers facing the possibility of losing job security. 

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill on Tuesday that will effectively eliminate a particular school district's ethnic studies program. The bill specifically targets Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program. That district superintendent, Tom Horne, has pushed the bill for years and says he believes ethnic studies programs promote hate and teach Latino kids to believe they were oppressed by white people. This new law makes headlines just weeks after Gov. Brewer put her signature to one of the most controversial immigration bills in the country.

Do you think there's a place for ethnic studies in U.S. history classes?»

A recent report by the College Board found students at for-profit colleges graduated with significantly more debt than their counterparts at public and private non-profit schools. President Obama recently overhauled the federal student loan program, changing the landscape for college lenders. Now Congress is considering ways to increase oversight of these for-profit colleges, which receive significant amounts of federal financial aid.

Robert Bobb, emergency financial director of the Detroit public school system, will reinstate an extended-day program for students who are struggling academically, the district announced on Wednesday. It was the latest in a series of fiercely pitched battles between Bobb and the Board of Education, which has sued Bobb, alleging that he has overstepped his mandate by attempting to make changes to the school's academic programs.

Haiti's higher education system — already highly dysfunctional before the quake — is in shambles. The January 12 earthquake destroyed 90 percent of its school buildings and tore down nine of the state university's thirteen campuses. In a country that needs massive rebuilding and new leadership, who is taking care of educating its next generation of architects, politicians and doctors?

Yesterday we reported how education cuts across the nation are taking effect and asked whether Earth Day, 40 years old, has been a success. We also looked at the fifth birthday of YouTube and got some of your favorite videos.

Across the country, cash-strapped schools say budget cuts are forcing them to lay off teachers. Secretary of education Arne Duncan has called the layoffs — which may number in the hundreds of thousands — a potential catastrophe for the education system. The Takeaway talks to superintendents on opposite coasts who find themselves in similar positions. 

Chinese exports are cheap, but it's not all lower wages or efficient production. The cost of exports has been held down in recent years because the Chinese government has pegged the Yuan to the dropping dollar. But that may be changing. Murmurs within the halls of China's central bank, and central government, are pointing to an announcement in the coming days that the Yuan may move to a more flexible exchange rate against the dollar. This has big implications for trade, for President Obama, and for American consumers. 

We’ve been talking all week about how to make American schools better. Do we increase funding, create better tests or shut down failing schools? This time, we look to learn from two cities experimenting with their own education policy reforms, Baltimore and New York City.

When a school is failing, is it better to invest in improvements or to close the whole thing down?

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, have spent the past eight years betting on the latter. They’ve closed 91 schools since Bloomberg took office in 2002. Most were large, failing high schools with low graduation rates. The city has replaced them with smaller schools that often share the same buildings. So as a school that’s closing stops accepting ninth graders, two or three new schools typically open in the same building by taking about 100 ninth graders each. The new schools then expand each year, taking sophomores and juniors as the old schools phase-out.

According to a 2009 Department of Education study, ten percent of black students and 22 percent of Hispanic students did not graduate from high school on time, compared to only six percent of white students.  A similar disparity in scores between white and minority students on national reading and math tests has remained largely the same since the mid-1990s.

UPDATED 6:15 p.m

Alex Goldmark here picking up the evening shift. 

We're watching a few different stories in the running for tomorrow's show. First up, is a nagging curiosity we've had for a few days now. A smattering of local press a few days back labelled Memphis the hunger capital of America. We're finding out why Memphis stands out. 

It occured to us that if it is such an enormous undertaking to pull off the US census, what is it like in India where they have more than a billion people? Well it takes more than two million census workers for one. 

And we'll have  another installment of our value series with Farai Chideya looking at how the changing economy has changed people's moral outlook in some way. 

The Obama administration is pushing to incorporate innovative technology initiatives in its reforms of No Child Left Behind. The President has set aside millions for a technology investment fund, but should that investment go to buying computers, getting mobile devices or to teacher training? For our week long series on the future of education in America, we look at how technology factors into education.

Bullying has long been a problem for school children and it seems that the level of violence is both increasing and spreading beyond the schoolyard on to the Internet. On Monday, charges for "unrelenting bullying" were filed against nine teenagers in the case of Phoebe Prince. The 15-year-old girl hanged herself in January after being tormented for months by other students at her high school. Two teenage boys were charged with statutory rape and a clique of girls were charged with stalking, criminal harassment and violating Phoebe's civil rights.

Anna Sale back on the dayside producing shift.

I'm just back from a week reporting at a hospital in rural Haiti, where one question kept coming up from patients and local residents alike: what's next for Haiti? There weren't a lot of answers where I was, but tomorrow in New York, representatives from Haiti, the United Nations, United States, and several other nations will discuss their plans to spend $34 billion there over the next 10 years. We're reaching out to reporters and international development experts to see what the latest thinking is on where the effort should start, and who will be in charge.