Jessica Hin is an inspirational single parent who is pursuing surgical technician certification through training at CNI College. Despite having five dependents to care for and two jobs, Jessica has been able to maintain excitement and energy for her schooling and future career. Her application impressed our scholarship committee, and we are proud to announce her as the winner of April's Single Parent Scholarship.

Jessica intends to graduate in 2014 from CNI's surgical tech training program, which will allow her to transition from her current career as a certified nurse assistant into an area of healthcare that she is more passionate about. Jessica hopes that by earning her degree, she will be able to show her children that an education is important for a successful career. Though she is very busy and her schedule does not allow for much downtime, Jessica continues to drive over one hundred miles to attend school. This dedication to earning her degree is admirable.

We are proud to announce Ben Hansen, a welding student from Snow College, as the April 2013 Community College Scholarship winner. Ben demonstrated in his scholarship application a strong work ethic and motivation to succeed. It is clear Ben has a big heart and that his success will positively influence the lives of his friends and family.

After graduating from high school, Ben entered the workforce instead of immediately attending college. This experience gave Ben the opportunity to figure out what he was good at and gave him the chance to realize his passion. After working in the Utah construction industry, Ben has decided to go to college to expand his skills and learn welding. Ben's choice to study welding is both practical and based upon a commitment to the field. His hope is that this will be a lucrative and challenging field, where he will get a "sense of accomplishment out of making something useful that didn't exist before."

A recent string of setbacks for one of the leading providers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and a series of re-validations of the enduring value of bachelor's degrees has us wondering if MOOCs may fix things that weren't broken to begin with. More broadly, if efforts to improve education target things that never stopped working, will they do more harm than good?

Since the large-scale launch of MOOCs last year, much of the excitement around them has been driven by their potential to revolutionize education and thereby solve many of the challenges facing higher ed, namely the perceived diminution of the value of a degree in today's economy and the increased cost of getting a degree. While no one can say for sure exactly how MOOCs will evolve or what role they will play, Michael Horn and Clayton Christensen recently described the potential in a Wired op-ed as follows:

If you follow education policy at all, you have likely heard a significant amount of talk about the "$10,000 degree," a bachelor's program that would only cost a student $10,000. Not $10,000 a semester or per year, but an entire bachelor's degree for just $10,000.

The idea of a degree with a price tag one-fifth the cost of the average public, in-state college degree likely sounds appealing. After all, tuition for public universities is rising about 8 percent each year, according to a recent study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Earning a college education is more expensive than ever, while financial aid continues to shrink. But as the saying goes, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," and the $10,000 degree is no exception.