To improve on the current system for tracking college and university student achievement, six higher education associations unveiled a new, more inclusive model. As more states are allocating funds to colleges and universities based on performance-based metrics, six higher education associations are sponsoring a new tracking system to measure student progress.
The Student Achievement Measure (SAM) will provide a system to measure student advancement and completion of their studies and will improve on the current federal tracking model by including a larger number of students and following students who enroll in multiple higher education institutions. Read more...

As the Massachusetts Legislature makes its final decisions on the fiscal year 2014 budget, we urge Senate President Therese Murray and her colleagues in the Senate to strongly consider Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal, which the House supports, to divide the cost of attendance at the state’s five UMass campuses evenly between the state and the students.
According to university officials, only 20 years ago the state paid 70 percent of the costs of students attending UMass. Five years ago, it was a 57-43 percent split. Now, the state pays just 43 percent and families are left to pay 57 percent. Read more...

By Brianna Ehley. As the majority of America’s college students struggle to pay rising tuition bills and prepare to graduate with overwhelming debt loads, an elite group of students are paying thousands more per semester to study Italian art in the Tuscan hills, or learn about modern architecture from the top floor of the world’s tallest building in Dubai.
It’s college for the 1 percent. Read more...

By Tim Goral. The acronym may be new, but the SPOC concept isn’t. It’s hard to follow higher education news these days without seeing a reference to MOOCs. The online learning platforms from edX, Coursera, Udacity, and others were launched to great fanfare over the last two years. Proponents praise them for their potential to change education, while critics chalk them up as more hype than hope.
To be sure, for all their promise, MOOCs also have their share of problems. For one thing, as has been documented in each of the popular platforms, the attrition rate is high. For the thousands of students that enroll in a MOOC, only a fraction will fulfill the requirements of the course. Read more...

By Karine Joly. Whether we like it or not, disruptive innovation is now the name of the game in higher ed. What’s to blame? Internet technologies, of course.
No doubt your institution has had to change its marketing and communication practices over the last five years to adapt to the paradigm created by the rise of social media. Meanwhile, the academic side is under pressure to offer alternatives to the traditional higher education model through MOOCs and venture-funded startups.
As if that wasn’t enough, converging factors point to college and university fundraising as the next item on the soon-to-be-disrupted list, from what some predict will be a rise of crowdfunding in higher education. Read more...

SRCH2, the company that enables "Google-like" corporate search tools on any device, today launched its "Pay It Forward" program to help non-profit and higher education institutions increase their effectiveness. The program offers donated and deeply-discounted search software products and implementation services to these institutions, so they can focus more time and resources on achieving their missions.As part of Pay It Forward, SRCH2 has enabled the UC Irvine Office of Technology Alliances to implement type-forward search with fuzzy error correction on its Android mobile application. Users of the app can easily search across non-confidential descriptions of technologies available for licensing from the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Read more...

By Tom Klassen. The transition from school to work can be less stressful with more realistic expectations and more preparation.Spring and summer bring equal measures of jubilation and despair to hundreds of thousands of university graduates across Canada. The joy comes from completing a post-secondary degree after years of study; the misery from discovering that there are no jobs. Taxpayers blame politicians for wasting money on funding universities; politicians pressure universities to better prepare graduates for the labour market. Universities reply that their role is not to produce job-ready workers for employers, but rather to educate. Read more...

By Fiona Buchanan. Canada continues to top the list of most educated countries in the world but it is falling short when it comes to public funding for post-secondary institutions, according to a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) annual report, “Education at a Glance 2013,” ranks Canadians as the most educated of 34 OECD countries, with 51 per cent of the population having completed university-, college- or polytechnic-level education. But Canada trails the non-OECD Russian Federation, which reported a 53 per cent rate of tertiary education in 2012. 
Canadians with university-level education are also less likely to be unemployed, the report found. Both men and women with bachelor’s degrees or higher experience had a five per cent rate of unemployment, compared with nearly seven per cent for high school and college graduates in 2011. Canadians without a diploma experienced unemployment rates of around 12 per cent. Read more...