By John Warner. In his recent address, President Obama has made it clear that he wants colleges and universities to “compete” with each other. Through a series of yet-to-be-specified metrics, institutes of higher education will be measured not on inputs (as the U.S. News and World Report rankings work), but on outcomes like graduation rates and job placement. The intention is determine the institute’s “value,” so that matriculating students can make better decisions. Ultimately, these metrics may be tied to Federal carrots like Pell Grants, with students being restricted to lower amounts for poorly performing schools. Presumably, schools will compete with others in the same category, so community colleges aren’t asked to measure themselves against the Ivy League. Read more...

By Dayna Catropa. According to Google, “Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages. 15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before.” By analyzing these search queries, Google is in a unique position to spot trends. Google’s Education Team recently released data related to education search. The report analyzes search volume over time using data unique to Google. They separate search queries into five categories: brand terms (includes an institution name); program terms (business, psychology); general terms (online education); degree terms (includes the level of the degree) and MOOC terms. Here are three trends they discussed. Read more...

 The Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium (HEASC) was formed to support and enhance the capacity of higher education to fulfill its critical role in producing an educated and engaged citizenry and the knowledge needed for a thriving and civil society.HEASC seeks to help higher education exert strong leadership in making education, research, and practice for a sustainable society a reality. The link address is: http://heasc.aashe.org/

By G. Rendell. Last week, Grist published a piece guaranteed to hook the attention of anyone under 40 -- its headline proclaimed that your iPhone (or equivalent device) uses more electricity than your fridge. Which is, of course, a load of bunk. Anyone writing (or editing; yes, Scott Rosenberg, I'm looking at you) for Grist should know better. Once I got past the ridiculous headline, what caught my eye was that the article was based on the conclusions of a report funded by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Read more...

 The mission of the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future (ULSF) is to support sustainability as a critical focus of teaching, research, operations and outreach at colleges and universities worldwide through publications, research, and assessment. ULSF also serves as the Secretariat for signatories of the Talloires Declaration, a ten-point action plan committing institutions to sustainability and environmental literacy in teaching and practice. The link address is: http://www.ulsf.org/about.html.

By Tracy Mitrano. On August 20, Cornell sent out its annual copyright notice to students pursuant to the regulatory requirement in the Higher Education Opportunity Act.  In the message, we always include an email whereby students with questions can communicate with me.  The first year we sent out a notice -- long before the HEOA, in 2002 -- I was up most of the night answering questions!  Since then, much has changed, and so I would approximate that it was more in the ballpark of about 30 queries this year, which can be clumped into about three issues.  Staff will help me work up a FAQ for next year. Read more...

 The mission of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association (HETL) is to bring together higher education professionals from around the world to dialogue, network, and collaborate on critical issues relevant to teaching and learning. HETL supports academic and pedagogical pluralism as well as practices that promote sustainable learning and peace. The link address is: http://hetl.org/

By Matt Reed. The new academic year is about to start.  Every year, around this time, I reflect on how I’d like to see community colleges work. In my perfect world, a community college would be a collection of mad scientists experimenting with the best ways to help students learn.  They’d hail from all sorts of disciplines, and presumably some of them would have better grooming than the traditional mad scientist, but they’d share the excitement and focus on the task at hand.  The college would be a constant cauldron of experimentation and communication of results.  In this view, academic freedom exists to enable experimentation.  Over time, as results accumulated, the effects for the students would get progressively better. Read more...

 The Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) is a membership organization and is composed of institutional leaders engaged in advancing the international dimensions of higher education. The purposes of the Association are to:provide an effective voice on significant issues within international education at all levels, improve and promote international education programming and administration within institutions of higher education, establish and maintain a professional network among international education institutional leaders and cooperate in appropriate ways with other national and international groups having similar interests. The link address is: http://aieaworld.org/

By Matt Reed. Last week, I was in a meeting with several colleagues, two of whom are Boomers, and one of whom is a fellow Gen X’er. As the meeting wound down, the discussion shifted:
Boomer 1: Remember when all the local banks used to recruit here? They’d hire all the liberal arts grads?
Boomer 2: Yes!  Or the big retailers like [name of dead chain] and [name of other dead chain].
B1: That’s right.  And then they’d put people in their management training programs.
(pause)
B1: When I graduated, I had four job offers before I finished.
(pause)
Me: What color is the sky on your planet?
X’er: (snarf)
B1: Blue.  That’s just the way it was.
Me: On behalf of generations X and Y, [colorful, if affectionate, expression of frustration]
X’er: When I graduated with my Master’s, I got a job at Subway.
I was reminded of that conversation yesterday in reading back-to-back articles in IHE about making aspects of college free. One addressed the growing use of Open Educational Resources as a substitute for the buy-your-own-textbook model, and the other addressed an argument for making public higher education entirely free. Read more...