By Christopher Newfield. Higher ed policy is suffering through a long siege  of intellectual gridlock.  The default result is what I've been calling permausterity, a chronic funding shortage for public colleges that now rests on a chronic lack of confidence in the job they're doing.  This has become a vicious cycle that feeds itself.  
Making matters worse, faculty responses are fragmented, when faculty respond at all.  Some of the most eloquent voices are increasingly disenchanted: William Deresiewicz got so much pushback for his recent piece, "Don't Send your Kid to the Ivy League," in part because he seemed to be saying that even our premier universities are turning America's most successful students into mercenary sheep. More...

By Libby Nelson. Somewhere in the US Education Department, statistical experts and policymakers are at work on a highly controversial idea: a federal system to rate colleges based on their quality, much as Consumer Reports rates refrigerators.
Many colleges hate this idea, and it turns out the uproar is nothing new. The forerunner of the modern Education Department tried a similar idea in 1911. At the time, colleges opposed the federal quality ratings so bitterly that two American presidents eventually intervened to halt their publication.
Quality ratings spent 102 years as a third rail of higher education policy. Then, last August, President Obama revived the proposal for a federal rating system. He quickly found out the idea hasn't become any less controversial in the past century.
At the turn of the 20th century, college was for the elite. Less than 3 percent of the US population had a bachelor's degree in 1910; just 14 percent had even finished high school. More...

Technology continues to impact the way students and teachers are interacting with educational content, according to the latest survey from BISG.
The core study, Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education, analyzes key trends in how students and faculty members acquire, assign, teach, and consume educational content in multiple media formats. The results from this year's study suggest that the “growing range of technological solutions for teaching and learning has meant that publishers have recast themselves as software companies offering learning platforms.” More...

By Colleen Leahey and Cameron Chisholm. When graduates are unprepared for the working world, corporate America should work with universities to help solve the problem. Should college students spend the four years after high school merging their minds with their hearts and experiences, ultimately building a self? Or should they focus on skills and talents that will let them dive headfirst into the workplace as soon as the cap and gown come off? Former Yale University English professor William Deresiewicz argued the first case in last week’s The New Republic cover story, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” But in 2013, Inc. magazine surveyed the CEOs of the Inc. 5000: 76% said finding qualified talent was a major problem. More...

By Ashish Jha. Last year, about 43 million people around the globe were injured from the hospital care that was intended to help them; as a result, many died and millions suffered long-term disability.  These seem like dramatic numbers – could they possibly be true?
If anything, they are almost surely an underestimate.  These findings come from a paper we published last year funded and done in collaboration with the World Health Organization. More...