By Gretchen M. Reevy and Grace Deason. Nationwide in the United States, 70% of faculty members in higher education are employed off the tenure-track. Nearly all of these non-tenure-track (NTT) appointments share a quality that may produce stress for those who hold them: contingency. Most NTT appointments are contingent on budget, enrollment, or both, and the majority of contingent faculty members are hired for one quarter or semester at a time. More...

By Christopher Flavelle. To judge by this summer's banner policy proposals, the most important question for higher-education reform right now is giving students easier access to loans. But evidence from Canada suggests those changes won't address the greater need: Getting more kids from poor families into college, the key to moving up in an increasingly unequal society. In research published last year, a team of American and Canadian economists compared the connection between family income and college or university attendance in the two countries. More...

By Rebecca Barrett. Every few minutes along Western Boulevard in Corvallis these days, trucks move in and out of the construction site of a large private student housing project.
And across the Oregon State University campus, it’s hard to go anywhere without seeing a crane these days. About a dozen large projects are in the works or set to begin this fall and winter, giving a boost to the construction industry and the local economy. More...

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have flocked to for-profit colleges, including a troubled chain that is closing or selling its campuses amid a series of federal and state investigations.
A report to be released Wednesday from the office of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, a critic of the for-profit education industry who chairs the Senate Education Committee, finds that for-profit colleges received $1.7 billion in Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits in the 2012-2013 school term. About a quarter of benefits paid under the program went to the for-profit sector. More...

By Mark Weiss. After spending most of my career working in industry, I am fortunate to have served the past decade in public higher education. What I have seen is both uplifting and heartbreaking. While wealth or intellect all but guarantees some students the opportunity of higher education, too many others face more difficult paths. More...

By Gene Budig and Alan Heaps. A recent report from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania sheds important and disturbing new light on racial and gender inequality in higher education.
Pretending to be students, Professor Katherine Milkman and her colleagues emailed 6,500 professors at 259 of the nation's top colleges and universities requesting a meeting to discuss research opportunities before applying to a doctoral program. Each message was identical. More...

By John Fitzgerald Gates. The debate around the relevancy of historically black colleges (HBCUs) is at least as old as the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" educational systems are inherently unequal. The data and experiences of countless HBCU alumni like me tell a much different story: HBCUs play an invaluable role in educating often underprepared students successfully, and without HBCUs, the hopes and dreams of thousands of capable African-Americans would go unrealized. More...

By Stefanie Botelho. The Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters , the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals and the most trusted source of scholarly research resources, today marked a first for the scientific community with the release of its enhanced research analytics solution, InCites TM, an integrated web-based platform for measuring research output and impact, monitoring trends, and benchmarking articles, journals, institutions, and people, allowing for greater accuracy in assessing global influence and better decision making. The Journal Citation Reports TM (JCR) and Essential Science Indicators TM (ESI), two globally trusted scholarly analysis solutions, have been integrated into and are now available within InCites for seamless connection across the platform. More...

By Charlotte Clarke. In 2012 Sharon Watkins was watching a Ted talk when she came across the concept of Moocs – massive open online courses. She was so impressed by the prospect of elite education being delivered for free to the masses, that she decided to set up a Mooc cohort where she works in Springfield, Ohio. More...