By Matt Reed. The goings-on in Ferguson are too disheartening for words, so in the interest of preserving my mental health, I’m focusing closer to home.  Based on years of observation, here are some tips for students who are about to start their first semester at a community college. If you’re a student about to start at a community college, or if you know someone who is, I hope these are helpful. Read more...

By Matt Reed. In journalism, “burying the lede” refers to putting the most interesting part of a story so deep within it that casual readers may miss it.  For example, the New Yorker had a piece last week on Ferguson, in which it mentioned in passing that the law that allows local police to take inexpensive possession of old military weaponry requires them to use it within a calendar year.  To me, that was both shocking and clarifying, but it was in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of the story. The New York Times did something similar yesterday in a story on WIA, or the Workforce Investment Act. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Yesterday I attended a statewide meeting of community college and career center people to discuss various projects we’ve been working on to help displaced workers find their way through our systems to employable credentials and actual jobs. It was heartening in some ways and frustrating in others, which is to be expected; the goals are good and the successes real, but if it were easy, it would have been done years ago. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, published a think piece in IHE on Monday about the possibility of a standardized, national college degree.  It’s well worth reading and chewing on at length, since it combines several strands of progressive educational innovation with a level of faith in state legislatures that could prove disastrous. Read more...