22 mars 2014

By Nicole M. Stephens, MarYam G. Hamedani and Mesmin Destin. During January’s White House opportunity summit, policy makers and higher education leaders announced over 100 new initiatives designed to bolster first-generation and low-income students’ college success. While students who overcome the odds to gain access to college bring with them significant grit and resilience, the road through college is often a rocky one. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. Evelyn Barish's The Double Life of Paul de Man, from Basic Books, is a scandalous volume, in at least a couple of ways.
At the most obvious level there is troubling nature, even after all this time, of the "the de Man affair" -- the discovery, in 1987, that the preeminent figure among the literary theorists at Yale University had published a substantial body of literary journalism in a Belgian newspaper when it served as a mouthpiece for the Nazis during the occupation. Read more...

By Paul J. LeBlanc. The New America Foundation’s recent report on the Student Unit Record System (SURS) is fascinating reading.  It is hard to argue with the writers’ contention that our current systems of data collection are broken, do not serve the public or policy makers very well, and are no better at protecting student privacy than their proposed SURS might be. Read more...

By Karen Gross. What is an acceptable level of loan default?
College and university leaders will be increasingly called to answer this question. That’s partly because the law will demand it: the newly embraced three-year cohort default rate measurement could result in penalties for more colleges and universities, and recent Congressional proposals could make institutions where significant numbers of students borrow and default on those loans responsible for paying back a sliding-scale amount of the defaulted debt to the federal government. Read more...

By Karen Gross. The student loan problem seems clear enough on the surface: students are incurring oversized student debt, and they are defaulting on that debt and threatening their ability to access future credit. The approaches to student loan debt collection are fraught with problems, including improper recovery tactics and informational asymmetry regarding repayment options. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Professors often frame plagiarism as an ethical problem, with a simple solution: don’t do it. For students tempted to plagiarize knowingly, that approach might work. But the academic integrity rhetoric ignores the fact that students sometimes unintentionally plagiarize or misrepresent source material in their work, panelists said Thursday during a session on the topic at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Seven years after Mike Adams sued the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, charging that he was denied a promotion because of his political views, a federal jury agreed on Thursday. The verdict comes in a case that has attracted considerable attention because Adams has a large conservative following, and his case represents the kind of bias many on the right say they experience in academe (typically without a verdict like this one). Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Tenured and tenure-track faculty members at four-year colleges and universities are receiving raises this year that exceed the increase in the cost of living, according to a study being released today by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. When faculty members move from one institution to the next, so do their courses, but after having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare those courses to a massive audience, are universities entitled to a share of the rights? The question has so far gone unanswered (though not undiscussed) even at some of the earliest entrants into the massive open online course market, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since MOOC providers have gotten out of the intellectual property rights debate by saying they will honor whatever policy their institutional partners have in place, it falls on the universities to settle the matter. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Much of the discussion about low-income students in Washington has centered on getting those students access to larger federal grants and loans, convincing them to apply for aid, or even persuading them to think about pursuing higher education in the first place. Read more...