By Tara M. Samuels. Over the past 14 years, I have served as the chief academic officer of undergraduate colleges, all in small to midsized private institutions. The job was pretty much the same in all four institutions in which I served, despite the fact that the titles varied wildly. In two of the four cases, the job did not resemble at all what I thought I had applied for — the dean was little more than an assistant to the provost, with limited decision-making authority. Read more...

By Gary DeCoker. Most postdocs arrive on campus with well-defined research agendas, but in teaching, a key part of many postdoc programs, they often express less confidence. Although teaching is sometimes called a solitary art, successful teaching requires a lot of support. As director of the ASIANetwork - Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Program, I’ve noticed time and again the benefits of careful planning and thoughtful mentorship. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. I do not know if he was an ancestor of the talk-show host, but one Jean-Baptiste Colbert served as minister of finance for Louis XIV. A page on the tourism-boosting website for Versailles notes that his name lived on "in the concept of colbertism, an economic theory involving strict state control and protectionism."
An apt phrase can echo down through the ages, and the 17th-century Colbert turned at least a couple of them. Read more...

By David R. Anderson. I approach the topic of the appropriate reach of government regulation into higher education in very much of two minds. On the one hand, I am the president of an independent-minded private college that has been in continuous operation for 139 years and delivers strong outcomes in terms of access, persistence, graduation, employment and post-graduation debt. Read more...

By Stan Jones. Remedial education and the instructors who provide it are critical to maintaining college access and increasing student success, but the traditional model deployed by most colleges and universities is badly broken. Complete College America’s call for reform is not about the total elimination of remediation. It is about transforming the system to ensure more students succeed. Read more...

By Hunter R. Boylan. Members of the professional community in developmental education agree with many studies suggesting that simply placing students in remedial courses is an inadequate response to the problems of underpreparedness among entering college students. They would further tend to agree that the current process of identifying and placing underprepared students is flawed and that the entire process of assessing, advising and teaching them needs reform. Read more...

By Katrina Gulliver. What follows is a true story.
A junior scholar had been waiting months for a response on an article she had submitted to a good journal. One day she happened to be visiting a colleague’s office, as the colleague was bemoaning being hassled by an editor, having missed the deadline to “review this damn paper.” The title was visible on the colleague’s computer screen. “But that’s my article!” the junior scholar cried. There followed a moment of rather awkward silence, followed by some nervous laughter. The colleague, shamefaced about his tardiness as a reviewer, hastily dispatched a friendly critique of the piece to the editor. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. Department of Education is planning to change how it evaluates the companies that manage the loan payments of the more than 26 million borrowers of federal direct student loans. Department officials are “in the final stages of developing revised performance metrics” for the companies and other entities that service federal loans on behalf of the government, Thomas P. Skelly, the department’s acting chief financial officer, wrote late last month in a letter to Congressional lawmakers. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. There is relatively broad consensus among policy makers and advocates in Washington that income-based repayment is, in most cases, a useful tool for helping borrowers manage their monthly student loan payments. Read more...