By Kelly Field. On the eve of a Senate fight over student-loan refinancing, President Obama is taking executive action to ease students' debt burdens. At a White House event on Monday, Mr. Obama will announce that he will expand a law that caps borrowers' loan payments at 10 percent of their income to individuals with older loans—those who borrowed before October 2007 or stopped borrowing by October 2011. The president will also announce plans to renegotiate contracts with federal student-loan servicers to provide them with financial incentives to keep students out of default. The percentage of students defaulting on their loans within two years of graduating reached 10 percent last year, the highest rate in nearly two decades. Read more...09 juin 2014
As Congress Bickers, Obama Takes Executive Action on Student Loans
By Kelly Field. On the eve of a Senate fight over student-loan refinancing, President Obama is taking executive action to ease students' debt burdens. At a White House event on Monday, Mr. Obama will announce that he will expand a law that caps borrowers' loan payments at 10 percent of their income to individuals with older loans—those who borrowed before October 2007 or stopped borrowing by October 2011. The president will also announce plans to renegotiate contracts with federal student-loan servicers to provide them with financial incentives to keep students out of default. The percentage of students defaulting on their loans within two years of graduating reached 10 percent last year, the highest rate in nearly two decades. Read more...The impact of purposeful campus internationalization
By Ralph Wilcox. Cultivating a campus culture that embodies both global diversity and interconnectivity should be central to the mission of universities today. Reminders persist that our current environment and economy are not confined to our immediate geographic surroundings. Modern-day technologies, transportation, international trade, and politics significantly diminish distances that used to seem great. More...
Are you sending students too much marketing content?
By Troy Burk. The students you’re trying to reach today have grown up in a world in which nearly everything was an advertisement. When they were still in diapers they were bombarded with cartoon characters aggressively hawking sugar-laced cereals, and as they’ve grown older, the commercials, emails, texts, pop-ups and social posts crowding their view have only increased in volume. More...
Seven tips for starting a student success coaching program with an outside partner
By Eric J. Hagan. One proven way to improve retention is by supplementing traditional academic advising with student success coaching. Student success coaching helps students fit school into life and life into school while building up the skills they need to be successful, including study skills, time management, and stress management. As institutions explore the possibility of starting coaching programs to improve student outcomes, there are several challenges they will face. Having gone through the process of launching a successful coaching program at a large private non-profit research university in cooperation with an outside partner, there are seven few tips I’d like to share—lessons learned that I hope will save others time and frustration. Bottom line: the challenges are as much about fitting coaching in to your university’s culture as they are about the mechanics of the coaching program itself. More...
U.S. schools push for campuswide fair-trade status
By Tim Goral. 17 U.S. institutions have been recognized as a “Fair Trade Colleges”.
Last fall Cabrini College (Pa.) became one of only 17 colleges and universities in the United States to be recognized as a “Fair Trade College.” (The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh was the first in 2008.)
Fair trade is a model in which producers are paid above market, “fair trade” prices provided they meet specific labor, environmental and production standards. More...
The negative consequences of relying on loans to raise higher education attainment
By Laura W. Perna. The U.S. cannot reach the levels of educational attainment required for international competitiveness in a global, technologically driven economy without closing the considerable gaps in attainment that persist across groups. Gaps in attainment based on family income are among the most vexing. Compared with students from higher-income families, students from low-income families are less likely to enroll in college and, among those who do enroll, are less likely to graduate. One particularly formidable barrier limiting higher-education attainment — especially for low-income students — is the need to rely on loans to pay college costs. Read more...
Guest Post: This Must Be the Place: Teaching Francophone Literacy Narratives
By John Warner. Many of you will recognize the title of this post from the Talking Heads song of the same name:
Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
This is unhome all over, right? “I guess that this must be the place.” Unhome took on new significance over the course of the term, one that can be considered more broadly within the experience of the university: unhoming is also what happens in the acquisition of deep knowledge. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about deep knowledge this semester, as I’ll be starting a new visiting position this coming year: I’ll still be housed in the Department of French and Francophone Studies, but my teaching will be in UIC’s new Freshman Experience Initiative, one of the primary aims of which is to help students acquire deep knowledge throughout their undergraduate education. Read more...
Don't step back to look at the big picture
By G. Rendell. That piece of advice was given me by my father. It's situational. It was delivered while I was standing on a ladder, painting a house. Under other circumstances, looking at the big picture is often a wise move. I realized today that part of my perspective on the world, part of why I signed on to promote sustainable behaviors at Greenback U, was shaped whilst I stood on that ladder and others like it. Read more...
Math Geek Mom: Frog Philosophy of Life
By Rosemarie Emanuele. As I often stress in my Statistics courses, there is a major difference between two things being correlated, or moving together, and those same two things being connected by a cause and effect relationship. I found myself thinking of this the other day as I watched young people in our public pool play on a new attraction that showed up when the pool opened this year. This year, our largest public pool in town now contains a series of inflatable surfaces that one can attempt to move along, much as a frog would move along lily pads. This analogy is reinforced by the painted frog footprints on each surface, and by the fact that the system bears the name of “Wibit,” which (I assume) sounds like a frog’s sound of “ribbit.” As I watched my daughter attempt this new diversion, I must admit that I was half tempted to try it myself. Read more...Old Friends
By Susan O'Doherty. I loved my college experience. I loved the exchanges of fascinating ideas, in the classrooms and the dorm rooms. I loved the beautiful, Jeffersonian buildings, the graceful weeping willows, and the huge expanses of lawn. Most of all, I loved building strong friendships with kind, brilliant, intellectually and artistically passionate women and living them day in and out, for four years. Read more...
