17 mai 2015

A Shakeout Dividend

By Matt Reed. The latest stories about ITT, EDMC, and Corinthian’s struggles -- and I doubt they’ll be the last -- should actually give community college fans some hope.
We may see a shakeout dividend. Read more...

Disciplinary Associations and Community Colleges

By Matt Reed. Paula Krebs, the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bridgewater State and a partner-in-crime with the New England Cross-Sectoral Partnership, asked me a great question. She noted that only 7% of the MLA membership is from community colleges, and she asked what would make membership more attractive to community college faculty. Read more...

Placing Adults

By Matt Reed. For years, most community colleges relied on a single placement test given at the time of admission. (Accuplacer and Compass are among the more common.) A score on reading, writing, or math would indicate that a student needed remediation, could start at the college level, or was potentially Honors material. Read more...

Kids Today: A Response to Mark Bauerlein

By Matt Reed. A few weeks ago, I offered my services to the New York Times to improve its coverage of higher education. This week, I’ll repeat the offer, since the situation there is only getting worse. Read more...

How Much of Your Stipend Should You Spend on Rent?

By Emily Roberts. There are a few different versions of the “rule of thumb” regarding how much of your income to spend on housing. No more than 25-30% of your take-home pay seems to be the consensus, with a few outliers. But as a graduate student receiving a stipend, does this guideline apply to you? How should you figure out how much to spend on housing? Clearly, whether your university is in a high cost-of-living or a low cost-of-living area will have an enormous impact on how much you need to spend. Read more...

Using Evernote in the Lab

By Hanna Peacock. As students in the lab we are told constantly to record everything we do… just in case we need to go back and check. “You never know what might end up being important.” We save data sheets from reagents, email correspondences, journal articles that give us ideas, notes hastily written on a paper towel, protocols inherited from from former lab members, etc. Read more...

Dissertating While Working

By DeWitt Scott. Completing a dissertation is always a challenging task, no matter what life circumstances compete for a graduate student’s time and attention. Meeting deadlines, conducting research, and completing revisions require students to give up large parts of their schedules to acquiesce to these demands. Juggling the time and energy needed to be a graduate student can be even trickier if one also has a full-time job. Read more...

Dutch firms call for higher education quality boost

Dutch companies have written to education minister Jet Bussemaker urging her to boost the standard of Dutch university and college education, the Volkskrant reports on Thursday. The two big Dutch employers’ organisations VNO-NCW and MKB Nederland say they are unhappy with the quality of the Dutch higher education system. Their report is in the hands of the Volkskrant. More...

Universities offer courses for women to reenter job market

By Naohiro Yoshida. A growing number of women are taking college courses aimed at helping them reenter the job market after leaving due to marriage or having a child. More...

Universities' plan to boost world rankings

By John Gerritsen. Universities could get a leg-up in international league tables through closer links with the Government's Crown Research Institutes.
An Education and Science Select Committee paper says New Zealand universities are suffering in the rankings because of a perceived lack of high-level research. The three main rankings are the QS, Times Higher Education, and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and they place most New Zealand institutions in the top 400 or 500 in the world. More...