By Pamela Newkirk. Now Dear White People, appropriately set on an elite and predominantly white university campus, delivers a timely and barely satiric lesson on why, for many blacks, tensions continue to simmer beneath the nation’s facade of racial harmony and transcendence. The film’s writer-director, Justin Simien, lays out an ambitious lesson plan to reveal how racial stereotypes play out on an elite campus that claims to celebrate diversity. More...
By Natalie Samson. Disquieting art installation has toured several university campuses since 2011.
This fall at the University of Saskatchewan, dozens of red dresses hung loosely from railings, windows and ceilings in campus buildings, and swayed in trees around the campus green known as the Bowl. These weren’t the aspirational party dresses of shop windows or the slinky frocks of fashion magazines, but a public art installation called the REDress Project. The dresses served as an ominous reminder of Canada’s missing and murdered Aboriginal women. More...
By Lachlan Murdoch. America’s higher education system comprises around 4,300 degree-granting institutions that enrol nearly 18 million undergraduate students. Three-quarters of all undergraduates and two-thirds of students with bachelor degrees are enrolled at public institutions where they are charged substantially lower fees and take out fewer and smaller loans than those at private institutions. Read more...
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued its sixth report on the quality of college education, which is based on the inclusion in the curriculum of required courses in literature, US government or history, a foreign language, mathematics, economics, science and composition. The council believes that these courses are essential elements in a broad undergraduate education.
The council found that most Americans support a broad curriculum although many are sceptical about the quality of college education. In addition, colleges appear publicly supportive of a sound general core curriculum. However, surveys have also repeatedly found that students are ignorant of even the most basic facts of American government and history.
Altogether 1,098 four year colleges were assessed according to whether they required students to take courses in the seven core subjects.
Source
What Will They Learn? 2014-15. More...
By . 31 million students have left college without earning a degree in the last 20 years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, leaving a huge amount of almost-students degree bereft. More...
By Simona Chiose. Ontario is considering funding spots for graduate students from abroad, bowing to pressure from universities that say their global competitiveness is harmed because they have to turn away qualified foreign applicants due to lack of money. Read more...
By . On a Friday afternoon last spring, Dennis D’Amelio, an artist and teacher in late middle age was presiding over a class in color theory at LaGuardia Community College, whose location in the immigrant hub of western Queens makes it one of the most ethnically diverse colleges in the country. It was the end of the semester and the students were tackling a challenging assignment — a test of the reactive properties of color, which required the meticulous rendering of small sequential blocks of paint, an exercise that would serve as a lesson in deductive reasoning and consume hours. More...
By Areeba Kamal. “You’re Asian, of course you’re good at math!”
This is the statement that Hannah Zhang, a sophomore at Columbia University, says she heard constantly growing up.
“I’m Chinese American, studying economics at an Ivy League school, good at piano, class valedictorian from high school. I guess you could say I fit the model minority myth,” she says. More...
By Ali Lincoln. College admissions is already a high-stakes, daunting process. There are so many moving parts students have to deal with: essays, letters of recommendation, financial aid, interviews, standardized testing — not to mention keeping up with high school classes and activities. So the recent news that some colleges would convolute the process even more by using the “FAFSA position” as a tool without students’ knowledge or consent deeply disappointed and saddened me. Read more...
By Jeffrey Voccola. Every morning as I head to my office at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, I have to drive past two armored military vehicles aimed in my direction: an M60 tank and an M42 Duster anti-aircraft gun. The vehicles are on display in front of the National Guard Armory, which happens to sit beside my academic building, and the campus and the armory share an access road. While the armored vehicles may be an appropriate symbol for the armory, they create an unfortunate and unwelcoming entrance to campus. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
