By Jacob P.K. Gross. A consensus has clearly emerged that higher education affordability needs to be addressed by colleges and universities, states, and the federal government. Less clear is how to address the problem, and perhaps more fundamentally, how to decide what affordability means. Read more...04 août 2014
Report: Work-Study Students More Likely to Graduate
Students who participate in the federal work-study program are more likely to graduate and be employed six years after college than their similar counterparts who don’t participate in the program, according to a new study. Read more...
Bar Exam Technology Disaster
New law graduates in many states experienced a technology snafu at the worst possible time Tuesday night: as they were attempting to upload bar examinations just before deadlines in their states. Many reported spending hours trying and failing to upload their answers. ExamSoft, a company that manages the bar test submission process in many states, acknowledged "slowness or difficulty" being experienced by many test-takers, and said that it was sorry for the difficulties many were having. Read more...
On Affordability, Who Decides?
By Jacob P.K. Gross. A consensus has clearly emerged that higher education affordability needs to be addressed by colleges and universities, states, and the federal government. Less clear is how to address the problem, and perhaps more fundamentally, how to decide what affordability means. Read more...Within Striking Distance
By Paul Fain. Americans who attended college for a while but never earned a credential might be the key to achieving the ambitious college completion goals the White House and influential foundations have set. Read more...Real Faculty Flexibility
By Colleen Flaherty. Not so long ago, faculty work-life balance equated to one thing: maternity leave -- and even that was administered in a haphazard fashion at many institutions. So higher education has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, administrators said here Thursday at a conference on faculty flexibility sponsored by the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Read more...What We Talk About When We Talk About Sending Our Kids to the Ivies
By Aaron S. Lecklider. For those of us who teach, work, and study in universities–especially those who, unlike me, find themselves within Ivy League institutions—no topic has aroused more passion recently than William Deresiewicz’s New Republic article, “Don’t Send Your Kids To the Ivy League.” If one can look past the article’s click-bait headline, one discovers that the substance of the piece deals with a number of weighty issues in American life: the dramatic increase in income inequality; the slow and painful decline of the humanities; the lack of creativity in lucrative professions (and the lack of lucre in creative ones); the troublingly narrow metrics for measuring a meritocracy. More...
Equal Rights vs. Religious Principles
By S. Alan Ray. Operating in a pluralistic society, America’s institutions of liberal learning have always faced a fundamental choice: to create cloistered sanctuaries from social difference, or to embrace difference as central to our teaching missions. More...
3 Questions for College Counseling’s Future
By Eric Hoover. Alice Anne Bailey has talked with low-income students about applying to college. Often they tell her they don’t know how to do it. “They think it’s some magical process,” she said. “Someone comes and knocks on your door, and you just pack your bags and go to college.”
Ms. Bailey, director of the Go Alliance at the Southern Regional Education Board, made those remarks on Monday during a conference at Harvard University. More...
With Scrim and Rolling Desks, a Journalism School Seeks a Tech Edge
By Avi Wolfman-Arent. A little over a century after his death, Joseph Pulitzer still looms large at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The building that houses the school bears his name. Every year the school announces the Pulitzer Prizes from the World Room, a reference to The World, his New York newspaper. More...
What Does $75-Million Mean to the NCAA?
By Jonah Newman. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced on Tuesday that it would pay $75-million to settle a class-action lawsuit over concussions in college sports. Rather than paying damages to former players who have suffered concussions, as the NFL has done, the NCAA will devote most of the money to brain screenings for current and former NCAA athletes and to set up preventive measures for future players. More...
