By David Silbey. World War II will not be entirely over for a long while:
Tens of thousands of city residents and U.S. Army soldiers here will evacuate their homes, offices and barracks Thursday as military explosives experts, seasoned by duty in Afghanistan, attempt to disarm a gargantuan bomb that was among thousands dropped during a single Allied mission 70 years ago. More...
27 avril 2014
In A Continuing Series On Things That Might Still Go Boom
‘What Is College For?,’ Chapter 6: Graduate School as Higher Education’s Nerve Center
By Vincent DeFrancesco. Chapter 6 of What Is College For? was a bit of a departure from the book’s central theme. The previous chapters focused on the lost public purposes of higher education and ways to revive the teaching of those purposes. This chapter’s author, Catharine Stimpson, dean emerita of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, touches on the book’s theme very briefly. More...
26 avril 2014
Who’s Looking for College-Educated Workers?
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “The Online College Labor Market”
Authors: Anthony P. Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, Dmitri Repnikov
Organization: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. More...
Historically Black Colleges Feel the Effects of the Recession
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “America’s Public HBCUs: A Four-State Comparison of Institutional Capacity and State Funding Priorities”
Authors: William Casey Boland and Marybeth Gasman
Organization: University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Minority-Serving Institutions. More...
Princeton U. Will Pay Town More Than $24-Million Over 7 Years
By . Princeton University said on Thursday that it had agreed to pay the town of Princeton, N.J., more than $24-million over the next seven years. The university, which as a nonprofit organization is tax-exempt, said in a news release that it would make voluntary payments of $21.7-million over the course of the agreement as well as one-time contributions valued at $2.6-million toward several town projects. More...
The World According to Whorf
By Tom Bartlett. In 1938 a chemical engineer and amateur linguist named Benjamin Whorf visited a Hopi reservation in Arizona and concluded that the residents there had no words for time. No “was” or “will”; only “is.” For Whorf, and for many descriptive linguists who followed him, the supposed lack of past and future tenses in the Hopi language was more than just a grammatical curiosity. It revealed something deep and meaningful about the speakers themselves. The Hopi were a people permanently in the present. Read more...How Has Mich.’s Ban on Affirmative Action Affected Minority Enrollment?
By Jonah Newman. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning race-conscious admissions. Although the decision didn’t directly address the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies, the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor, cited student-demographic data as proof that the ban, which went into effect in 2008, has adversely affected minority enrollment and diversity at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. More...
Education Dept. to Move Forward With Plans for Improving Teacher Preparation
By Mark Keierleber. To strengthen the nation’s teacher-preparation programs, President Obama is asking the Department of Education to move forward with a plan to issue draft regulations that encourage and support states in developing systems for rating programs and providing them with information to help the programs improve. Read more...How much are college students learning?
By Ben Wildavsky. If you want to know how U.S. schoolchildren are performing, you don't have to look far: A wealth of information is available, thanks to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Go online and see, for instance, that Massachusetts children outperform those in Texas, that average math scores have gone up nationally over the past 20 years and that the District of Columbia was the only urban district to improve in math and reading in grades 4 and 8 last year. More...
More Hispanics than whites accepted in California
By . More Hispanics than whites were admitted to the University of California this year, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The demographic shift signals a changing make-up of the country’s largest state, where Hispanics are already the largest ethnic group.
The university system admitted 61,120 Californians to this fall’s freshman class; 28.8% of them are Latino, topping 26.8% who are white, the university’s data detailed. Both demographic groups still trail Asians, who make up 36.6% of admitted freshman. Blacks represent just 4.2% of the admitted freshman class, continuing to lag behind their state-wide demographic representation, as 6% of Californians are black. More...
