President Obama on Thursday nominated Ericka M. Miller, vice president for operations and strategic leadership at the Education Trust, to be assistant secretary for postsecondary education. If Miller is confirmed by the Senate, she would largely complete the team of political leaders who will guide the Education Department's higher ed agenda in the president's second term. Miller has spent six years at Education Trust, which advocates for educational equity at all levels, particularly on behalf of students from low-income backgrounds. Read more...
13 novembre 2013
Foreign Student Numbers Growing: The Good News and the Missed Opportunities
By Edward Alden. While it is easy to despair at the many failings of the U.S. political process, it is important sometimes to celebrate the amazing resilience of American society. My cause today is the latest annual Open Doors report from the Institute of International Education, which examines foreign students studying at American universities and U.S. students studying abroad. The encouraging news is that last year nearly 820,000 international students attended U.S. colleges and universities, a record high and an increase of 7 percent over the previous year. New enrollments were up 10 per cent. That’s nearly a million smart young people who will either remain in the United States after they graduate and strengthen this country, or return home and bring with them the values and skills they learned at some of the world’s greatest schools. More...
10 novembre 2013
Obama Nominates Advocacy Group Official to Federal Higher Ed Post
ACT and College Board Sued for Selling Student Information
A standardized test taker filed a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against ACT and the College Board for selling personal information about her and millions of American high schoolers. The lawsuit, filed this week in a federal district court in Illinois, seeks more than $5 million in damages from the test makers for “unfair, immoral, unjust, oppressive and unscrupulous” conduct. Namely, the plaintiff, a Cook County woman about which little else is known, alleges that ACT and the College Board do not tell test takers what will be done with their personal information. Read more...
FAFSA Snafu Possibly Contributed to 8% Enrollment Drop
A paperwork snafu following the merger of two Georgia colleges may have contributed to an 8 percent enrollment decline, according to officials at Middle Georgia State College. Middle Georgia State – the combination of Macon State College and Middle Georgia College – is the product of a round of mergers pushed by the University System of Georgia. When the first class of students to attend the merged college used the Free Application for Federal Student Aid this year, the online application presented them with these two choices: "Middle Georgia College, Cochran, GA" and "Middle Georgia State College, Macon Cam, Macon, GA.” Students who picked the first received their financial aid normally. Read more...
Higher One Nears Settlement
By Michael Stratford. Higher One, the large but often controversial provider of debit cards on college campuses, has reached a preliminary agreement to pay $15 million to settle claims that its fees and marketing practices were predatory, the company announced Tuesday. The settlement, if finalized and approved by a court, would resolve a handful of class-action lawsuits filed in 2012 against Higher One by a dozen students at colleges across the country. A federal judge consolidated the lawsuits filed in five different states -- Connecticut, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois and Kentucky -- into one class action earlier this year. Read more...
The Education Faculty
By Scott Jaschik. Schools of education need to improve the way they evaluate faculty members -- whether on or off the tenure track -- according to two reports released Friday by the American Educational Research Association. One report, on evaluating faculty members for tenure and promotion, finds that significant changes are needed in how teaching and research are evaluated. The other report says that faculty members off the tenure track deserve "appropriate conditions of professional employment and support."
Tenure-Line Faculty
The report on tenure-track faculty members suggested significant shifts in all parts of the evaluation process. Read more...
Not Dead Yet
By Carl Straumsheim. The death of the learning management system has been routinely predicted over the last few years, but if a new market forecast is to be believed, commercial vendors have little to fear. The industry will continue to expand over the next five years, though most of the growth will come from outside the higher education sector. According to a report by the market research and consulting company MarketsandMarkets, the industry is anticipated to post a year-over-year growth rate of about 25 percent for the next five years, expanding from $2.55 billion today to $7.83 billion in 2018. Read more...
08 novembre 2013
Aboriginal student population increases at the University of Saskatchewan
By Joel Senic. The University of Saskatchewan (U of S) saw close to a 30 per cent increase in Aboriginal enrollment this semester compared to last fall.
There are currently close to 2,000 aboriginal students enrolled at the university.
The university is actively reaching out to First Nations communities across the province in an effort to get more aboriginal students on campus, says Candace Wasacase-Lafferty, the University of Saskatchewan First Nations and Métis Engagement Director at its English River facility. More...
06 novembre 2013
The school data problem: what we have vs. what we need
By Valerie Strauss. It’s the backbone of the modern school reform: data. And a lot of it, it turns out, isn’t any good. Here’s a post about the problem of the data we have vs. the data we need, by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, who confronted the issue recently when he helped the Boston Globe create a rating tool for schools in Massachusetts. Schneider is the author of “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and the upcoming ”From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.” He tweets @Edu_Historian. Read more...
05 novembre 2013
Negotiators Offer Proposals Ahead of 2nd Session on ‘Gainful Employment’ Rule
By . The U.S. Department of Education has posted online a series of proposals submitted by negotiators who are seeking to shape its revised “gainful employment” rule, ahead of a negotiating panel’s second formal gathering, set to take place this month. A federal judge last year struck down the department’s previous version of the controversial rule after the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the main trade group representing for-profit colleges, challenged the regulation in court. In August the department released draft language for a new version of the rule, which would penalize career-oriented programs whose graduates struggle to repay their student loans, as defined by two benchmarks—a debt-to-income ratio and a debt-to-discretionary-income ratio. More...
