Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Colleen Flaherty. Lectures on “putting first things first” and “beginning with the end in mind” could soon replace those on world civilizations and logic for some students enrolled in San Antonio area community colleges. Bruce Leslie, chancellor of the Alamo Colleges, is hoping that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will approve his bid for a course heavily influenced by the popular self-help book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to become part of the core curriculum, in place of a humanities course. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The College Board is releasing data today showing sustained growth over the last decade in the number of students taking Advanced Placement exams, with more than 1 million members of the high school class of 2013 taking AP exams.
That's nearly double the 514,000 from the class of 2003. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Few educational theories have taken off as quickly in recent years as that of "undermatching." The idea is that many academically talented, low-income students who could succeed at top colleges are not applying to, enrolling in or graduating from them. Research on the topic has attracted widespread attention not only from colleges but from the White House, where administration officials have urged higher education leaders to do more on the issue. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin may have trumpeted their partnerships with -- and pledged millions to -- the massive open online course provider edX, but to no avail: Their students don't seem to understand why.
“A year after UT began rolling out nine Massive Online Open Courses, the results are in,” The Daily Texan wrote in a Jan. 29 editorial, which appears to have been inspired by a recent article in The Texas Tribune. Among the “results” are completion rates ranging from 1 to 13 percent, the lack of credit granting courses and the $150,000 to $300,000 production costs. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. Donors gave about $34 billion to North American colleges in 2013, according to an annual survey by the Council for Aid to Education. That's more than $3 billion more than the year before, and the most ever raised in a single year -- topping the $31.6 billion from pre-recession 2008, not adjusted for inflation. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The last time the Higher Education Act came up for a vote in Congress in 2008, Senator Lamar Alexander trotted out a five-foot stack of cartons onto the Senate floor to show the enormity of existing regulations governing higher education. Now that lawmakers are once again contemplating how to rewrite that massive piece of legislation -- which authorizes, among other things, the $150 billion-a-year federal student aid program -- Alexander is returning to his props. Read more...

California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles jointly announced a new effort Thursday to increase the number of minority Ph.D.s in science, mathematics and technology fields. The four universities will create "a unique, cross-institutional community of underrepresented minority Ph.D. students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty members in the targeted fields. Read more...

By Becca Ramspott. Whether we call it protesting, mudslinging, or “digital hate,” as Chancellor Phyllis Wise did in her blog post addressing University of Illinois’ Twitter incident, there is nothing new about very public, incendiary criticism occurring online — or in person. Racist and derogatory slurs and innuendos happen every day, in our college and university student centers, in our residence halls, out on the field at games. And numerous colleges and universities have felt the wrath of social media outrage in response to a decision, changes in leadership, and other developments. Read more...

By Arthur Levine. Last week the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education released model state legislation to create teaching fellowships for high school seniors willing to teach in high-need schools. Their approach includes a four-year college scholarship, accompanied by professional development, in exchange for a commitment to teach in a high-need school for four years. It is an excellent idea — and it could go farther still. Read more...