Formation Continue du Supérieur

By John A. Fry. Despite an improving economy, eager and talented new college graduates are still encountering significant difficulty in securing jobs. The fallout has landed squarely on colleges. Parents are demanding higher returns for the significant investment in their children's education, and the government is backing them by increasing its efforts to collect and publish postgraduation employment and income data.
These demands are not without merit. As a university president, father of a college student, and former higher-education consultant, I value accountability. More...

By Jonah Newman. As an admissions counselor at Valparaiso University, Daniel Jarratt noticed that few high-school students really knew what they were looking for in a college. For all the talk about the importance of college choice, most students Mr. Jarratt spoke to knew of a few colleges they wanted to attend but couldn’t articulate exactly why they wanted to do so. So on his nights and weekends, Mr. Jarratt, now a first-year Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, started working on a tool that would direct students to the right colleges even if they didn’t know what they were looking for. More...

By Tara Isabella Burton. Earlier this month, more than 700,000 students submitted the Common Application for college admissions. They sent along academic transcripts and SAT scores, along with attestations of athletic or artistic success and—largely uniform—bodies of evidence speaking to more nebulously-defined characteristics: qualities like—to quote the Harvard admissions website—“maturity, character, leadership, self-confidence, warmth of personality, sense of humor, energy, concern for others and grace under pressure.”
Why are American colleges so interested in leadership? On the Harvard admissions website quoted above, leadership is listed third: just after two more self-evident qualities. More...