By Joshua Kim. I'd like to make a modest proposal:
The goal of academic technology departments should be to downsize ourselves.
That the purpose of higher education is for learners to learn and researchers to research - and that anything that we do that is not directly contributing to those two goals we should endeavor to do no longer. Read more...
By Michael Stratford. President Obama’s push for a rating system for colleges and universities that would eventually influence how the federal government doles out student aid is the most ambitious higher education proposal of his administration. The last serious push to so significantly transform federal higher education policy came in 2006 under Bush administration Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. That year, a 19-member commission -- known as the Spellings Commission -- released a report on the future of higher education that called, broadly speaking, for the federal government to play a larger role in promoting accountability and transparency at colleges and universities. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. Reformers and policymakers talk a lot about how to recruit teachers with higher GPAs, higher standards, better standardized tests, big data and more. In this post, Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., writes about something critical that gets ignored in these conversations. Schneider is a former high school teacher and the founder of University Paideia, a pre-college program for under-served students in the San Francisco Bay Area. His research focuses on educational policymaking and school reform in the 20th century. Schneider is the author of “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and is working on a new book about scholarship in education. He tweets @Edu_Historian. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. Context: Budget troubles have led some school districts to either reduce the number of counselors or completely eliminate them, leaving schools without professionals who, at their best, help students in every part of their lives —academics, social/emotional development, college admissions, career planning, anti-bullying, etc. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. Philadelphia public schools are opening for the new school year on Monday without many of the basics any reasonable person would expect.
Paper, for example. Guidance counselors. Nurses. Amid an agonizing financial and leadership crisis, the appointed School Reform Commission, which has run the district since the state took it over a dozen years ago, passed a “doomsday” budget this past summer that included cuts so drastic there was no money for schools to open this fall with funding for things such as paper, new books, athletics, arts, music, counselors, assistant principals and more. Teachers were laid off. This came after the closure of a few dozen schools. Read more...
By Bob Sanders. At a time of stagnating college enrollment nationwide, business schools and programs in New Hampshire are thriving and finding new ways to attract and teach students.
The 15 institutions granted a total of more than 4,000 business degrees in 2011 – the latest figures available – with more than 1,250 coming at the graduate level or above. Most report that they have grown since then, as they rush to adapt to globalization and technological change.
The schools are, for the most part, ramping up their efforts by investing in accreditation, online education and additional facilities and revamping their course offerings to cut costs. They’re also building connections with local businesses and reaching across borders, both to entice international students and internationalize their offerings.
The education being sought in college has come a long way in the last generation. In the early 1970s, more than a fifth of undergraduates earned a bachelor’s in education, while nearly another fifth went into social sciences and history. Business-related degrees accounted for 14 percent of the total. But in the 1980s that changed in a big way, and today 22 percent of all degrees are in business. Social sciences make up 10 percent of the total, and 6 percent are would-be teachers. Read more...
By Sarah Cruickshank. Universities need to offer international students ways to cope during labour dispute with service officers. For a country built on successful immigration policies, it's troubling to see unnecessary obstacles placed in front of international students. These individuals are driven to pursue higher education, eager to participate in Canadian culture, and willing to contribute to our Canadian economy.
A large number of potential international students are struggling with delays in visa processing times. This is a direct result of the labour dispute between the Canadian government and the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, the union that represents the staff at the many Citizenship and Immigration Canada offices. These students may be compelled to delay their studies or to pursue degrees in other countries. And that's likely to present them with a number of additional challenges. Read more...
By Matthew DeLuca. College enrollment in 2012 declined by nearly a half million students compared to a year earlier, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau, with students over the age of 25 leading the miniature exodus from higher learning.
Enrollment at colleges and universities among students aged 25 and older dropped by 419,000 last year, while enrollment among younger students dropped at about a tenth of that rate, according to the statistics released Tuesday.
The drop-off comes amid an overall increase in college enrollment, with 3.2 million new students entering classrooms between 2006 and 2011, according to the Census Bureau. More...
By Walter Hickey. President Obama is touring the country promoting his new proposal for paying for college.
The Department of Education is planning to develop a rating system for colleges that will help decide which students will receive additional aid from the government.
Students attending the higher-ranked schools will be eligible for more tuition help.
The rating system is comprised of the following three quantitative elements:
Since everyone is interested in which schools will win out, we built a model to give a rough estimation of the future scores of schools. More..
By Max Blouw. The trajectory of most individuals in their education and careers is seldom linear. Few people at 17 or 18 have a crystal-clear idea of what their job will be at 40. And for those lucky ones who do, it is unlikely they will pursue a linear path to that end point and stay in that career until retirement. This is simply not the pattern of the modern workplace.
Yet there seems to be an increasing – and in my view mistaken – expectation that graduates are entitled to land a high-level and highly relevant job right out of school. This is unrealistic in today’s rapidly shifting employment landscape. More...
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