Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Julie Hare for The Australian. A call by the leader of an Australian state for its three universities to consider a full or partial amalgamation comes just two years after the idea was rejected for being too expensive and for the likelihood that the costs would outweigh the benefits. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Students are most likely to be successful in transferring academic credits when they have higher grade-point averages and move between community colleges and four-year institutions, according to a new federal study released Wednesday. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Professors sometimes bemoan their students' writing skills. But how good are professors at creating quality writing assignments? There's no recent, national study of how and what professors are asking their students to write, despite lots of research suggesting that rich, varied writing assignments and opportunities for feedback mean better student papers. A new book seeks to fill that data void, and argues that what professors are asking their students to write is as important as what students end up writing.
“Writing assignments are revealing classroom artifacts,” says Dan Melzer, reading and writing coordinator at California State University at Sacramento in his book, Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (Utah State University Press). Read more...

By Paul Fain. In the debate over the value of attending a for-profit college, the rubber hits the road in corporate human resources departments. And now, for the first time, researchers have looked at how employers respond when for-profits are listed on a résumé. The newly released working paper by five economists tracked callbacks by employers in response to 8,914 fictitious job applications. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Citing a "failure of higher education governance," a group convened by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has called on trustees to play a much more active role in overseeing their institutions. The group issued a report suggesting serious erosion in the quality of American higher education. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. "Hard Times" is the theme for this year's annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. Many sessions -- including those on higher education -- focus on issues of income inequality. Sociologists presented numerous studies on various ways that policies and practices in American higher education hinder the success of low-income students. Several of the papers suggested that key inequities are not that hard to find, but don't necessarily attract attention. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. An analysis of satisfaction surveys from 60,000 international students at 48 universities in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia reveals that students are, by and large, satisfied, but that satisfaction levels vary by country of origin and that large proportions of undergraduate international students from a single country can inhibit integration. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. Foreign applications to U.S. graduate schools and initial admission offers to international students continue to increase, driven by a surge of interest from India and despite a slight drop in applications from China, according to a new survey on international graduate admissions from the Council of Graduate Schools. Read more...