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By Joshua Kim. The world of educational publishing is completely fascinating. What other industry faces more pressure to change in this world of print-to-digital than textbook publishers? How will the leadership of the large education publishing companies pull off this transition? What role will publishing play in how higher ed evolves in an age of information abundance? My method for answer these and other questions is to try to get to know the people that work in publishing. I like these people. In some near parallel universe I work for an educational publisher, and they work for a university. We share a common set of values, a shared vocabulary, and often the strong feeling that the status quo can no longer hold. One of the most insightful leaders in the world of educational publishing is William Rieders, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer for Cengage Learning. We first met William when I interviewed him for a piece about his transition from the consulting to the publishing world. Read more...

By Ian Wilhelm. When the philanthropist Salah Khalil proposed starting a magazine to cover Arab higher education, he knew it would have to negotiate political obstacles in a region where governments tightly watch scholarly work. Just how quickly that would happen, however, he didn't expect. On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend.
That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country. The new magazine, called Al Fanar, "is committed to strong coverage of academic freedom, and we truly believe academic freedom is an essential condition for excellence in universities around the Arab world," said Mr. Khalil. "We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message." Read more...

By Ann Schnoebelen. Findings released on Wednesday by the Milken Institute corroborate a view many in higher education have found themselves defending in recent years: A college education pays. In a report titled “A Matter of Degrees: The Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity,” the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank says its research proves “the strong relationship between educational attainment and a region’s economic performance.”
The report associates education with increases in real gross domestic product per capita and real wages, linking the addition of one year in a worker’s average years of schooling to a 10.5-percent rise in a region’s real GDP per capita and a 8.4-percent rise in the region’s real wages. The regional jumps in GDP and wages grow even larger—to 17.4 percent and 17.8 percent, respectively—when applied to workers who already hold at least a high-school diploma. Read more...

By Ann Schnoebelen. Findings released on Wednesday by the Milken Institute corroborate a view many in higher education have found themselves defending in recent years: A college education pays. In a report titled “A Matter of Degrees: The Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity,” the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank says its research proves “the strong relationship between educational attainment and a region’s economic performance.”
The report associates education with increases in real gross domestic product per capita and real wages, linking the addition of one year in a worker’s average years of schooling to a 10.5-percent rise in a region’s real GDP per capita and a 8.4-percent rise in the region’s real wages. The regional jumps in GDP and wages grow even larger—to 17.4 percent and 17.8 percent, respectively—when applied to workers who already hold at least a high-school diploma. Read more...

By Spurgeon Thompson. Student evaluations can be either the most painful or falsely ego-boosting things we faculty members read. Sadly, they’re becoming more and more important as American universities veer toward private-enterprise models of educational management. Based on the concept of the customer survey, they have been taken public by a range of Web sites, most famously Rate My Professors. Now that I’ve returned from a decade teaching in Europe, where the culture around student evaluations is entirely different, it has been eye-opening, if not alarming, to witness American higher education’s shifts toward consumerist assumptions. The impulse behind this shift is understandable. We’ve all done it—written a negative review of a product we were unhappy with on Amazon, or complained about a bad experience with an airline that lost our bag or a hotel whose bedsheets weren’t changed. Read more...

By Beckie Supiano. While the average graduating senior who took out student loans leaves college with what should be a manageable level of loan debt—around $26,500—concerns about student debt are persistent and widespread. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators took account of that broad concern and decided to convene a task force of its members to comb through research and trends, and offer recommendations for improving the student-loan system. On Wednesday the association, known as Nasfaa, released a report laying out those recommendations, which have been endorsed by its board. Read more...