By Barbara Fister. The latest social-media kerfuffle on Goodreads has left me pondering the dynamics of expressing ourselves in digital communities. People are amazingly generous about sharing their words – but amazingly vicious at times. As it happens, I am reading the draft of a book of essays on using digital media for teaching writing, and that is setting up some curious reverberations. Read more...

By Kayla P. Solinsky. Please allow me to state the obvious: graduate school is one of the most mentally and physically taxing experiences ever. Breaking a mental sweat while writing the dissertation proposal, applying for fellowships, and grading papers is a normal occurrence for most grad students. Unfortunately, breaking a literal sweat is not as common, but it really should be. For many students, college is a place for having a fabulous body and sweating hard at the gym. Lucky for me, I was never a victim of gym culture peer pressure. My younger self always complained that the gym was always too far and far too sweaty. Working out was nowhere near my mind in my junior year, when I was diagnosed with severe depression. It seemed normal for the therapist to prescribe pills for the depression and other pills to counteract the side effects. Read more...

By Katy Meyers. My first five years of grad school, I lived within walking distance of the campus. I always felt that being close to the university community was important for bonding with other students and becoming a part of the general area. I loved spending my Sundays buying fresh vegetables from the university’s farmers markets, visiting campus on Saturdays for tailgating, and being able to quickly pop over to campus whenever I needed to. I would strongly suggest living near campus for your first couple years of grad school. However, that isn’t always possible and sometimes plans change. Read more...

By Kaitlin Gallagher. The best advice I’ve received about surviving in the competitive world of grad school was passed down from a colleague: “Kaitlin, make sure to run your own race.” This came in response to a question I asked about how to deal with people around me doing all sorts of things that I wasn’t doing. What she meant was that it was my degree and it’s what I do that matters.  Looking around at your colleagues, there will be people publishing more, teaching more, and people who have more extracurricular activities, or more funding. It can be easy to think you don’t measure up. This self-deprecating thinking ignores strategies that can help make you successful and instead fixates on what others are doing. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Now Yahoo is ranking community colleges?
Ugh. Another list.
I’m not sure who the intended audience is. Most community college students don’t choose from among colleges across the country; most choose locally. In many areas, that only means one place to go; in most, no more than two or three. Online degrees have loosened the ties to geography to some degree, but most community colleges still charge a premium for out-of-state (or, in some states, out-of-county) students. Geography isn’t dead. Knowing that a college in Washington got a great ranking doesn’t help a prospective student in Massachusetts very much. Read more...

By Matt Reed. You know that awkward moment when your sense of what goes without saying clashes directly with somebody else’s, and you’re too surprised in the moment to do a really good job of analyzing it?
I had one of those on Saturday.  I was on a panel at the Education Writers Association’s higher ed conference in Boston, along with Zakiya Smith, from the Lumina Foundation, and Terry Hartle, from ACE.  Scott Jaschik, from Inside Higher Ed, was the moderator, and the focus of the panel was President Obama’s proposals for tying financial aid to as-yet-unspecified measures of institutional performance. Read more...

By Matt Reed. An occasional correspondent writes:
I have been privy to a trend that at first I liked a lot, but most recently brought me alarm. (I am bringing this to you not as applicant in either process, just came across them through acquaintances.) In many VP searches the open forums and much of the interview process is very public. Public to the extent that I am seeing and hearing about more and more of the open forums being broadcast either on the radio, public television or youtube.  All of which bring transparency to the search. Read more...

Le CNFPTLV (Conseil national pour la formation tout au long de la vie) et le RCO (réseau des Carif-Oref - Centres d'animation et de ressources d'informations sur la formation-Observatoires régional sur l'emploi et la formation) s'engagent, via cette convention, à poursuivre et développer leur coopération sur les points préexistants, mais définissent aussi de nouveaux axes de travail commun. Suite...