By Lauren Schudde. A recent Gallup-Purdue study on the relationship between student experiences in college and later job satisfaction concludes that what matters is not “where you go” but “how you do” college. According to the report, students who participate in what the authors term the “winning combination” -- research projects, extracurricular activities, internships and close relationships with faculty -- are more highly engaged in their jobs after college. What the authors fail to acknowledge, however, is the fact that how students “do” college is often governed by pre-existing inequalities that our higher education system does little to ameliorate. Read more...

By Bernard Fryshman. We have a propensity to draw conclusions from patterns, even when there is a lack of hard data. Thus, British soccer fans are rarely invited to join quiet lawn parties in retirement villages, and NFL football scouts have not added Rabbinical schools to their talent-search itineraries. Read more...

By Mary Flanagan. Telltale fast clicks of laptop arrow keys gave away my distracted student from 30 feet off. So engrossed was he in a 1980s role-playing game that he barely noticed when I leaned in to whisper how entirely inappropriate his behavior was during my digital humanities class at Dartmouth College. As a noted visiting technology and culture speaker held forth on participatory culture and Wikipedia — in which my students had expressed an avid interest — I was shocked as he and many others openly engaged with their Facebook pages. Read more...

By Clark G. Ross. The teaching of introductory economics at the college level remains substantively unchanged from the college classroom of the 1950s, more than 60 years ago. The teaching of other introductory courses, from psychology to biology, has changed dramatically -- with new knowledge and, more importantly, new pedagogical techniques. Today's students are also very different, not accustomed to sitting through 50-minute lectures, taking detailed notes of material and techniques, the value of which has yet to be demonstrated to them. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. This month's edition of The Pulse podcast features an interview with Dina Leytes, who chairs the intellectual property and new media practice at Philadelphia's Griesing Law firm. In the interview with Rodney B. Murray, host of The Pulse, Leytes discusses some of the copyright issues related to online higher education. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. José Ferreras was 11 when his grandfather died on Thanksgiving Day. A few weeks before, Ferreras had fallen into an argument with the older man, who was sick with Parkinson’s. He didn’t have a chance to apologize.
“This man, he was the only male figure that I truly had in my life,” Ferreras said. “My father was never around, and I was never really close with my brothers or my cousins, so I just really had my grandfather.”
Now 19, Ferreras is a creative writing major at Southern Vermont College, a 500-student liberal arts institution in Bennington that enrolls many low-income and first-generation students. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Administrators at the Georgia Institute of Technology are optimistic but “not declaring victory” after one semester of its affordable online master’s degree program in computer science. While the program has been well-received by students, administrators are still striving to solve an equation that balances cost, academic quality and support services. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Many faculty members gripe about the way presidential compensation dwarfs their own -- and how high-level perks create a divide between professors and presidents. Four such faculty members have found an unusual way to attract more attention to this critique. They have applied jointly to share the job (and the $400,000 minimum salary) of the opening to lead the University of Alberta. Their application is, in part, tongue-in-cheek. Read more...