Hiring of college graduates this year is expected to reach levels not seen since the early 2000s, but the starting salaries of those positions are improving at a much slower pace, according to new reports authored by Phil Gardner, the director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. The number of internships -- and paid ones at that -- is also expected to increase. After several years of slow growth, hiring of recent college graduates will increase by 16 percent for the 2014-2015 school year, according to Gardner's report released earlier this month. Read more...

Disadvantaged students who enroll at community colleges and who would not otherwise have attended college are more likely to earn a bachelor's degree in the future, according to a newly released research paper. And while many policies focus on getting students into four-year colleges instead of community colleges, the study found that the vast majority of community college students do not suffer a penalty to their eventual likelihood of completing a bachelor's degree. Read more...

By Gerry Canavan. This short essay arises out of my sense that framing academic job searches as a "lottery" might actually encourage, rather than combat, the cruel optimism involved in the process. Read more...

By Nate Kreuter. The academic life, even a “successful” one, is a life filled with rejection. We are rejected from some of the colleges we apply to as high school students, as well as some of the universities where we apply to undertake graduate study. When we graduate yet again and seek academic appointments, rejection becomes an ever-present force as never before, so common in fact that the employers rejecting us have pre-prepared form letters, which they often reuse from year to year, made up to deliver the news, sending them out well beyond the day when we have already realized that we didn’t get the job. Read more...

By KC Williams and Shannon Gibney. You probably don’t want to be reading this any more than we want to be writing it. Documenting racism, sexism, and classism in American society – especially in institutions of higher ed, which are allegedly supposed to be at least somewhat enlightened about these issues --  is a real downer. Read more...

By Paul Jay. It shouldn't be surprising that the recent conference at St. John's College, in Santa Fe, entitled “What is Liberal Education For?” should have turned into an occasion for blaming a host of difficult challenges currently faced by the humanities and the liberal arts on critical theory and political correctness. I wasn't there, but that seems to be one of the conference's main preoccupations as reported by Inside Higher Ed in an article entitled “Doing Themselves In?” After all, St. John's, with its great books curriculum, is known for proudly embracing a traditional approach to a liberal arts education. Read more...

By Patti McGill Peterson. U.S. colleges and universities face choppy waters ahead. Navigating institutional direction these days requires not only a clear grasp of what the domestic challenges are but also demands a good global positioning system. Read more...

By Andrew Joseph Pegoda. “Student success” is the big push at colleges and universities across the nation, and this push is largely being forced upon colleges by state legislatures and federal bodies overseeing education. This well-intended goal has many definitions but generally includes a focus on having higher enrollments, more full-time students, students passing their classes (with high grades), and more graduates. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, whose annual meeting just concluded here, gathers 1,300 minority Ph.D. students and postdocs, and some of their advisers in what is billed as the largest annual gathering of minority doctoral students. Many here talk about the challenges created for black and Latino students who end up -- as doctoral candidates or later as junior faculty -- with few colleagues who share their backgrounds. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The massive open online course craze may have subsided, but the debate about the role of online courses in higher education persists. Even as more faculty members experiment with online education, they continue to fear that the record-high number of students taking those classes are receiving an inferior experience to what can be delivered in the classroom, Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests. Read more...