Service Employees International Union’s Adjunct Action campaign, a national adjunct organizing effort, released this week a new report on academic labor. "Crisis at the Boiling Point" is based on input from part-time faculty members at 238 colleges and universities, plus 40 in-depth interviews with adjuncts. Read more...
By Shari Motro. International Education Week, which begins today, aims to “prepare Americans for a global environment.” As part of this preparation, perhaps we should rethink the use of the word “international” as an adjective describing people. Read more...
By Elizabeth Redden and Michael Stratford. President Obama formally announced Thursday evening a series of controversial executive actions he plans to take to reform a “broken” immigration system -- policies that have implications for undocumented college students as well as international students who study at American universities. Read more...
By Colleen Flaherty. New data about time to degree in Ph.D. programs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences complicate some current reform efforts to help students get through graduate school faster. At the same time, the data suggest that real time to degree is shorter than many people think it is, and that it’s decreasing in some disciplines – albeit slowly.
Among the key findings is that the median time is longer in the humanities than in any other field, at 6.9 years in 2012, compared to a 5.9-year average for all Ph.D.s. That won’t surprise anyone following the national time-to-degree conversation, but just where in their studies humanities Ph.D.s are stalling might. Read more...
By Carl Straumsheim. Academic libraries can help promote the adoption of open educational resources, but ultimately the push for open content has to be about more than textbooks, advocates said this week during the Open Ed Conference. Read more...By Carl Straumsheim. The Association of American Publishers made its appeal to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Wednesday during a hearing on fair use and access for the visually impaired. The second topic, however, was somewhat overshadowed by the ongoing legal disputes over what colleges and universities can and cannot do with copyrighted works. Read more...By Colleen Flaherty. Top Ph.D. students from the highest-ranked economics departments tend to be extremely productive researchers six years out of their programs. The rest of their cohorts? Not so much. Those are the findings of a report published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Read more...
By Michael Stratford. The top Democrats on the U.S. Senate and House education committees on Tuesday criticized the Obama administration for tweaking the student loan default rates of some colleges, a policy that allowed those institutions to avoid penalties. The U.S. Department of Education earlier this year adjusted downward the default rates for certain colleges whose high default rates would have otherwise placed them at risk of losing federal aid. Read more...
By Paul Fain. Redeeming America’s Promise, which was unveiled in June, has become the Campaign for Free College Tuition. The bipartisan nonprofit still wants the feds to fund scholarships to make tuition free at public colleges (see box for details). Read more...
By Paul Fain. Performance-based funding is increasingly popular among both state and federal policy makers, who want public institutions to graduate more students, more efficiently. Yet colleges may cope with these funding formulas by using grade inflation or admitting fewer at-risk students. Read more...
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