By Jonathan Thon. It’s a new year, and with it come renewed efforts to improve the status of academic funding in Canada. While our reader feedback  has been phenomenal this last year, our government’s has been less so. Back in June 2013 I wrote a series of open letters on the status of science funding in Canada which I addressed to the Honourable Thomas Mulcair (Leader of the New Democratic Party), the Honourable Daniel Paillé (Chef du Bloc Québécois), the Honourable Elizabeth May (Leader of the Green Party of Canada) and the Honourable Justin Trudeau (Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada), culminating in an open letter I posted on this site to the Right Honourable Stephen Harper. More...

By Matt Reed. In my poli sci days, one of my favorite observations was the wild disparity between Americans’ opinion of Congress in general, and their opinions of their own Representatives. It boiled down to “they’re all bums, except for my guy.” And that was true even before redistricting got completely out of hand. Americans are perfectly capable of re-electing over 90 percent of the members of a body with a 10 percent approval rating. In the case of Congress, we can’t even blame the electoral college. Read more...

About 23 percent of students who receive college credit while still enrolled in high school obtain an associate degree within two years, making them far more likely to do so than peers who do not earn college credit in high school, a new study shows. Read more...

The U.S. Education Department plans to provide guidance counselors and state agencies with more information about students who are filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, Obama administration officials said Wednesday at the department's so-called "Datapalooza" event. The goal is to boost the rate at which students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, complete the FAFSA. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled more than 100 commitments from colleges and universities and millions of dollars in philanthropic donations aimed at helping more low-income students attend and complete college. The lengthy list of new promises doubles as the guest list to Thursday’s higher education summit hosted by the White House. In order to attend the daylong event, which will include remarks by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as well as discussions with top administration officials, college presidents were required to make new pledges, financial or otherwise, to helping low-income students. Read more...

By Matt Reed. When the Atlantic decided to tell us how to escape the “community college trap,” I had to look. It’s the same part of my mind that makes me smell the milk even though I know it’s spoiled.  Nothing good is likely to come of it, but curiosity is a force in itself. The article wasn’t nearly as awful as its title suggested. It was largely a profile of the ASAP program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. ASAP has improved student retention rates by being remarkably prescriptive about what students do. They have to enroll full-time, for example, and every student gets an “intrusive” advisor who functions as something between a truant officer and a personal trainer. Read more...

Following a vote by the leaders of the sociology department, the University of Colorado at Boulder says that Patricia Adler is clear to return to teaching her popular course on deviance. Adler has been warned last month that she needed to stop teaching the course because of concerns raised by administrators about a classroom exercise in which some assistant teaching assistants dressed as different types of prostitutes. The university gave a series of conflicting reasons for the concern about the course, which had been taught for years, with strong student reviews. Eventually, the university said that if Adler's course was reviewed, she could teach it again, and that review process is now complete. Read more...