By Willemien Kets. You don’t need a degree in statistics to see that African-Americans are underrepresented at the highest academic levels on college campuses across the country. Nationally, 5.3 percent of doctorates are awarded to African-Americans, and 4 percent of full professors are African-American. In my own field, economics, the percentage of professors is even lower: 1.8 percent. More...
Many Community-College Students Struggle to Afford Food or Shelter, Study Finds
By Steve Kolowich. Community-college students, many of them adults, often face the challenge of balancing coursework with jobs and families. But some students face a more basic, urgent struggle: feeding themselves and finding a place to stay at night. More...
What a Mass Exodus at a Linguistics Journal Means for Scholarly Publishing
By Ellen Wexler. It was the kind of exit designed to make a statement.
Last week all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The announcement re-energized concerns about the relationship between academics and for-profit companies, and the future of scholarly publishing. More...
The Leaky Pipeline
By Paul Fain. Improved transfer pathways from community colleges to four-year institutions may be the best answer to America's college completion woes, say three influential groups that will prod states and colleges on transfer. Read more...
It's the Little Things
By Carl Straumsheim. Colleges are using data to find hundreds of students who are unaware that they are eligible to graduate. Sometimes it's as simple as asking students if they've applied. Read more...
Rubio's Take on Higher Ed
By Michael Stratford. In the Senate, Marco Rubio delved into the weeds of higher education policy. Now he’s taking his reform push out on the campaign trail, where he is the lone GOP candidate talking about higher ed. Read more...
California Accreditor Under Fire
By Michael Stratford. The embattled accrediting organization that oversees California’s community colleges should lose some of its existing authority and not be allowed to expand its jurisdiction, the U.S. Department of Education’s accreditation unit has recommended. Read more...
The Right to Write History
By Elizabeth Redden. Japanese and American professors clash over a textbook's depiction of the Japanese government's involvement in a system of sexual slavery during World War II. Read more...
The Alumni Question
By Kellie Woodhouse. As student groups throughout the nation demand more diversity on their campuses, administrators have to consider many constituencies, including students (those protesting and those not) and professors with a range of views. Read more...
What Trustees Think
By Kellie Woodhouse. Trustees of comprehensive public universities don’t feel as though they have an adequate understanding of the finances at the institutions they lead, and many of them are concerned the boards they serve on merely rubber-stamp the proposals presented to them by administrators. Read more...