By Jeffrey R. Young. Even before the Apple Watch was released, professors and pundits began speculating on whether it and other wearable devices might play a role in college classrooms. On Monday researchers at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus announced that they would be among the first to test the device’s usefulness in the classroom. More...
How Corinthian’s Student Body Measured Up Against Other For-Profits: 4 Takeaways
By Lance Lambert. Corinthian Colleges Inc. made waves in higher education this week when it announced it would abruptly close its remaining campuses, displacing 16,000 students. The campuses — operated by the Corinthian subsidiaries Everest College, Everest Institute, Heald College, and WyoTech — were located mostly in California and other western states. More...
Revisions Make a Key Loan-Repayment Plan More Inclusive, Yet More Targeted
By Kelly Field. Negotiators on a federal rule-making panel have agreed on a plan to expand and remake Pay as You Earn, the most generous of the student-loan income-based repayment plans.The revised program — dubbed REPAYE, short for Revised PAYE — would be at once more inclusive and more targeted than the current plan. More...
AAUP Takes Illinois to Task in Report on Salaita Case
By Peter Schmidt. The University of Illinois violated principles of academic freedom in withdrawing a tenured faculty appointment to Steven G. Salaita over his harsh criticisms of Israel, the American Association of University Professors argues in a report released on Tuesday. More...Bringing the Liberal Arts to Engineering Education
By Loni M. Bordoloi and James J. Winebrake. "It’s required." Too many engineering undergraduates utter this simple phrase when asked why they are taking a particular liberal-arts course. The structured curricula that exist for most students in engineering fields create a checklist approach to liberal-arts courses that makes them seem, well, "required" — not relevant, salient, or connected to their professional aspirations. As a result, students struggle to see the value of the liberal arts, even though solving the complex problems of our time — eliminating hunger, preventing terrorism, minimizing our carbon footprint, to name a few — requires a multidisciplinary approach. More...Survival of the Fittest in the English Department
By David Wescott. For a scholar ignored or condemned by almost everyone in his discipline, a career adjunct unable to secure job interviews much less a tenure-track position, Jonathan Gottschall is unusually prominent. More...She Seconds That Emotion
By Clancy Martin. Few philosophical projects are more ambitious or daunting than writing a book about love. First of all, the literature on love is larger, I’d wager, than that on any other subject. There are classics like The Odyssey, The Symposium, the Kama Sutra, Pascal’s Discourse on Love, Kierkegaard’s "Diary of a Seducer," Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, not to mention Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust — and Woody Allen. See also the explosion of interest in the topic in contemporary American philosophy since the pioneering work of Irving Singer, Robert C. Solomon, Harry Frankfurt, and Martha Nussbaum, along with contemporary critical minds who have tackled the subject, like Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Adam Phillips, Simon May, and Laura Kipnis. I have only a small sampling of my favorite books on love at home, and they take up three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And that’s leaving out the neuroscientists. More...Beyond College Rankings
By Jonathan Rothwell and Siddharth Kulkarni. The choice of college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality. This is especially true for colleges granting credentials of two years or less, which graduate two out of five postsecondary graduates. Moreover, popular rankings from U.S. News, Forbes, and Money focus only on a small fraction of four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that may contribute the most to student success.
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End government profits on student loans: Shift risk and lower interest rates
By Matthew M. Chingos. Student loans make billions of dollars for U.S. taxpayers, at least on paper. These profits attract frequent criticism from politicians, most recently in a letter to the Education Department by six U.S. senators led by Elizabeth Warren, who has previously called the profits “obscene” and “morally wrong.”. More...
The global '100-year gap' in education standards
By Rebecca Winthrop. When it comes to education the differences between the developed and developing worlds remain stark.
There has been a convergence in the number of pupils enrolling in primary school, with many more young children in developing countries now having access to school.
But when it comes to average levels of attainment—how much children have learned and how long they have spent in school—there remains a massive gap. More...