By . Jamienne S. Studley, a deputy under secretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education, on Wednesday published a blog post that provides some updates on the Obama administration’s push to develop a college-ratings system. More...
By Taylor Harvey. To maintain or increase enrollment amid overall national declines, a new report by the Parthenon Group tells colleges to go beyond students’ demographics and focus on their motivations. More...
By Beckie Supiano. Researchers have known for years that applying for financial aid is a hurdle on the path to college. So there’s been a big push to get more high-school seniors to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, knows as the Fafsa, which is used to determine aid eligibility by the federal government as well as many states and colleges. Students have to refile the Fafsa annually, but much less attention has been paid to how the application process works after the first year. A new paper, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Investigating Rates and Patterns of Financial Aid Renewal Among College Freshmen,” explores the issue using a nationally representative federal data set. More...
By Eric Hoover. Harvard University will no longer require all applicants for undergraduate admission to submit scores from SAT subject tests, according to an email sent last week to the institution’s alumni interviewers. In the May 14 message, William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, wrote that Harvard would soon change how it describes its testing requirements. “While we normally require two SAT subject tests,” he wrote, the new language will say, “you may apply without them if the cost of taking the tests represents a financial hardship or if you prefer to have your application considered without them.” More...
By Lawrence Biemiller. A Maine-based venture-capital firm is buying Academic Management Systems and its CoursEval software line from the bankrupt education-technology company ConnectEDU, according to a news release from the North Atlantic Capital Corporation, the purchaser. Brian Hopewell, vice president of Academic Management Systems, said the change would “allow us to bring more resources to bear on innovation and growth.” The release said that CoursEval is in use at more than 300 institutions for evaluating both courses and instructors. More...
By Steve Kolowich. The faculty at Middlebury College last week took a stand against the Vermont institution’s partnership with K12, an online-education company that has been helping the college turn its reputation as a language-instruction mecca into a business venture. Read more...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Students, education providers, and employers call massive open online courses one of the best ways to learn web-development skills, according to a report released on Thursday by the European Commission. More...
By Jonah Newman. Walk into the president’s office at a public research university, and chances are high that the person behind the desk is a man. An 84-percent chance, in fact. According to new data from The Chronicle’s annual survey of executive compensation, women accounted for just 40 of the 254 people who served as chief executives of public universities and public-college systems in 2012-13. More...
By Goldie Blumenstyk. Congress now seems unlikely this year to pass patent-reform legislation aimed at controlling so-called patent trolls. That’s both good news and bad news for the research universities that have been in the thick of the debate. The bad news, according to John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, is that there will be no new law, yet “there is a problem out there to be solved.” The good news, he says, is that proposals being pushed by the computer and information-technology industry, which many universities found “really quite problematic,” are unlikely to be enacted this year either. Read more...
By Suzanna Danuta Walters. When I came out, at 16, in those fashion-challenged late 70s when tweedy jackets and pinky rings had to do hard labor in signifying lesbian identity, my (liberal) mother sent me to a shrink before she began her queer re-education and joined the cause, righteous pink triangle pinned on her ample bosom. I knew not one other gay kid, there were no support groups in my high school, and I felt so very alone until I blissfully discovered gay bars, gay bookstores, and the gay movement. Now my 19-year-old daughter (after a high-school career of being the "s" in gay-straight alliances) seems to imagine she gains street cred by claiming queer provenance and goes to a college where gender bending is just another day and creative pronouns business as usual. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
