Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Tara M. Samuels. Over the past 14 years, I have served as the chief academic officer of undergraduate colleges, all in small to midsized private institutions. The job was pretty much the same in all four institutions in which I served, despite the fact that the titles varied wildly. In two of the four cases, the job did not resemble at all what I thought I had applied for — the dean was little more than an assistant to the provost, with limited decision-making authority. Read more...

By Gary DeCoker. Most postdocs arrive on campus with well-defined research agendas, but in teaching, a key part of many postdoc programs, they often express less confidence. Although teaching is sometimes called a solitary art, successful teaching requires a lot of support. As director of the ASIANetwork - Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Program, I’ve noticed time and again the benefits of careful planning and thoughtful mentorship. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. I do not know if he was an ancestor of the talk-show host, but one Jean-Baptiste Colbert served as minister of finance for Louis XIV. A page on the tourism-boosting website for Versailles notes that his name lived on "in the concept of colbertism, an economic theory involving strict state control and protectionism."
An apt phrase can echo down through the ages, and the 17th-century Colbert turned at least a couple of them. Read more...

By David R. Anderson. I approach the topic of the appropriate reach of government regulation into higher education in very much of two minds. On the one hand, I am the president of an independent-minded private college that has been in continuous operation for 139 years and delivers strong outcomes in terms of access, persistence, graduation, employment and post-graduation debt. Read more...

By Stan Jones. Remedial education and the instructors who provide it are critical to maintaining college access and increasing student success, but the traditional model deployed by most colleges and universities is badly broken. Complete College America’s call for reform is not about the total elimination of remediation. It is about transforming the system to ensure more students succeed. Read more...

By Hunter R. Boylan. Members of the professional community in developmental education agree with many studies suggesting that simply placing students in remedial courses is an inadequate response to the problems of underpreparedness among entering college students. They would further tend to agree that the current process of identifying and placing underprepared students is flawed and that the entire process of assessing, advising and teaching them needs reform. Read more...