Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Katrina Gulliver. What follows is a true story.
A junior scholar had been waiting months for a response on an article she had submitted to a good journal. One day she happened to be visiting a colleague’s office, as the colleague was bemoaning being hassled by an editor, having missed the deadline to “review this damn paper.” The title was visible on the colleague’s computer screen. “But that’s my article!” the junior scholar cried. There followed a moment of rather awkward silence, followed by some nervous laughter. The colleague, shamefaced about his tardiness as a reviewer, hastily dispatched a friendly critique of the piece to the editor. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. Department of Education is planning to change how it evaluates the companies that manage the loan payments of the more than 26 million borrowers of federal direct student loans. Department officials are “in the final stages of developing revised performance metrics” for the companies and other entities that service federal loans on behalf of the government, Thomas P. Skelly, the department’s acting chief financial officer, wrote late last month in a letter to Congressional lawmakers. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. There is relatively broad consensus among policy makers and advocates in Washington that income-based repayment is, in most cases, a useful tool for helping borrowers manage their monthly student loan payments. Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. The number of students seeking help for anxiety continues to grow, and while counseling centers are starting to recover financially from the recession, they’re still as short-staffed as ever, an annual survey of counseling center directors found. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Florida’s public institutions are anxiously watching this spring’s legislative session, which rounded the halfway point last week. Regardless of what dies on the floor or is signed into law, the universities are still waiting for clarification on the fallout of last year’s session. House Bill 7029 took a turbulent path to reach Governor Rick Scott’s desk last June. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. In March, the College Board unveiled plans for an overhaul of the SAT, revamping the much-derided essay, promising the end to "SAT words" that are rarely used, and promising a test more focused on students' ability to demonstrate sound thinking, rather than test-taking skills. Today, the College Board is releasing much more detail about the thinking behind new sections of the test, and some samples of questions. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The Thunderbird School of Global Management last week announced that it was ending discussions on an alliance and joint venture with Laureate Education. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. The head of the nation’s largest community college said aloud what many higher ed leaders mutter in private about tightfisted lawmakers.
“Bullies” and “ideologues,” Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padrón called a few of Florida’s anti-tax legislators. The comments, made last week to The Miami Herald’s editorial board, weren’t well-received by the state lawmakers, including Representative Jose Oliva, who is in line to become the speaker of the House. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. A paradox was evident at a conference this weekend on the future of international and foreign language studies, with educators excited about rising student and employer interest but concerned about the decline in federal and university support for their programs. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. The number of applications to U.S. graduate schools from prospective international students climbed by 7 percent this year, but shifts in the countries from which applicants are coming raise questions about the stability of international enrollments. These were key takeaways from the Council of Graduate Schools’ annual survey of international student applications, which recorded a modest drop in the number of applications from China, the largest country of origin for international graduate students, for the second straight year. Read more...