By Ben Yagoda. About two weeks ago in this space, I kicked off Language March Madness, a fun-filled tourney where various solecisms and abuses have been vying for the title of Worst Sin Against the English Language, as determined by the votes of you, the public. (The idea is to choose something that combines high frequency and high annoyingness.) As you can see by the bracket, we’re almost at the end, and you can vote on the first Final Four matchup here. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. It appears to have been just bad luck that one British newspaper, The Independent, chose April 1 as the day to publish James Vincent’s science report about a significant animal-to-human communication breakthrough. More...
By Ilan Stavans. Our ABC seems to have changed dramatically before our very eyes and no one is making a fuss. Not that it would matter. It used to be that the alphabet was a sequence of 26 letters, from A to Z. The letter A came first for reasons that, as far as I gather, are arbitrary. Other than historical loyalty, there is no explanation—neither phonetic nor graphic—why it is at the beginning. The aleph in Hebrew starts the alphabet, and other Middle Eastern alphabets, such as the Phoenician, also had similar-sounding letters opening their writing systems. The B, the bet in Hebrew, could have led the pack, but it ended up second. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Can Psychosocial Factors Predict First-Year College Retention Beyond Standard Indicators?” (report not yet available online)
Author: David R. King, a doctoral student in psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Edwin Ndum, of the statistical-research department at ACT Inc.
Organizations: Georgia Institute of Technology, ACT Inc.
Summary: The researchers analyzed 10 “psychosocial factors” of 9,364 students at 31 institutions to determine whether those factors had influenced first-year retention and, if so, whether the analysis could predict which students stayed enrolled, dropped out, or transferred. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “The Effects of Rurality on College Access and Choice”
Author: Andrew Koricich, assistant professor of higher education, Texas Tech University
Organizations: Texas Tech University; presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting
Summary: Students in non-metropolitan counties are less likely to go to college and, if they do, are less likely to choose four-year, private, or selective institutions. More...
By . National Geographic Channel said this week that it would indefinitely pull a planned television series called Nazi War Diggers, after the show drew heated criticism from archaeologists and others, The New York Times reported. National Geographic Channel International had commissioned four episodes of the program, which involved the excavation of sites along the Eastern Front of World War II. It was to have been broadcast around the world, except in the United States. More...
By . Three Congressional Democrats have teamed up on legislation being introduced on Thursday that seeks to improve coordination among the federal agencies that oversee for-profit colleges. The legislation, known as the Proprietary Education Oversight Coordination Improvement Act, is being introduced in the Senate by by Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowan who is chairman of the chamber’s education committee, and Sen. Richard J. Durbin, of Illinois. The bill is being introduced in the House by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, of Maryland. More...
By . A panel of the South Carolina House of Representatives on Wednesday advanced a measure that is being billed as a compromise to controversial efforts to merge the College of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina, according to The State and The Post and Courier. More...
By Maria S. Moten. The sequence of steps that an incoming student must complete in order to enroll in courses at Harper College is known as our “new-student flow.” Research suggests that the lack of structure in how community colleges first enroll students may cause barriers that confuse and overwhelm them. As the researcher Judith Scott-Clayton so aptly put it, by creating many options and opportunities for new students as they enter, we may be unintentionally sending them down a “shapeless river” that we expect them to understand and navigate. More...
By Mary Baxton and Eddie West. International recruitment and admissions have been topics of much interest over the past 20 years. Efforts to develop, fine-tune, and implement international recruitment have led to multiple approaches, budget adjustments, and refinement of philosophy and technique. The days of having a tried-and-true marketing strategy and expecting students to simply arrive at the door of the institution are gone. Developing an international community and building it take time. Colleges cannot expect it to grow overnight. It takes teamwork and partnerships. Each November the Institute of International Education releases its Open Doors report, detailing figures on international students in the United States and American students studying abroad. Last year’s report indicated that 819,644 international students were studying in the United States as of the fall of 2012. More...
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