Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Nick DeSantis. A report released on Friday by the American Educational Research Association offers recommendations for reassessing faculty evaluations at a time when colleges have faced serious financial pressures and increased scrutiny about the quality of teaching and learning. The report, “Rethinking Faculty Evaluation,” lays out recommendations in the assessment of three areas: teaching, research, and how faculty members communicate the results of their scholarship with policy makers and the public. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The U.S. Department of Education has posted online a series of proposals submitted by negotiators who are seeking to shape its revised “gainful employment” rule, ahead of a negotiating panel’s second formal gathering, set to take place this month. A federal judge last year struck down the department’s previous version of the controversial rule after the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the main trade group representing for-profit colleges, challenged the regulation in court. In August the department released draft language for a new version of the rule, which would penalize career-oriented programs whose graduates struggle to repay their student loans, as defined by two benchmarks—a debt-to-income ratio and a debt-to-discretionary-income ratio. More...

By Beckie Supiano. About a quarter of high-school graduates who took the ACT in 2013 met all four of its college-readiness benchmarks, in English, reading, mathematics, and science. But students whose parents did not go to college fared quite a bit worse: Only 9 percent of them met all four benchmarks. That finding comes from a report, “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2013: First-Generation Students,” released on Monday by ACT and the Council for Opportunity in Education, a nonprofit group focused on access to college. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. Accreditation matters played heavily into Altius Education’s dashed ambitions for Ivy Bridge College. 
A document trail, annotated by The Chronicle, highlights the key events in the seven-year saga, which began with an entrepreneur’s dream and wound down under the cloud of a continuing federal investigation. More...