Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Michael J. Garanzini. The process to reauthorize the Higher Education Act is in full swing, and both the White House and Congress appear to have admirable goals. Everyone agrees that students and parents should have more information about the institutions they are considering, that college needs to be more affordable, and that degree completion has real value in the marketplace. There's little to argue about thus far. The devil, however, is in the details.
Underlying those stated goals is the public perception that college is unaffordable for America's middle class. Annual tuition hikes often exceed inflation by two and even three times. At the same time, salaries of some college presidents appear to be out of line, at least with the public's view of what the job entails. And information about things such as completion and default rates are hard to obtain. More...

By Karin Fischer. The United States is projected to be the largest and fastest-growing destination for foreign students over the next decade, according to a report released on Tuesday by the British Council's Education Intelligence global-research service.
But American universities' heavy reliance on students from China and India could make them vulnerable if an economic slowdown in those and other emerging countries put a college degree—particularly a costly foreign diploma—out of the reach of many families. India and China are predicted to account for fully two-thirds of the growth in international students at American institutions from 2011 to 2024, the research shows. More...

By Jennifer Howard. Christopher B. Loring, the director of the libraries at Smith College, has a problem with his Strategic Air Command bunker—it's almost full.
The bunker, long since retired from military service, now operates as a high-density book-storage facility for Smith and the rest of the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst). It can hold about 570,000 volumes and now contains about 540,000. In about five years Smith will run out of places to house all its books, according to Mr. Loring. More...

By Katherine Mangan. Community colleges have generally cast a wary eye toward massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But a relatively new model, which "flips" homework and classwork by incorporating outsourced lectures, could help struggling students and make colleges more efficient, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told a packed gathering of community-college leaders here on Wednesday. Mr. Gates urged them to provide resources to instructors who wanted to experiment with flipped classrooms and other techniques for integrating technology into their teaching. More...