Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Matti Bunzl. It’s been a few weeks since "The Heart of the Matter," the congressionally ordered report on the state of the humanities and social sciences, was issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And while there is little to object to in the actual text, which brims with veracities on the importance of education and good citizenship, the smarting hasn’t stopped. In The New York Timesalone, we heard from three pundocratic naysayers. David Brooks, a member of the commission, bemoaned the collective suicide of the humanities professoriate, Verlyn Klinkenborg lamented the decline and fall of the English major, and Stanley Fish excoriated the report itself for its "bland commonplaces" and "recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia" (and as a Miltonist, he knows that’s not the world we live in). Read more...

By Karen Gross. On his education bus tour, President Obama is urging, among other suggestions, a new rating system to ensure that more families are able to afford higher education. I think we can all (well, almost all of us) agree that the rising costs of a bachelor’s degree need to be constrained, and we must find ways that facilitate middle- and lower-income students entering and graduating from college. The value proposition matters, and “debt without diploma” is unacceptable. What is vastly harder to agree upon is how to address the problem, rather than just wringing our hands over it -- which we have been doing for far too long. Read more...

By Laura Wright. In May, I gave a reading from my contribution to Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat, a book edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee. The text pays homage to Carol J. Adams’s foundational ecofeminist animal studies work The Sexual Politics of Meat,first published in 1990 and in print and much-discussed by scholars ever since. I read my entry at a local bookstore packed to the rafters with friends and strangers alike, all of whom hung on my every word. At the end of the reading, people hugged me. They bought the book and asked me to sign it. In my professional life, I have never given such a reading and, as a result, I have never experienced anything that felt quite as rewarding as what I experienced that evening. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Invest in higher education in good times, drain it (and expect students and families to make up the difference) when the economy sours. State governments have embraced that pattern for decades, even as many analysts deride it as flawed if not foolish. As most states set their budgets for the 2014 fiscal year this spring and early summer, public higher education fared better than it has in several years. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities reported last month that 37 of the 48 states for which it had received information showed year-over-year increases in operating support for public colleges and universities, with an average gain of 3.1 percent over 2012. That compared to 30 states showing increases from fiscal 2012 to 2013, and just eight on the plus side from 2011 to 2012. The fact that these increases come as college enrollments in many states actually begin to slow makes them all the more significant. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Colleges need to demonstrate the value of their product with hard numbers, an increasingly popular maxim holds, or lawmakers will try to do it for them. That prediction is now truer than ever, as the nation’s highest elected official has joined state policymakers in pushing performance-based funding for higher education. The sweeping, ambitious proposal President Obama unveiled Thursday seeks to tie all federal financial aid programs to a rating system of colleges on affordability, student completion rates and the earnings of graduates. The U.S. Department of Education will hold public hearings to develop the ratings before fall 2015. Then the White House will go to Congress to pursue legislation that would link aid levels to colleges’ performance. For example, students who attend standout institutions could receive bigger Pell Grants and more affordable student loans. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim and Ry Rivard. Advocates of disruptive college business models and carrot-and-stick accountability measures were excited Thursday to hear President Obama back their work in his effort to curb the rising cost of college. The president, in a speech on college costs, praised a new public-private partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Silicon Valley start-up, name-checked a performance-based college funding formula in Tennessee and praised programs that award degrees to students based on how well they test rather than how much time they spend in a classroom. All of this, Obama said, could help “shake up the current system, create better incentives for colleges to do more with less and deliver better value for students and their families.” Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. President Obama appears to be making good on his vow to propose a "shake-up" for higher education.
Early Thursday, he released a plan that would:

• Create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes (such as graduation rates and graduate earnings), on affordability and on access (measures such as the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants).
• Link student aid to these ratings, such that students who enroll at high performing colleges would receive larger Pell Grants and more favorable rates on student loans.
• Create a new program that would give colleges a "bonus" if they enroll large numbers of students eligible for Pell Grants.
• Toughen requirements on students receiving aid. For example, the president said that these rules might require completion of a certain percentage of classes to continue receiving aid. Read more...

By David Matthews. A London-based private provider is to offer pathway programmes with a consortium of Northern universities, enabling international students to get on to degree courses.
The London School of Business and Finance has said it will take on around 150 students to “provide students with the academic and English skills needed to progress to a leading university”. 
These courses offer guaranteed progression to degree courses at 11 institutions, including the universities of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield. More...

By Chris Parr. The US government is to develop a new system of ranking colleges and universities in a bid to ensure the “best value” institutions have access to the most federal funding.
In an extensive speech on college affordability, delivered at the University at Buffalo, US president Barack Obama said the new rating system would be introduced by the start of the 2015-16 academic year. It would, he claimed, take into account measures such as graduation rates, quality of tuition, and whether colleges were “helping people from all backgrounds to succeed”.
“A higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future,” Mr Obama said, adding that colleges should be ranked “not just by which are the most selective”, but in order of those offering “the best value”. “Colleges that keep their tuition down…are the ones that will see their taxpayer funding go up,” he said. More...

By Elizabeth Gibney. Half of scientific papers published in 2011 can be accessed online for free, a new study has suggested.
The level is about twice that previously estimated and is likely to cheer advocates of the movement to make the results of publicly-funded research freely available. 
According to the study – published on 21 August by Montreal-based research evaluation consultancy Science-Metrix – Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US have the highest rates of open access publishing. 
In Europe, 20 out of 27 countries, including the UK, are likely to have tipped towards a majority of papers published in 2008-2011 being made available for free, it adds. More...