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“Why Do Colleges Die?” - An Analysis
Inside Higher Ed
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3/20/19
“Practically speaking, high dependence on tuition -- as high as 80 to 90 percent -- is a good sign that an institution will not likely survive for long… Colleges and universities that are under threat of closure “have a full range of bad choices to make,” she noted: they can lower standards, defer maintenance, create new programs to generate new students or cut unpopular programs that aren't attracting enough students. All of these, she suggested, are terrible ways to save money or bring in new revenue.”
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"Six College Experiences Linked to Student Confidence on Jobs”
Gallup
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1/22/19
“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the job market rises steadily with the number of these experiences they have had.”
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“Does Where You Go To College Matter?” New Studies, Three Conclusions
Atlantic
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12/11/18
“First, to high-strung affluent parents, well-compensated counselors, and other members of the elite-admissions industrial complex: Just relax, okay? You are inflicting on American teenagers a ludicrous amount of pointless anxiety. Even if you subscribe to the dubious idea that young people ought to maximize for vocational prestige and income, the research suggests that elite colleges are not critical to achieving those ends. In the aggregate, individual characteristics swamp institutional characteristics. It’s more important to be hardworking and curious than to receive a certain thick envelope.”
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SNHU Issues Digital Diplomas On Blockchain
Campus Technology
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6/11/18
"Because Blockcert credentials can be linked to any blockchain… they can be read and verified anywhere in the world without the need to check with the original issuer.”
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Making The Case For Innovation Systems In Higher Ed
Educause
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5/7/18
“In general, higher education institutions have sound and rigorous processes for known, incremental, and precedent-setting change. What they lack is a valued parallel process for true bottom-up experimentation when the outcomes are unknown.”
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On A Measured Approach To Experiential Learning
Inside Higher Ed
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1/8/18
"Such experience, it is argued, will help students by giving them a leg up in their careers and making them more useful people. And although that may often prove true in the short term, I am convinced it is not reliably the case when we consider a longer time frame -- particularly for students in the foundational arts and sciences disciplines. Take, for example, the following three situations.”
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A Surprising Provocation Against—And For—The Humanities
American Affairs
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11/1/17
"The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
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Academic Leaders Discuss: How Fast Should Institutions Change?
EdSurge
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9/20/17
"Where officials stood during this exercise seemed to depend largely on what type of institution they were from.”
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Sweet Briar College Reinvents Its Curriculum And Cost Structure
Chronicle of Higher Education
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9/6/17
"The curriculum changes, hammered out in just three months by the college’s faculty, will abolish traditional academic departments and instead align professors in three groups, one focusing on engineering, science, and technology, another on the environment and sustainability, and the third on creativity and the arts.”
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E-Sports Continue To Expand At Universities
Education Dive
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9/1/17
"This past fall, Miami University became the first Division 1 school to have a varsity e-sports team, and Platt said a game last semester had more streaming viewers the school’s football, basketball and hockey matches throughout the entire year. The Guardian even reports the possibility that e-sports will be included in the 2024 Paris Olympics… There are about 40 schools with varsity teams throughout the country, according to Platt, and many are offering scholarships. While some are thousands of dollars — others, like the University of Utah, are offering full ride scholarships to talented gamers.”
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Ivies Profs To (All) Students: “Think For Yourself.”
Princeton
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8/29/17
"Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.”
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Recommendations For Making Good Ed Tech Decisions: Big Survey
The 74 Million
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7/10/17
"For EdTech decision-makers: 1) Beware of living in an echo-chamber: talk to people outside of higher education. 2) Make sure decisions are being led by clearly identifiable pedagogical needs rather than simply by what technology is out there. 3) Involve stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students early in the decision-making process to build buy-in and avoid bumpy rollouts. This may include using creative ways of understanding faculty challenges.”
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"The Survivor’s Guide To Adulthood”
Yale Daily News
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4/28/17
"The happiness of adulthood is not as intoxicating as the rapture of youth, but is perhaps more valuable because it is not narcissistic and thus can be truly shared. After doing the dishes, my fiancee and I sit on the couch with nothing but the Christmas lights on, listening to the sound of cars of Chapel Street. We sit there with the long day finished, our shapes reflected on the window, dark masses surrounded by speckles of light inside a room of no great size. And I think, This is enough. But something pricks me from inside. The question: Will I ever change the world. I remember what I had aspired to be three years ago: a hero like Hercules or Prometheus.”
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“Should We Lose The Lecture?” Nobel Physics Prof Wants To Know
Stanford
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3/1/17
"Professors retain a central role, but Wieman sees them more like athletic coaches, putting students through strenuous, targeted practice while giving immediate feedback and direction based on performance. By confronting the problems first, the audience is more invested — and prepared — to hear what the professor has to say. ‘If you experience the condition of the problem, you’ll remember the answer much better,’ Schwartz, the dean of the GSE, says. ‘Lectures have it backwards. They basically give you the answer, then you practice it.’”
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Micro-Masters Programs Grow To 16 Universities
EdX
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2/28/17
"With MicroMasters programs, we are helping to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace by offering content and credentials in the most in-demand fields and skills needed for success in today’s rapidly-evolving and tech-driven world. These credit-eligible, career-relevant programs are free to try, and can help advance careers and offer a pathway to an accelerated Master’s program. Top employers, including industry-leading companies like IBM, PWC, Hootsuite, Bloomberg, Fidelity and more, recognize MicroMasters programs for real-time, real-world relevancy.”
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Higher Ed Invests In Spaces For Creative Work
New York Times
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8/4/16
"The rationales for these buildings are varied: Employers are dissatisfied with graduates’ preparation, students are unhappy with outdated teaching methods, and colleges want to attract students whose eyes are on postgrad venture capital and whose scalable ideas might come in handy on campus. And so universities of all sizes, both public (Wichita State, University of Utah, University of Iowa) and private (Cornell, Northwestern, Stanford), have opened or are planning such facilities.”
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Why One Star Student Chose To Ditch College And Go Off The Grid
New York Post
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5/29/16
"Two weeks earlier, I was almost finished with my sophomore year at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science when I decided to start my new life. I skipped my final exams, changed bank accounts, got a second phone number and deleted my Facebook page. I needed to break from my old life of high pressure and unreasonable expectations.”
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The Onion’s 13 Best Articles About Higher Ed
Chronicle of Higher Education
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1/15/16
“Nobel Fever Grips Research Community As Prize Swells To $190 Million… College Unveils New Media Center Every Month…”
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Bruni: Diversifying School Campuses Must Be Only The First Step
New York Times
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12/12/15
"A given [school] may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands. That’s consistent with the splintered state of America today, but it’s a betrayal of education’s mission to challenge ingrained assumptions, disrupt entrenched thinking, broaden the frame of reference.”
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Universities Are Spinning Internal Tech Into Commercial Products
e-Literate
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9/18/15
"Are these efforts paving the way for universities who know their own business to create profitable ed tech and services offerings based on unique insights into how schools really work, or are they vehicles for star-struck administrators seeing glory and easy revenues? Or both? Only time will tell, but I would expect to see more announcements of a similar nature over the next year or two.”
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“88 College Taglines, Arranged As A Poem” [Humor?]
Chronicle of Higher Education
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8/4/15
"Are You In? What Will You Do? Who Will You Be? It’s All About You.”
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Five Exercises To Prompt Reflection On One’s Education
New York Times
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8/2/15
"Here are five exercises that students find particularly engaging. Each is designed to help freshmen identify their goals and reflect systematically about various aspects of their personal lives, and to connect what they discover to what they actually do at college.”
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Liberal Arts Colleges Begin Developing In-House Startup Incubators
Forbes
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7/29/15
"With annual symposiums, mentorship programs and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern-day startup incubators–geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging students to pursue entrepreneurship–in particular, social entrepreneurship.”
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What Do Students Think Of Higher Ed Priorities?
Higher Education Policy Institute
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6/4/15
"The Student Academic Experience Survey was established in 2006 and is now in its tenth year. It has been continuously improved and this year’s survey includes new questions on how students rate the importance of training for those who teach in higher education, on information provided to students and on possible spending cuts.”
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SNHU’s Paul LeBlanc On Competency-Based Learning (and More)
Chronicle of Higher Education
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5/27/15
“The credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they've actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time becomes the variable.”
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Should Wealthy Schools Educate the Least Wealthy Students?
Inside Higher Ed
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5/21/15
"Selective institutions should do more to enroll low-income students, and that it would be fair for the government to expect institutions that receive a large amount of federal aid to also enroll higher numbers of low-income students.”
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A Deep Dive Into The First-Generation College Experience
New York Times
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4/12/15
"Freshmen were assigned to attend one of two hourlong orientation sessions. In one, panelists gave advice about the transition to college and challenges like choosing classes. In the other, the same panelists wove their backgrounds into advice… Typically, first-generation freshman G.P.A.s lag behind their peers’ by 0.3 points. The gap was eliminated for students in the session where panelists shared their backgrounds; they also reported being happier, less stressed out and more willing to seek help than the control group.”
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The Perils and Promise of 1st Generation College Kids (at Ivies)
Boston Globe
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4/9/15
"I feel like here I’m moving up the socioeconomic ladder. But when I graduate, will I slip back down?”
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Some Big Ten Schools Begin Offering Competency-Based Degrees
Inside Higher Ed
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10/28/14
“A common thread with the three institutions’ experiments is that they seek to focus more on what students know and can do rather than how much time they spend in class. 'They will emerge with proven competencies,' Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, said last month.. 'Businesses will not have to guess whether these students really are ready for the market, ready for their business, ready for the world.'"
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Should We Be Increasing Our Focus on Vocational Prep?
Marketplace
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10/23/14
“For years, vocational high schools have been seen as a lesser form of schooling – tracking some kids off to work while others were encouraged to go on to college and pursue higher income professions. But things are changing. At one of those schools - Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts - students can learn traditional trades like carpentry, plumbing and welding. They can also learn high tech fields such as video game design, engineering, and biotechnology."
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Over 350 Institutions Credit Competency-Based Work. Do You?
NPR
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10/7/14
“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading... Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into diploma mills.”
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Mentoring and Deep Learning Lead to Future Work-Life Engagement
Gallup
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10/7/14
“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning... But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support... If graduates strongly agree with these three things, it doubles the odds that they are engaged in their work and thriving in their overall well-being.”
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Bard College Is Innovating In Ways We Should All Pay Attention To
New Yorker
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9/29/14
“Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games, but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs... Bard... saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year.”
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The Ivies, Deresiewicz, and the Soul of Higher Education
New Yorker
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9/1/14
“Even in the era of fast tracks and credentialism, the psychic mechanisms of an education are mysterious. Let teachers like Deresiewicz believe. For a couple of hours every week, students are theirs in the classroom to challenge and entrance. Then the clock strikes, and the kids flock back into the madness of their lives. Did the new material reach them? Will the lesson be washed from their minds? Who knows. They heard it. Life will take care of the rest.”
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College Offers 45 Scholarships for Video Gaming
NPR
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6/23/14
“In addition to the scholarships, which are worth about $19,000 each, the school will also be looking to hire a video game coach... The move marks yet another step in the mainstreaming of video games, which in this context are also called e-sports, within education. There's already a Collegiate Star League dedicated to video gaming, with teams at 100 universities including MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.”
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What Actually Helps Students “Thrive” Later in Life?
NPR
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5/6/14
“Graduates who said they had a "mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams," "professors who cared about me" and at least one prof who "made me excited about learning" are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
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EdX and MIT’s Bold New Vision for the Future of College
Inside Higher Ed
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11/25/13
“Agarwal said he expects MIT will move away from the traditional four-year-on-campus experience.”