This is the first post in what I hope will be a series, in which conference and chapter leaders comment on the issues that they are trying to address and the initiatives that they are trying to organize and to promote. I intend to contact conference or chapter leaders directly to invite them to participate,…
Here is the table summarizing the results from the Young Invincibles report on state support for higher education over this past year: The detailed profiles for each state are available at: http://www.studentimpactproject.org/state_report_cards You can see from the table that four states have received A’s; ten have received B’s; thirteen have received C’s; twelve have received…
The Far Right media has pre-emptively declared that the field of candidates who will vie for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is the strongest in history. Writing for the Far Right news outlet Newsmax, Todd Beamon and Bill Hoffmann have offered a survey of those candidates with the catchy title “16 for ’16: The Most…
It is usually more difficult to teach students how to frame an essay—how to write effective introductory and concluding paragraphs—than how to organize and develop the body of an essay. Likewise, models of effective framing paragraphs in academic writing are more difficult to locate than those in media writing simply because the details of some…
The college football bowl season is reaching its climax, and the professional football playoffs are about to begin. By all accounts, football is indisputably the most popular sport in America. Indeed, according to an article published in Business Insider early in 2014, football is essentially keeping network television culturally relevant and financially solvent. Consider this…
In a feature article for University Business, Ioanna Opidee provides an overview of the major trends related to postsecondary teaching that we might expect in 2015. Opidee focuses on what she asserts will be four increasing areas of emphasis: 1. Academic Return on Investment 2. Competencies at the Core 3. Flipped Classrooms and Evolving MOOCs…
This post is a follow-up to my earlier post, “Obfuscation of Long-Term Asbestors Issue at Texas College; Governance Issues Exposed” [https://academeblog.org/2014/11/28/obfuscation-of-long-term-asbestos-issues-at-texas-college-issues-with-governance-exposed/]. Carlos Griffin, a member of the Board of Trustees of Kilgore College has been at the center of the efforts to understand the problems with the removal of asbestos from many of the buildings…
On December 12, Myles Udland reported the following in an article for Business Insider: “Consumer confidence is at an almost 8-year high. “On Friday, the University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer confidence reading for December came in at 93.8, the best reading since January 2007 and a complete blowout of expectations. “According to Paul Dales at Capital…
This is a chart from the Federal Reserve Board in New York representing household debt in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2014: Over the last decade, student debt has clearly increased both in raw dollars and as a percentage of household debt. The implications of that increase have, however, been much less clear…
The Student Monitor survey for Fall 2014 is the result of a detailed questionnaire completed by a representative sample of 1200 students. It includes all sorts of data, largely related to the students’ purchases of digital devices and uses of digital technologies and media. I find the following chart of college students’ print or digital…