An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ In the media and in the halls of our legislatures, the talk these days about the purpose of a college education seems to focus almost exclusively on its value in expanding a person’s employment opportunities. It’s a perspective that…
What follows is a letter sent by a University of Southern Maine alumna to Theo Kalikow, the university president, in response to his announcement that full-time faculty positions need to be eliminated in response to a projected deficit in the institution’s budget. It is, in some respects, a follow-up to a previous post that I…
An article published yesterday by Portside in Portland, Maine, opens: “Faculty and students launched an occupation of a Maine university building Friday to demand a halt to mass faculty layoffs and department slashes that they say are part of the austerity cuts devastating public education nation-wide. “Over 100 people launched a late-morning occupation of the…
A student group calling themselves the Young Invincibles has graded each of the fifty states on five criteria: tuition costs, spending per student, burden on families, financial aid, and the degree to which higher education is treated as a priority in state budgets. The scores for each category have then been averaged in a weighted…
On Saturday, Salon ran a terrific article by Suzanne Mettler with this headline: “More Bad News for Millennials: College Is Actually Making Inequality Worse” [http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/more_bad_news_for_millennials_college_is_actually_making_inequality_worse/]. Given the current attention to the issue of income inequality, the headline does a disservice to what is actually a very complex analysis of the economic impact of enrollment and…
The Ohio Conference of AAUP (OCAAUP) has joined such groups as the Ohio Education Association (OEA), Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT), New Faculty Majority (NFM), Ohio Part-Time Faculty Association (OPTFA), and Ohio Student Association (OSA) in forming a statewide advocacy group on issues related to higher education. After taking some time to create an operating…
A very recent post on the Department of Education blog Homeroom promotes “Arts in the Schools Month.” Written by Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Office of Innovation and Improvement, the post begins: “The arts are an important part of a well-rounded education for all students. Arts-rich schools, those with high-quality arts programs and…
Author’s Note: A version of this post was publish on Raging Chicken Press under the title, “Slow Train to Destruction of Public Higher Ed in PA?: Defund then Divide-and-Conquer,” on Saturday, Feb. 22. If the fall 2013 semester saw the term “retrenchment” – the elimination of faculty, programs, and jobs – become part of daily…
February 18, 2014 At the 2013 convention in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its historical commitment to increasing access to post-secondary education and alleviating the financial burden that now too often is part of that education. Accordingly, we call on federal and state policymakers to make post-secondary training and education more accessible by ending the…