The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education calls on America’s college & university faculty to join in the search for new ways to fund higher education. In the United States, quality public higher education was once accessible to most Americans able to benefit from it. The way it worked was simple—taxpayers funded public colleges and universities…
A website called foreclosure.com is sponsoring an essay contest for current undergraduates in America’s colleges and universities. The contest was introduced in 2009. First prize is $5,000, and there are four runners-up prizes of $1,000. The students must write an 800- to 2,000-word essay on an assigned topic, and this year’s topic is the following:
Shaun Johnson of The Chalk Face, a website dedicated to questions of public education (particularly to the struggle against the so-called “reformers” who are attempting to eradicate it), has a post at Good which, though it is aimed at demonstrating why the current “reforms” should be viewed with suspicion, also shows why we should be a…
Last week, I attended a presentation by William Doyle, a professor at Vanderbilt University, about his proposals to change the way student aid works in America. His analysis was sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, who also hosted the presentation. You can read the report on CED’s website. Professor Doyle’s ideas center around one…
Thus far, 2013 has been a tough year for open-education advocates. As Flat World Knowledge promised at the tail-end of 2012, the publisher no longer provides a CC 3.0 NC SA version of its textbooks for students. In response, Leslie Scott endeavored to defend the commons by crowd-sourcing an effort to harvest Flat World Knowledge’s catalog…
Over the past few years, plenty of ink has been spent discussing the question of how college changes students. They don’t just learn facts, of course—there are lots of important skills to learn inside and outside the classroom. Students also change as they grow out of their teens and into their early twenties. In the…
Kenneth Bernstein just retired from a career as a high school teacher in suburban Washington, DC, and he has a stark message for college professors: the students entering your classes this year will be less prepared than ever. He points to two culprits, both related to increased testing: –More and more students are taking AP…
No matter the metrics devised, grading is subjective. All grading. How can I say this? Don’t the scales created offer objective data? No. The decision-making in creation of the scales is necessarily subjective itself, making all evaluation using the scales just as subjective. Yet we continue to believe in the objective status of grades. Here…
As a teacher at a college with a student population made up primarily of minorities, immigrants, and/or first-generation college students, an article in today’s New York Times hit home. By Jason DeParle, it is titled “For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall.” One of my greatest frustrations, and one I constantly work…