Online degrees are poised to shake up the academy, says Kevin Carey, director of educational policy at the New America Foundation. That they haven’t yet is not the fault of technology as much as it is the perceived value of a traditional college diploma. That document tells little more than the applicant attended classes at […]

The Great Recession of 2007-08 had a profound impact on both public and private universities. In How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jeffrey R. Brown, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-editor Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economics professor, examine universities […]

When Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed into law a controversial “religious freedom” bill, he probably didn’t expect the backlash that resulted. Although supporters claim the law provides protection for individuals with sincerely held religious beliefs, opponents say it opens the door for legal discrimination. Presidents from a number of Indiana institutions including Butler, Indiana, DePauw, […]

A new documentary is sparking calls for reform on campuses across the country for humanizing a topic that is too often conveyed in the media as a set of statistics. The Hunting Ground features interviews with numerous campus sexual assault survivors who tell of their frustration with getting justice from a system that often protects […]

Eight years ago this month, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on campus before committing suicide. In the aftermath, Aradhana Bela Sood, senior professor for child mental health policy and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, was named to […]

Fifteen California community colleges received initial approval in January to offer four-year degrees in a limited number of specialties as soon as next year. If approved, the plan could—at a fraction of the cost of four-year schools—produce thousands of new workers in a state that needs more employees in areas such as healthcare and the […]

A self-described “space nerd,” Laurie Leshin brings an infectious sense of wonderment and discovery to almost everything she does. Leshin will share that enthusiasm as a keynote speaker at UBTech in Orlando (June 15 to 17), discussing “How innovation is unleashed by asking unanswerable questions.” As president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (and the first female […]

People often go to college for the wrong reasons, with assumptions about how it’s going to benefit them, says Donald Farish. “When it doesn’t come out the way they imagined it would be, then, of course, it’s everybody else’s fault.” Farish, president of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, will be the inaugural speaker at […]