At Juniata College in Pennsylvania, students took Arabic for the first time last fall by enrolling in a course at Gettysburg College via video conference. Amherst College students, meanwhile, can major in architectural studies by taking classes at four neighboring colleges. And at Cabrini College near Philadelphia, students from five institutions researched viruses last summer […]
Two- and four-year colleges across the nation have plugged the black hole of remediation with a range of programs designed to keep students enrolled while steering them toward greater levels of success. Some institutions have upgraded their assessment process to ensure incoming students take placement exams seriously and aren’t assigned a higher (or lower) level […]
Online learning has expanded dramatically over the past two decades, reaching a high of more than 5 million enrollments in 2013. While that expansion has slowed recently, it still far exceeds overall growth in higher education. The growth of Penn State World Campus has mirrored this trend, consistently outpacing annual projections. What started as a […]
Students don’t quite run the show when it comes to course scheduling. But colleges and universities are striving to make it easier for them—with their ongoing juggle of work, family and school commitments—to take the classes necessary to meet educational objectives in time to graduate. Course scheduling policies and practices tend to date back—way back—to […]
As faculty members at a small, tuition-driven private college in the northeast, the familiar refrain of contemporary higher education in shambles rings in our heads. How will our college's low-endowment—combined with less than optimal name recognition—reconcile with the declining number of high school graduates in our region? How will the arms race of amenities and […]
Remember IBM’s Watson, the star of Jeopardy! a few years back? The computer system learns by examining data and earlier results it provided, then formulating even better answers and results for the next problem. Watson is probably the most well-known example of artificial intelligence, which has come out of research labs and onto college and […]
The traditional MBA, the flagship of graduate business education for more than a century, is losing ground as applicants increasingly turn to online degrees and specialized master's programs in business-related fields. The decline in enrollment in full-time, two-year MBA programs has prompted business schools to roll out a wave of new graduate programs, from one-year […]
Thirty years ago, we knew that larger institutions would consume smaller, more fragile schools – pure mergers as they came to be known. Yet, during the early higher ed merger mania era, many found that consolidations of venerable institutions offered a creative and more equitable non-merger alternative – read as, Azusa Pacific University, Birmingham-Southern College, […]
Student retention, persistence, success and graduation remain top-of-mind issues for higher ed leaders amidst the advent of the College Scorecard, the push toward 60 percent of high school graduates earning college degrees by 2020, and families' familiar concerns about return on investment. Lower-than-desired retention and graduation rates are not limited by an institution's size, sector, […]
Carine Feyten Chancellor and president, Texas Woman's University Topic: Safety and security Trend: Campus safety certainly is going to get more attention from senior administration—and how we are perceived by prospective students and their families will impact their "buying decision." Finding the right balance of open and enjoyable campus life and controls that might mitigate […]
