Helen Drinan is nothing if not outspoken. The eighth president of Simmons College (Mass.) is a strong advocate of women's rights, diversity and equal opportunity. Coming from a corporate background where she often had to stand up for herself in a male-dominated environment, Drinan pulls no punches when pointing out higher education's shortcomings in these […]
Resource constraints and other challenges are preventing some historically black colleges and universities from internationalizing their campuses as extensively as other institutions of higher education. That’s a major finding of the Creating Global Citizens initiative, which for three years studied seven HBCUs that worked with the American Council on Education’s Inclusive Excellence Group and the […]
One of the more enduring images from the recent protests in Ferguson, Mo., was that of armored military vehicles rolling down the streets of the city. It was the result of the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, also called the 1033 program, that transferred surplus military equipment to law-enforcement agencies around the country. But […]
Steven Shaw spends much of his time analyzing spreadsheets and watching for trends. He also flies across the globe on extended trips that can last weeks. This might sound like a lot of work and resources—but for international student recruitment to be effective, it takes attention, buy-in and leadership at all levels, says Shaw, assistant […]
The American higher education system still holds a global appeal, attracting nearly 1 million international students as of July, and more than one-third of these students are traveling stateside to study STEM fields. That’s according to the latest quarterly report from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, “SEVIS by the Numbers.” The Student and Exchange […]
In terms of making money from inventions, New York University does pretty well. In 2013 it earned $214 million from intellectual property (IP) created through research, primarily in the schools of medicine and engineering and in the departments of computer science and physics. The institution developed the patents behind about 25 products on the market […]
Fall 2014 freshman seminar at University of California, Los Angeles, taught by Grace Hong, an associate professor of gender studies and Asian-American studies “While universities are often lauded as avenues for upward mobility and alleviation of class, race, gender and sexual inequality, recent debates about uneven burdens of student debt have put such assumption into […]
If “the medium is the message” as Marshall McLuhan so famously proclaimed in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, then what is the message of contemporary distributed learning? One can only wonder what McLuhan would say in 2014. Yet, as far back as 1967, McLuhan predicted that “the little red schoolhouse is already well on […]
There exist an endless number of articles, books, blogs, and interviews on the state of higher education (HE) in America. The themes are consistent – fewer resources, fewer students, bloated administrative staff, less affordability, unsustainable student debt, poor graduation rates, unimpressive employability skills and what the heck is a MOOC and why should I care. […]
The longest-serving university president in the country, Norman Francis of Xavier University of Louisiana, will retire after the 2014-15 academic year, nearly 47 years after he took office. Francis, 83, is a 1952 Xavier graduate who was elected class president every year of his undergraduate study and student body president his senior year. In 1957, […]