We hear it all the time—complaints about the inefficiency of public higher education in Massachusetts. These complaints are often based on the incorrect assumption that providing students with a choice—the choice of where, when, and what to study is necessarily inefficient. How do we provide choice in an efficient way? I’ll answer that from my […]
Americans learned from the timeless wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.” One of the great challenges of Community, Technical, and County Colleges is to provide quality, affordable higher learning […]
Better academic performance. Increased student retention and graduation rates. Improved sense of campus community. Online exclusive: Edtech providers on student/faculty ties These are just three benefits that closer ties among faculty and students can yield. Here are nine places to foster such connections. Service-learning sites Tactic: Engage with the community through formal and informal service-learning projects. […]
International students coming to the United States can mean a financial boon for community colleges as well as the towns and cities where they reside. Nearly 100,000 international students attending U.S. community colleges contributed $2.4 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 14,000 jobs during the 2016-17 academic year, according to data released […]
Once meant to supplement full-time and tenured faculty, adjunct faculty were often viewed as “the others.” But times and economics have changed and this contingent force has become the majority of faculty in American higher education. One result of this shift is a new push to unionize adjunct professors for better pay, benefits and working […]
When we think of the students served by institutions of higher education, we usually think of young adults the age of undergraduate and graduate students. But colleges and universities often offer programs to children and adolescents under the age of eighteen and as young as pre-kindergarten. These children and adolescents are more vulnerable than older […]
Sometimes a simple math solution is all it takes to reverse a complex enrollment dilemma. Like most community colleges, Rowan College at Burlington County in New Jersey was experiencing a series of challenges—most notably declining enrollment and resources—that threatened our ability to fulfill our mission and transform lives. With the benefit of an innovative partnership […]
Imagine coaching a student intern who is teaching in a school that’s so remote, there are no roads leading into town. Or trying to observe a social work major who has a field placement hundreds of miles from campus. For colleges and universities that serve rural areas, interacting with students who do not have access […]
What began as a push to increase the number and diversity of students studying STEM has evolved into a full-scale effort to improve teaching and learning at The University of Arizona. In 2013, the college was selected as one of eight initial project sites for The STEM Undergraduate Initiative, a project of the Association of […]
NASHVILLE, Tennessee—When Glenda Baskin Glover applied to college, her decision wasn't whether to enroll in a historically black university, she says, but which one she chose to attend. "There were schools I couldn't get into because of the racial climate of the day," says Glover, who graduated from Tennessee State University in 1974 and became […]