For decades, colleges and universities have used big data to track high-risk students and intervene as needed. Now a growing number of institutions are using data tools to track and analyze another group: successful students. It is a radically different approach that many campus administrators believe will help them understand what makes students successful—developing a […]
Colleges and universities have made spending on administrators and part-time instructors a higher priority than raising salaries of core faculty members who have the biggest impact on learning, says a new report from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. Heavier teaching loads for professors combined with increased use of adjunct faculty reduces the […]
Community colleges have achieved the goal of providing broader and cheaper access to higher education. Now, experts and administrators say, the focus must turn more aggressively toward student success and completion.
After years of quiet evolution, the competency-based education movement is now poised for explosive growth, with several hundred colleges and universities developing programs that fundamentally redefine the college degree. An estimated 34 U.S. institutions now offer some form of competency-based learning, according to research by Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton […]
Fans at a University of New Haven football game might notice an odd sideline sight: medical personnel with their heads hunched over smartphones. But these athletic trainers are not checking text messages or updating their Facebook status. Rather, they are monitoring real-time data about the force of their players’ on-field collisions. In 2013 the Connecticut […]
Rapid changes in technology, the dissolution of boundaries in the global marketplace, and innovation in research all demand a new approach to higher education. Universities must blur the lines—between public and private, between not-for-profit and commercial, between the liberal arts and STEM—by working with industry and nonprofit organizations to create unique training, research opportunities and […]
Michael Crow is out to reinvent the public research university. As president of Arizona State, Crow has made it his mission to create and spread a "New American University" model. Using ASU as the prototype, Crow sees the promise of an egalitarian institution committed to academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal […]
Starbucks made headlines last spring as more than just a campus hot spot when it announced a free college tuition plan for its employees. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and health insurance company Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield have now followed suit, and Starbucks has expanded its program. While each corporation is partnering with a specific […]
Online learning, specifically MOOCs, has inspired many doomsday forecasts regarding the fate of traditional higher education—which, of course, has yet to collapse. But the predicted death of MOOCs—due to erratic completion rates, lack of formal student support and concerns about the financial returns for institutions—hasn’t come true either. In an effort to add quantifiable worth […]
Higher education institutions consistently face pressure to satisfy the computing, storage and network requirements of their campus power users, the research scientists. A variety of technological trends are also putting added pressure on an institution’s infrastructure. With the advent of cloud computing, and public infrastructure as a service offerings available with the swipe of a […]
