As violent crime has steadily increased on college campuses in the last three decades, institutional leaders have reacted by creating more stringent policies to restrict visitors from entering their academic, administrative and residential buildings. Along with technology—including surveillance cameras, building access systems and even ID badges with proximity chips that could allow officials to track […]
Fewer and fewer institutions are meeting students’ financial need. Per The College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing 2013,” the average net tuition and fee price for students attending four-year public institutions increased by an estimated $1,180 (in 2013 dollars) between 2009-10 and 2013-14. At private four-year institutions, average net tuition and fee price increased between […]
Michigan legislators have introduced a plan that would allow in-state college-bound students to attend college for free and then, as graduates, pay a percentage of their income back. Known as a “pay it forward” model, the money paid back would go into a special fund to help other students attend college using the same plan. […]
The University of Puget Sound in February became the first higher ed institution to accept a gift of digital currency, when alumnus Nicolas Cary gave the Washington school 14.5 bitcoins—equal to $10,000. For the uninitiated, Bitcoin is a global, open source virtual economy created in 2009, and bitcoins are its cyber currency, used for electronic […]
In January, President Obama launched the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to help colleges and universities combat what he called “the prevalence of rape and sexual assault at our nation’s institutions of higher education.” The announcement came as a growing number of young women have filed federal complaints against colleges […]
Adjunct faculty have long played a supporting role in higher education. These often overqualified professors work long hours for comparatively little pay, on the hope that it might lead to a full-time position. But somewhere along the way, the situation changed. University of Southern California Rossier School of Education Professor Adrianna Kezar, co-director of the […]
Recently, the White House Council on Women and Girls issued a report pledging to “make our campuses safer” from sexual assault. According to their research, “1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted while she’s in college,” a troubling statistic which the authors explain by “the dynamics of college life.” Female undergraduates, we are told, […]
How many members of your faculty would enjoy teaching the same courses, day in and day out, throughout a 30-, 40- or even 50-year career? Not many. Staying motivated and intellectually challenged is not always possible at schools where promotions or lateral career moves are rare. Faculty may find themselves disengaged, even downright bored, teaching […]
The challenges for executives operating state-wide higher education Systems and the flagship research universities within those Systems have grown more baffling with each passing year. From UMass and UNC to LSU, Wisconsin, and Oregon, we hear regularly about frustrated and embroiled leadership. Public Systems have always been subject to strains, both within themselves and beyond, […]
The tenure process remains instrumental to universities in maintaining academic freedom and in soliciting the country’s top minds to forgo employment in industry and seek employment in higher education. However, the system has evolved overtime, and so have the requirements for making and holding onto tenure. At the same time, the economic crisis of the […]
