The coming change in how student loan default rates are calculated may mean bad news for some colleges and universities. With the new calculations, the rate at which a group of students later defaults on loan payments will increase for most institutions, and schools with a particular default rate for three consecutive years will lose […]
Textbook publishing has long been seen as an impenetrable business, with five major players controlling most of the nearly $14 billion industry. But in recent years, the shift to digital and open-access content has led to a proliferation of free and low-cost alternatives. Meanwhile, spiraling costs, massive student debt, changing consumer demands and public as […]
Georgetown University officials had a bit of an epiphany recently about the impact of their noncredit courses. While the offerings had been around since the 1990s, administrators hadn't realized the big benefits they could bring to the institution. "What started as fairly standard, adult-education, personal-interest type of courses has evolved into a major part of […]
"Copyright is broken," said Kevin Smith, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, to open his UBTech featured session on intellectual property. Smith, who is an attorney and a librarian, noted that in recent years technological innovation has put a severe strain on our copyright law, which dates from 1976. The law is supposedly technology-neutral, but […]
Some see the three year baccalaureate as a fad which will ultimately dilute the depth, breadth, and rigor of the true college learning and living experience. Other commentators see the accelerated credentials megatrend as the natural outcome of decades of degree inflation. Think about the fact that an associate's degree is no longer the coin […]
For today's college students, on-the-go lifestyles present a challenge when it comes to finding time to eat, and, more specifically, eat well. In 2010, when Adriana Marie Reyes of The University of Arizona surveyed 219 undergraduate students for her honors thesis on what influences college students' eating habits, 82 percent said they would eat healthier […]
As the academic retail industry faces unprecedented changes in student behavior and rapid advances in technology, campus bookstores need to rise above the transaction. Today's campus bookstores must focus on delivering a superior experience that supports and celebrates the cultural and academic aspirations of students, faculty and alumni. This web seminar, originally broadcast on December […]
In today's higher ed world, no department can work in a vacuum, least of all IT. From understanding the business plan to knowing how a web page or application will be used and by whom before it is designed and built, the days of CIOs and their teams working independently are gone. IT administrators are […]
It would be very easy to be jaded about the future of higher education if it were not for the fact that those who serve this industry view it as a calling. We know we can make a difference in the lives of our students and in society. We try to do the best for […]
College sports has long had its share of scandals, including rape charges against players and coaches, illegal payments to athletes, academic fraud and point shaving, to name a few. More recently, a pair of high-profile cases—an antitrust suit against the NCAA by players seeking compensation for the use of their likenesses for commercial purposes and […]