Archive
With Student Learning at Stake, Group Calls for Better Working Conditions for Adjuncts
By Audrey Williams
Academe needs a new model for the professoriate that better supports the growing number of instructors who are off the tenure track, the participants in a national project about the changing faculty have concluded.
The participants, who represent a cross-section of academe and its stakeholders, also said in a report being released this week that they need to align to gather data that will paint a clearer picture of higher education’s increasing reliance on contingent faculty.
A key reason for those two strategies to improve the jobs of contingent faculty members is that their poor working conditions may harm student learning, says the report, a “working document” produced by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.
The 49-page document, in part, details the challenges linked to the rising number of contingent faculty, who now make up about 70 percent of all instructors at the nation’s colleges and universities. But data that quantify the effects of this shift in the make-up of the faculty and the issues it creates aren’t readily available, the report says. Without hard numbers, campus policy makers may be unaware of the extent of the challenges they face.
Related articles
- Adjunct survey paints bleak portrait (insidehighered.com)
- Freelance, part-time or fixed-term: Is this the future of academic careers? (guardian.co.uk)
- AAUP Proposes Giving Contingent Faculty a Bigger Role in College Governance (chronicle.com)
New Americans in Postsecondary Education: A Profile of Immigrant and Second-Generation American Undergraduates
From Russ Poulin, WCET
A new NCES Statistics in Brief, “New Americans in Postsecondary Education: A Profile of Immigrant and Second-Generation American Undergraduates”, presents data from the 2007–08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study about the characteristics and experiences of 2007–08 undergraduates who immigrated to the United States or are second-generation Americans. The analysis points to differences in educational pursuit and attainment for these two groups compared to all undergraduates and American undergraduates whose parents were born in the United States. SourceL National Center for Education Statistics Digest; WICHE Policy Unit.
Visit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012213.pdf
Related articles
The Results Are In
By Paul Fain
A U.S. Senate committee released an unflattering report on the for-profit college sector on Sunday, concluding a two-year investigation led by Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat. While the report is ambitious in scope, and scathingly critical on many points, it appears unlikely to lead to a substantial legislative crackdown on the industry — at least not during this election year.
Issued by staff from the Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the report follows six congressional hearings, three previous reports and broad document requests. The final result is voluminous, weighing in at 249 pages and accompanied by in-depth profiles of 30 for-profits. It questions whether federal investment through aid and loans is worthwhile in many of the examined colleges.
The investigation found that large numbers of students at for-profits fail to earn credentials, citing a 64 percent dropout rate in associate degree programs, for example. It also links those high dropout rates to the relatively small amount of money for-profits spend on instruction.
Visit: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/30/harkin-releases-critical-report-profits#ixzz227zGfb7g
Read the report: http://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/hearing/?id=cdd6e130-5056-9502-5dd2-e4d005721cb2
Response of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities: http://www.career.org/iMISPublic/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=25566&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm
Stratification Undermines American Higher Education’s Capacity for Enabling Social Mobility
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
Although a college education has increasingly become the sole path into the shrunken middle class, social stratification within the world of higher education threatens to undermine the American Dream.
That was one of the major points that economist Anthony Carnevale made during a presentation Monday at the annual at the 2012 NCCEP/GEAR UP Conference.
“Our post-secondary system has become highly segregated by class, by race and by ethnicity,” Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, said during a workshop titled, “The Growing Importance of Higher Education, Attaining Middle Class Earnings, and the Increasing Stratification of Access.”
Visit: http://diverseeducation.com/article/17239/
Related articles
- Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality? (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
Higher Education Myths: Busted
From the American Council on Education
A fair number of misperceptions about higher education frequently seem to pop up—and linger—in the national discourse. In this issue, experts from inside and outside higher education shine a spotlight on 10 of the most persistent myths, with the goal of dispelling them once and for all.
Related articles
- Game Changers in Education: A New, Free E-Book (educause.edu)
One-Third of Colleges Are on Financially ‘Unsustainable’ Path, Bain Study Finds
By Goldie Blumenstyk
An analysis of nearly 1,700 public and private nonprofit colleges being unveiled this week by Bain & Company finds that one-third of the institutions have been on an “unsustainable financial path” in recent years, and an additional 28 percent are “at risk of slipping into an unsustainable condition.”
At a surprising number of colleges, “operating expenses are getting higher” and “they’re running out of cash to cover it,” says Jeff Denneen, a Bain partner who heads the consulting firm’s American higher-education practice.
Bain and Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm, collaborated on the project. They have published their findings on a publicly available interactive Web site that allows users to type in the name of a college and see where it falls on the analysts’ nine-part matrix.
The methodology is based on just two financial ratios, and they produce some findings that may seem incongruous with conventional views on colleges’ financial standing. The tool classifies wealthy institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton Universities as being on an “unsustainable path” alongside tuition-dependent institutions like Central Bible College, in Missouri. But the very public nature of the findings is sure to bring some attention to the analysis. Bain and Sterling provided advance copies of the analysis and the tool to The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle.
Visit: http://chronicle.com/article/One-Third-of-Colleges-Are-on/133095/
The Disruptions Facing Higher Education, and How Universities are Beginning to Adapt
By Alex Goldman
At no time in history have there been as many unknowns facing the field of higher education. The cost of college attendance, and the resulting mountains of student debt, loom as possible economic bubbles; the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500% since 1985- schools that cost $10,000 per year in 1985 now charge an average of $59,000. In the recent economic downturn, students graduating from college or university often find themselves unemployed or underemployed, leading to questions about the return on investment of a college diploma.
To boot, new platforms for deploying learning, particularly over the internet, pose to disrupt higher education by presenting alternative pathways to acquiring knowledge and skill. These range from for-profit online universities like the University of Phoenix to non-profits like the University of the People. And with the low cost of content distribution and the possibility of quickly reaching massive audiences, innovators and venture capitalists have taken notice, leading to startups like Udemy and Udacity. All these institutions promise learning at a cheaper rate, many of them for free.
Visit: http://www.iftf.org/node/4220
Related articles
- Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality? (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
- Is Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity the future of higher education? (cnn.com)
College Degrees, Designed by the Numbers
By Marc Parry
Campuses are places of intuition and serendipity: A professor senses confusion on a student’s face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife.
Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance.
As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths—it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone’s class according to her understanding of the material.
With 72,000 students, Arizona State is both the country’s largest public university and a hotbed of data-driven experiments. One core effort is a degree-monitoring system that keeps tabs on how students are doing in their majors. Stray off-course and you may have to switch fields.
Visit: http://chronicle.com/article/College-Degrees-Designed-by/132945/
What Can Competency-Based Assessment and Degree Qualification Mean for the National Degree Completion Agenda?
By Mary Grush
The push for degree completion has taken the national spotlight easily in recent years. But surprisingly, questions about the quality and consistency of those degrees have not been quite so prevalent. Gary Brown, Portland State University’s Associate Vice Provost for Academic Excellence, Co-director of AAEEBL, and a Senior Fellow with Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), is among the higher education leaders seeking to change that. As institutions are increasingly pressed to graduate more students and to do so more efficiently, says Brown, understanding how quality is defined will be critical–and building consensus around competency is an emerging strategy for ensuring quality. Here, Campus Technology asks Brown about efforts underway in this important arena.
VIDEO: Higher Education Policy Issues 2012
From EDUCAUSE
Visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSFHa5W0HIQ&feature=youtu.be
Focus on Adult Learning . . . Innovation through Inquiry 