| International |
Australia must fix school inequity to create a top education system | Parental choice is an idea that became commonly known as a consequence of Milton Friedman’s economic theories in the 1950s. Friedman stated that parents must be given the freedom to choose their children’s education and encourage competition among schools to better serve families’ diverse needs…Results over the past half a century have not been what Friedman expected. In 2013 the Grattan Institute in Australia concluded: “By increasing competition, government policies have increased the effectiveness of many sectors of the economy. But school education is not one of them.” (p35) Instead of asking schools to race against one another for better outcomes, state and federal strategies should introduce incentives that would encourage collaboration between schools and guarantee that all schools have sufficient resources to cope with inequalities that children bring with them to school every day.
UK tops 80 countries in best education list | The criteria used to establish the best nations for education is founded on a worldwide perception-based survey. Notably, the survey utilized a combination of results derived from three evenly determined nation aspects: whether a nation offers optimal education; if a well-crafted public education network thrives; and the chances of learners thinking about attending university. The 2019 Best Countries rankings, formed in partnership with BAV Group, a unit of global marketing communications company VMLY&R, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, are based on a study that surveyed more than 20,000 global citizens from four regions to assess perceptions of 80 countries on 75 different metrics.
| U.S. National |
Today’s students need more than just free college | Free college and debt forgiveness alone do not address the underlying need to modernize student support services, create more flexible pathways and programs, or respond to the growing misalignment between our higher education infrastructure and the demands of a labor market that is being transformed by the diffusion of emerging technologies.
Why Data and Analytics Matter—and Why They Matter Now | Analytics has the power to help higher education tackle some of its biggest challenges, and colleges and universities have access to enormous stores of data. Taken together, these two facts should indicate a bright future for analytics in higher education. However, colleges and universities are still struggling with how to best use data to derive the information they need for strategic decision-making and meaningful change. They are collecting vast stores of data, but they do not always integrate it with other data on campus or use the data for the greatest impact.
Free College Should Not Leave Out Nonprofit Schools | Currently, a mix of public and private institutions offer post-secondary education. Of the 17.5 million students who were enrolled in a post-high-school academic program last spring, 3.8 million attended a four-year, private nonprofit college or university. Writing for Inside Higher Education, Claude O. Pressnell Jr., president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, expressed his concern that ignoring nonprofit schools is neither good policy nor in the interest of students.
Report: ‘Hypercompetitive’ higher ed market will limit revenue growth | Colleges are addressing growing concerns of a slowdown in the supply of high school graduates, which could shrink their applicant pools and heighten competition for top students. While the number of high school graduates rose 15% from 2002-03 to 2012-13, only 5% growth is expected between 2012-13 to 2027-28, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The potential for an economic slowdown could boost enrollment, the Moody’s report authors write, but it stands to hurt institutions’ balance sheet reserves, endowment returns and fundraising efforts.
Turning Point for Student Loans | Defaulted student loans have surpassed all other types of household debt classified as “severely derogatory,” including mortgage and credit card debt, according to a report from New York Fed researchers.
| U.S. States and Territories |
Gov. Gavin Newsom creates council to coordinate CA higher education system | The council will advise Newsom on issues related to enrollment, growth of colleges’ student bodies, coordination on the regional and statewide levels and the community college transfer process. In addition to this council, Newsom has recruited various advocates and stakeholders to advise him on student access and affordability issues.
Budget Compromise in Alaska | The state’s governor and university officials strike a deal that will cut funding by $70 million over three years instead of a whopping $136 million immediately.
How Delaware Aims To Improve College Readiness | The state of Delaware has the same remediation challenge that is plaguing the rest of the country. But through its unique analysis of high school and college data, it has gotten closer to identifying the root of the problem. The state has pinpointed which high school English and math courses contribute to its college remediation problem and has identified those students least likely to enroll in higher-level 12th grade math and English courses. Both of these data points hold enormous potential to reform high school math and English instruction and transform student academic outcomes.
| Institutional |
Pew Study: Faculty-Student Diversity Divide Persists | More than three-quarters of faculty are White compared to 55 percent of students, according to fall 2017 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. From 1997 to 2017, the number of minority students climbed by 17 percent while faculty diversity rose 10 percent. Progress for Black and Latinx faculty has been particularly sluggish, with their percentages rising only minimally over the course of a decade. Since 1997, the number of Latinx faculty jumped by 2 percent, and for Black faculty, only 1 percent.
In Related News |
Sorry, Not Sorry | Johns Hopkins University terminated a nontenured associate research professor of speech and language processing who broke into a student sit-in earlier this year with bolt cutters. He says his counterprotest was supposed to be nonviolent and that he wanted to access servers in the occupied building. But protesters accused him of attacking them, and the university says that whatever happened, he put students in danger.
‘The Assault on American Excellence’ | Anthony Kronman (Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School): Yale’s diversity offices are mostly staffed by administrators. They have a built-in incentive to find that the university is not doing enough to promote diversity on campus. The result is an increasingly complicated set of rules and regulations, some mandatory and others merely suggestive but influential nonetheless, requiring the faculty to give racial, ethnic and gender diversity an ever-greater weight in all aspects of academic life. Faculty judgments regarding excellence of achievement are subordinated to the moral imperative of greater diversity, as defined by a nonacademic corps of bureaucrats whose involvement in the work of teaching and learning is peripheral at best. [Ed.: Donald Sterling?]
When Private Colleges Cut Ties With Presidents, It Can Mean a 6-Figure Golden Parachute [subscription required] | Hitting the reset button can come at a heavy price.
What Is a Chief Enrollment Officer? | Chief enrollment officers are at the forefront of an industry in need of innovation. Their leadership will determine the direction institutions take. Their policies will impact who goes to college, and their advocacy on the national stage can ensure that universities make a commitment to serve the public good.
How Some Colleges Are Helping Freshmen Find Their Academic Focus [subscription required] | The idea of the meta-major is for students to find momentum and get going in the areas they’re passionate about “before choice paralysis kicks in.”
Learning About Online Learning at Small Private Colleges | The Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction is one of the largest-scale experiments (at least if you measure scale by the number of institutions involved, rather than enrollments) in online postsecondary learning. Over the course of several years, 42 member institutions of the Council of Independent Colleges built a set of upper-level online and hybrid humanities courses to be shared by their peers.