| International |
How China’s higher education development outpaced India’s | Politicians and policy analysts like to make comparisons, and India and China are often set side by side…When it comes to higher education, however, the differences are stark and mostly the result of diverse strategies pursued by each nation over the past two decades to answer huge demand for tertiary education. Both countries followed the Soviet model separating research and teaching and both maintained elite systems catering to 10 per cent of the youth population until the year 2000. They both also tended to focus their investments on STEM subjects.
India still grappling with low learning outcomes in rural areas, here’s a solution | It has been 10 years since the Right to Education Act came into effect, but India is still grappling with low learning outcomes amongst school kids in rural India…Unfortunately, 60% of grade-5 students can’t read grade-2 text or recognise numbers beyond 99. Having worked in primary education for the last few years, I know how important foundation years are in shaping a child’s future…In fact, 36% of children drop out even before completing primary education, and the reason is outdated teaching practices.
Action needed to avert the crisis in UK language learning, report warns | A new Higher Education Policy Institute report has lambasted the UK’s current approach to learning foreign languages, revealing that just 32% of 16-to-30-year olds in the UK feel confident reading and writing in another language, compared to the rest of the EU’s 89% average.
| U.S. National |
The Barriers to Mobility | For generations of Americans, higher education was a ladder — study hard and you could climb into the middle class. A college degree helped guarantee a good job and financial security. And the value went beyond dollars and cents — graduates were more likely to own their own homes, raise children in two-parent families, and live longer, healthier lives. They still are. Today, though, the ladder is rickety…“The only thing that mitigates intergenerational poverty is higher education,” says Danette Howard, senior vice president at the Lumina Foundation, which supports expanded college access. “But you have to get it.” The poorest Americans don’t. Less than 15 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic bracket earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24, according to the U.S. Department of Education. While college-graduation rates have soared over the past 50 years for middle- and upper-income Americans, for those with family incomes of $42,000 or less, they’ve barely budged.
Education and the Breakdown of Democracy | We applaud Ronald J. Daniels’ Washington Post op-ed (December 31, 2019) on the shortcomings of American tertiary education. As professionals with a deep commitment to educating next-generation citizens and leaders, we concur with his critique of American education and join his call to universities to enable young people to “participate in the daily business of our democracy” and redress our educational system’s longstanding failures…Alas, the financial model by and through which higher education functions today contributes directly to the breakdown of democracy. Finance is the elephant in the ivory tower. The search for yield is undermining the process by which education forms good citizens. Quite literally the search for yield is outstripping social good. Massive defunding of higher education beginning in the early 1980s has pushed universities into raising tuition to levels unaffordable to middle class Americans. Universities have redirected their investment priorities away from educating people towards hard assets (real estate) and facilities development to justify the higher tuition levels.
10 Higher Education Predictions for a New Decade | 3. Higher Education Finance Debate: Education costs will continue to rise above inflation, forcing a nationwide debate over higher education finance. Is higher education a private good, to be paid for with personal loans, or a public good, to be paid for with government grants? Congress will wind up greatly expanding Pell Grants, and many states will adopt free community college, but a college education will remain increasingly unaffordable, leaving many more students opting for technical training instead.
Happy New Year, Higher Ed: You’ve Missed Your Completion Goal | It’s barely the beginning of the new year and higher education has already missed its “moonshot,” the goal of making the United States the world leader in college attainment by 2020… [that] President Barack Obama issued. [Note: American higher education’s adherence to the status quo is perhaps the most pressing historical question when considered in a transnational perspective for the early 21st century (see article on China and India above).]
Opinion: Student debt in context | Debt relative to future means – In some ways, student debt can be seen as a means to purchase an annuity. You pay more for an annuity with a relatively large future payoff. Borrowing to finance an education that promises high lifetime income is reasonable, rational and justifiable.
Attacks on Expert Knowledge and Higher Ed Institutions Threaten American Democracy | The AAUP has issued In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, a statement that advances an impassioned argument for the importance of expert knowledge and the institutions of higher education that produce and transmit it. Addressing an ongoing movement in the United States to attack the disciplines and higher education institutions, the statement defends the critical role these institutions perform in producing the knowledge that sustains American democracy, especially in this moment of intense global instability. In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education was prepared by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
| U.S. States and Territories |
Rising tuition putting college out of reach for low-income, minority students | Rising tuition and reduced state funding have put college out of reach for low-income students, experts say. The impact is being felt most acutely by black students, whose enrollment in four-year colleges has steadily declined, according to a report by the nonprofit Partnership for College Completion. The group works with colleges and universities to improve completion rates for low-income, minority and first-generation students. It found 11,100 fewer black students attended Illinois’ public and private, nonprofit institutions in 2017 compared to 2007.
Positive Picture for State Higher Ed Funding | An annual survey of state funding for higher education released today documents modest continued increases in funding across most states. Initially approved state appropriations grew by 5 percent in fiscal 2020 compared to the year before, representing the eighth straight year of annual increases and the largest annual percentage increase since fiscal year 2015, according to the annual Grapevine survey, a joint project of the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO).
Opinion: Performance-based funding for universities is gaining in popularity — here’s why it’s a bad idea | In the past 13 years, state policy makers have shown a renewed interest in performance-based funding. This is even after numerous states abandoned it in prior years, in part because of shrinking state budgets and loss of public support for the policy. The resurgence of performance-based funding in the U.S. is being driven by two things. First, there has been a growing national interest in college completion. Second, the Great Recession led policy makers to demand publicly funded institutions — including colleges and universities — to do more with less. Performance funding was viewed as one way to get college leaders to improve outcomes.
Online education in Pennsylvania could get more competitive thanks to state community colleges | Graduates of Pennsylvania’s 14 community colleges can go on to earn their bachelor’s degrees online from a New Hampshire university at a rate that makes it less costly than nearly every other in-state public option, under an agreement signed Wednesday. The agreement with Southern New Hampshire University was arranged through the Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges, a nonprofit umbrella association, and marks the first transfer agreement between all 14 colleges and a four-year university.
Utah governor requests tuition freeze among budget proposals | Utah’s governor released an annual budget proposal calling for a freeze on college and university tuition increases until a specific definition of higher education affordability can be established. Republican Gov. Gary Herbert requested that the governing bodies of the state’s higher education and technical college networks be merged into a single, post-secondary education oversight entity, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
California governor keeps key higher education pledges but significant aid for non-tuition costs remains | Newsom and the Legislature in 2019 increased the number of available competitive Cal Grants while also giving community colleges the option of offering two tuition-free years by increasing funding for the California College Promise. Newsom also kept his promise to avoid tuition hikes for the California State University and University of California systems by increasing funding for each system. Left unfulfilled in 2019 was significant reform of the state’s financial aid system to better help students cover non-tuition costs, such as housing and food. Without committing to a specific plan, Newsom said on the campaign trail that he wanted to ensure that no student lacks proper housing or food and that he would “provide the resources necessary to address these crises.”
| Institutional |
Dr. Stevie Watson Focuses on Recruitment, Retention and Graduation at SUNY Morrisville | Watson arrives at a time when the SUNY system, which is made up of 64 campuses, has seen several years of declining enrollment — down 9.9% between 2010 and 2018. Within that decline, the biggest drop was at SUNY’s community colleges, where enrollment fell 2%. While total enrollment at SUNY’s four-year colleges slightly increased — up 1.05% between 2010 and 2018 — SUNY Morrisville’s enrollment declined 13.5%. The enrollment drop is mostly due to the declining population in upstate New York, resulting in fewer teens graduating from high school in the region, SUNY Morrisville spokesman Robert Blanchet said. Roughly 40% of SUNY Morrisville’s enrollment comes from four upstate counties: Chenango, Madison, Oneida and Onondaga, he said.
How two (very different) Massachusetts colleges are taking on the same fast-approaching threat | Hampshire College may sit just five miles away from the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts in the town of Amherst. But the two institutions are facing the next decade — and a looming college enrollment crisis — from vastly different positions. After a brush with mortality last year, Hampshire enrolled barely a dozen incoming freshmen as the school works to find a path back to sustainability after years of multi-million-dollar budget deficits. Meanwhile, the UMass system now counts five nationally ranked campuses and has recently made moves to expand its physical footprint.
IHEP Study, Top 100 Rankings Highlight Student Diversity Record of Flagship Institutions | As the analysis in the IHEP report details, only six out of 50 public flagship institutions meet an affordability benchmark for low-income students. Only 17 of these 50 institutions appear among Diverse’s Top 100. Voight says the flagship institutions cited in the IHEP report are generally accepted in the state as the flagship university. IHEP looked at a variety of sources and cross-checked the information. If a state had two flagship institutions, IHEP used the one most frequently cited in other analyses.
Accreditors sharpen focus on equity in student outcomes | In April 2018, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report detailing the deficiencies it perceived in how accreditors use the information they collect on students’ performance. Regional accreditors might review high-level metrics such as graduation rates, but none had developed a clear definition of what counts as poor performance for a college and what the consequences would be for institutions if their students were not successful. Colleges sometimes keep their accreditation despite having poor outcomes, Antoinette Flores, now CAP’s director for Postsecondary Education, wrote in the report.
A New Path for Evergreen | Evergreen’s enrollment started dropping after the end of the financial crisis. To be sure, many colleges are dealing with low enrollment because of declining birth rates that have resulted in fewer Americans of traditional college age. But at Evergreen, enrollment has dropped by 1,000 students since 2017, to about 2,900, indicating something else might be at play. Of course, the strong progressive bent on campus might be a turn-off to some, especially after student protesters made national news in 2017 for occupying the president’s office and calling for a professor to be fired. But some of the enrollment drop preceded those events, officials said, leading them to believe there were other factors leading to the decline. This year, the college is making some academic changes the administration hopes can help recruit students and — crucially — retain them.
