International
OECD: England gets extra spending under £9K fees – and world’s most expensive public universities | England’s higher education spending increased in the first year of £9,000 tuition fees and its financing system allowed it to “raise spending in difficult times”, unlike European rivals, but the country has the most expensive public universities in the world.
Andreas Schleicher: TEF relies on ‘proxies’ for teaching quality | OECD’s head of education calls for international system to measure graduate learning outcomes in Hepi lecture.
Emerging economies want world class universities too, and they’re doing all they can to get them | This year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings saw 28 nations make the top 200, with a further 42 making an appearance in the overall list of 800.
Focus excellence initiatives on systems, not universities, expert says | Jamil Salmi, former coordinator of the World Bank’s tertiary education programme, warns of the potential “adverse consequences” that national “excellence initiatives” could have on teaching quality and student diversity and says that such schemes are “not a substitute for a meaningful reform of the entire tertiary education system”.
Private universities ‘only way to meet demand’ in emerging economies | Allowing private sector to flourish is best route to vastly increase access to ‘good, not great’ higher education, BRICS and Emerging Economies Universities Summit hears.
U.S. National
Free Tuition Is Not the Answer | THESE days, politicians on both the left and the right are very critical of higher education, especially the cost of attending college and the related debt that students and their families incur.
University President: ‘This Is Not Day Care’ | At a time when many college presidents are responding with sympathy to students who say speakers or faculty members make them feel uncomfortable, the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University is having none of it.
‘Not a Day Care’? Really? | It took a brave college president from a little-known evangelical college to step up and say enough is enough. Or at least that’s what Oklahoma Wesleyan University wants us to think.
Policy Priorities for Accreditation Put Quality College Learning at Risk | Ensuring the quality of college learning is, beyond doubt, the most important responsibility of higher education accreditation.
College Graduation Rates Are Up for Black, Latino, and Native Students at Many Four-Year Public Colleges and Universities | According to a new Ed Trust report, Rising Tide: Do College Grad Rate Gains Benefit All Students?, there have been real improvements: More than two-thirds of all four-year public colleges and universities increased graduation rates from 2003 to 2013.
College Grad Rates Don’t Always Benefit All Students | An institution of higher education can improve its graduation rate over time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the college or university has narrowed its graduation gap between White students and students of color.
U.S. States
California’s Higher-Education Crisis | Scores of highly qualified students are failing to secure spots at the Golden State’s public universities.
Tennessee looks to continue historically small tuition hikes | Tennessee’s leading higher education agency has recommended the lowest set of college tuition hikes in recent memory, signaling what one official said was the state’s growing interest in affordability for students.
Regents: No increase in higher education funding | Officials are requesting a flat budget for higher education next fiscal year, but say they actually need an additional $22 million to operate Oklahoma’s colleges and universities.
Institutional
Burlington College cuts tuition 9 percent | Burlington College has been focused on affordability throughout its history. Recently, it was one of the first private colleges in the country to “freeze tuition.”
Brandeis Students End 12-Day Sit-In After University Announces Diversity Plan | A sit-in protest involving hundreds of students at Brandeis University ended on Tuesday after the university created a plan to answer the group’s demands for diversity, The Boston Globe reports.
Mercer County Community College in jeopardy of losing accreditation | The West Windsor college, which operates a satellite campus in Trenton, is in jeopardy of losing it accreditation, according to a Nov. 19 report from the Middles State Commission on Higher Education.
College evaluates institutional effectiveness | Cochise College was mentioned in an EMSI Best Practice article posted on Economicmodeling.com on Tuesday, November 24.
Note: Posted on Dec. 9, 2015.