International
Students: the missing voices in internationalisation | The main perception among scholars is that internationalisation discourses are predominantly about mobility. However, the question is mobility from whose perspective? Student mobility viewed through an organisational lens does not capture mobile students’ viewpoint.
International student enrolment set to exceed UK numbers | For the first time this year, the number of foreign students attending Australian universities is likely to exceed those studying in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.
How higher education has been weaponized in the age of Trump — and how it can be redeemed | Educators need to initiate and expand a national conversation in which higher education can be defended as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a site of deliberative inquiry, dialogue and critical thinking, a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and a sense of civic courage. The project of defining higher education as a democratic public sphere can provide the platform for a more expressive commitment to developing a social movement in defense of public goods. What is crucial to recognize here is that higher education mimics a neoliberal logic that views education largely as a commodity to be bought and sold for private advantage, while undermining the power of faculty and students to live up to and resurrect the demands of global citizenship.
Students march to ‘save education, nation, democracy’ | The Students’ Federation of India said that people cutting across categories, such as farmers, workers, Dalits, religious minorities, teachers, the unemployed youth, have been the worst-affected sections in the country under the NDA regime as there has been a series of attacks, resulting to the weakening of the Indian education system on the one hand and the sabotage of the very idea of education and its societal duty on the other.
We must invest in education with a focus on equity of outcome | In Ireland, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are significantly behind their better-off counterparts. The result of this is an educational inequality that compounds the already inherent disadvantage of these pupils. This must be addressed as a central policy issue if we are to truly value all children equally.
Has marketisation of higher education reached its limits? | Quality metanarratives, made up of an overlapping number of norms, standards and agencies, offer images of transparency, accountability and excellence within a context of public funding cuts and rising consumerism. Studies show that this market-based quality brouhaha, replete with league tables and rankings, bears no tangible transformative or empowering benefit for academics or students and neither does it bear a positive effect on the quality of teaching and learning.
Low wages, unemployment to blame for HELB loans crisis | The announcement by Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed that the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) will enlist the services of law enforcement agencies to compel graduates including those working in the informal sector to repay their loans has continued to attract wide condemnation…“Section 15 (2) of the HELB Act gives mandate and authority for the board to have inspectors who will help HELB to recover and also access premises where ex-loanees are actually residing,” HELB CEO, Charles Ringera, said on Friday.
From Faculty to Factory | Until 2013, the commodification of higher education affected only private universities. That year the newly formed Socialist Party government started an aggressive neoliberal reform in higher education…Inspired by the Chilean university reform during Pinochet’s rule and formally modelled on the British university reforms of the Blair era, this shift was based on the principle of financial competition between public and private universities, the control of the university boards of administration by government employees, and the reduction of student participation in university governing bodies. The student was considered as a customer, professors as wage laborers, and the university as a cost-effective institution. Advertisements in university campuses were becoming common and curricula were expected to transform in accordance with market needs. Impoverished public universities were forced to raise tuition fees, especially in master’s degrees, and start a plethora of new programs whose sole purpose was “to look interesting from a market perspective.”
U.S. National
For a Dissatisfied Public, Colleges’ Internal Affairs Become Fair Game | Harnisch, of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, says increased legislative activism may also be the result of a generational shift in statehouses. Today’s lawmakers may be skeptical of higher education, but they also are more likely to have graduated from college themselves. Familiarity with higher education may give them confidence to think they can diagnose — and fix — colleges’ problems. “Previous generations had less experience with higher ed,” Harnisch says, “so they tended to be deferential to college leaders and their expertise.”
New Effort Focuses on Increasing Community College Success for Women Students | In her talk on Wednesday, Biden pointed to data by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) that note that a growing number of single mothers — 11 percent of all undergraduates — are enrolled in postsecondary institutions but most will not graduate because of the challenges they face as financially independent students who are juggling work, school and parenting. According to IWPR, only eight percent of single mothers enrolled in college earn an associate or bachelor’s degree within six years.
U.S. States
Commentary: Government aid should educate the many, not enrich the few | The 2017 Student Loan Report noted an average default rate for for-profit colleges of 15 percent, public colleges 11 percent and private non-profit colleges 7 percent. Of the 43 colleges in Utah, five are non-profit, eight are public and 30 are for-profit. Utah for-profits default on average 11.28 percent, public 8.39 percent and nonprofit 4 percent (with our institution, Westminster College, at 2.7 percent). The worst 10 Utah for-profits defaulted on average at 19.73 percent, with the highest at 26.8 percent.
Louisiana community colleges too costly, state’s higher education chief says | Louisiana students are paying more than the regional and national averages to attend community colleges and the issue needs to be addressed, Higher Education Commissioner Kim Hunter Reed said Monday. Families here pay 21.1 percent of their income when enrolled in the two-year schools compared to 17 percent in other Southern states and 18.2 percent nationally, according to data compiled by the Southern Regional Education Board.
The role of education in solving Alaska’s economic crisis | Oil-producing states such as Louisiana, Wyoming and Alaska tend to cut funding at both K-12 and higher education levels due to declining oil prices. On Feb. 13, Gov. Mike Dunleavy decided to cut state funding for the university at an unprecedented rate, by almost 41 percent. One natural consequence of these cuts is less economic activity in the short- to medium-run. However, education cuts also foreshadow economic dysfunction later on down the road.
Institutional
Across the Country, Universities Are Answering the Call for Innovation | Notably, they are expanding their continuing education departments—the arm of the school that has the most flexibility, can move quickly, and is organically connected to the local community. Once considered an unassuming part of the university serving a limited demographic, today’s continuing-ed departments resemble innovation labs, able to launch new programs, engage with outside partners, and respond to employment trends—all with the support and structure of the university.
The Impact of Faculty Attitudes About Intelligence | A new study suggests that faculty members’ attitudes about intelligence can have a major impact on the success of students in science, mathematics and technology courses. Students see more achievement when their instructors believe in a “growth mind-set” about intelligence than they do learning from those who believe intelligence is fixed. The impact was found across all student groups but was most pronounced among minority students.
Strength in Smaller Numbers? | It may be true in some cases and to small degrees, say those who run colleges or who have closely watched segments of the higher education landscape. Some institutions have found success enrolling students who were attending a shuttered rival, either by scrambling to open transfer pathways or by picking up a closing college’s strongest programs. But it’s usually not as simple as one college being able to survive because another college died.
What college scandals can teach higher ed leaders | Such incidents have put a spotlight on the growing importance of crisis management skills for higher ed leaders. Incoming and current college officials should take note of the lessons they teach about what to do — and what not do — to recover from a scandal on campus. “If you’re a major university and you’ve got 30,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff and 150 buildings, something is going to go wrong,” said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”