News Items from the Week of January 11, 2019

International

Cover | Outsourcing Student Success (Kindle Edition)
Outsourcing Student Success (Kindle Edition) | Click on the Image to Visit Amazon.com

In Brexit uncertainty, universities face cash crisis as EU student numbers fall | The decline in EU student numbers, including a 9 per cent slump in postgraduates, has sparked fears that enrolments will be down across the rest of the sector which could push some universities closer to the brink of financial collapse.

Privacy Emerges as a Top Concern for Higher Education IT | As colleges increase their use of data to develop student interventions and deliver personalized services, they have a growing responsibility to develop guidelines and best practices to protect students’ personal information.

Understanding the teaching crisis facing South Africa | At the same time, it’s calculated that 10% of the country’s teachers are absent from school each day, while research found that 79% of South African Grade 6 mathematics teachers were classified as having content knowledge levels below the level at which they were teaching.

Does Higher Education Still Prepare People for Jobs? | Although there is a clear premium on education — recent reports from The Economist suggest that the ROI of a college degree has never been higher for young people — the value added from a college degree decreases as the number of graduates increases. This is why a college degree will boost earnings by over 20% in sub-saharan Africa (where degrees are relatively rare), but only 9% in Scandinavia (where 40% of adults have degrees).

Tertiary institutions should adopt rigorous admission criteria for teacher education programmes | In response to the ever-increasing demand for teachers in South Africa, Tertiary institutions have adopted demand-driven admission criteria for teacher education programmes, whether it be ITE or PGDE programmes, that is far less stringent compared to those of other degree programmes. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that teaching has become a “stopgap” or “last resort” occupation for many. Tertiary institutions must adopt rigorous admission criteria for teacher education programmes in order to reverse this trend.

U.S. National

What the Numbers Can Tell Us About Humanities Ph.D. Careers | Until recently…data was hard to come by, said McCarthy, director of best practices at the Council of Graduate Schools. The council conducted two surveys last year — one geared toward current Ph.D. students and their career aspirations, one geared toward Ph.D.-program graduates — to fill in those gaps.

Federal Report Agrees Some Low-Income College Students Are Going Hungry | The U.S. Government Accountability Office report, which was released Wednesday, examined 31 studies on food insecurity among students. It also determined through further analysis that about two million at-risk students who were potentially eligible for food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, did not report receiving the benefits in 2016.

Is This Higher Education’s Golden Age? | Beyond the din of the latest protests about sexual violence on campus or controversial speakers causing an uproar, some remarkably positive trends have left American universities bigger, stronger, and in a more influential position than ever before.

Worries Grow About Outsourcing of College Degrees | Dozens of colleges, including many with widely known brands, outsource parts of degree programs to other institutions or private companies. Under federal rules, colleges can offer degree programs in which up to 50 percent of instruction is outsourced, including through unaccredited entities.

U.S. States

Re-Examining the Role of Elite Higher Ed in American Society | The basic finding that it does not matter where you go to college if you are a highly qualified student was first published 16 years ago.

Students, educators oppose tuition hikes, push for more higher ed funding | The Oregon Student Association is pushing for an additional $1 billion for the Public Universities Support Fund, $787 million for the Community College Support Fund and $252 million for the Oregon Opportunity Grant.

Making Career Education Affordable in California | Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently announced plans to eliminate rules put in place during the Obama administration that require career-education colleges to show that the credentials they award lead to gainful employment. In California, these rules have helped shift enrollment from expensive for-profit institutions to public community colleges, which offer career education programs at much lower cost. Indeed, California’s community college system is one of the most affordable higher education institutions in the country.

Institutional

Small Colleges Grapple With ‘Culture of Insecurity’ | An annual gathering for presidents of mostly small private liberal arts colleges started with worries about whether the kids are all right. It was soon evident presidents continue to wonder the same about the institutions they lead.

Chicago State U. Will Pay $650,000 in Legal Settlement Over Faculty Blog | A four-year legal battle between the administration at Chicago State University and two of its professors has ended in a $650,000 settlement of a lawsuit over faculty members’ First Amendment rights to publish a blog criticizing administrators.

How Purdue Global is expanding Purdue U’s access to adult learners | To learn more about how it is fitting in with the rest of the Purdue system and the ways in which it is implementing new educational models such as competency-based education (CBE) and modularized courses, Education Dive spoke with David Starnes, Purdue Global’s vice president of academic operations and its chief academic officer. Starnes was previously an executive with Kaplan University.

Learning Analytics and ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ | Dr. Muller was inspired to write the Tyranny of Metrics by his own experience with the ever-metastasizing institutional reporting requirements while department chair of the History Department at The Catholic University of America. The book takes us on a tour of data-driven disasters in higher education, K-12, medicine, policing, the military, business, philanthropy, and foreign aid. In all of these domains, the impact of an increased focus on metrics has been a series of unintended and mostly negative consequences.

Posted: January 31, 2019

Note: Delayed by holiday schedule…and then Block Editor (Gutenberg update) to WordPress 5.0. Here is the most helpful article I found about the new Block Editor functionality in WordPress:

How to Disable the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg) and Use the Previous WordPress Editor | The block editor is an intriguing system, but it’s also generated a lot of criticism. As such, some people would prefer not to use it at all. That’s actually easy to do, using a dedicated plugin created by the core WordPress team (more on this later).