International
‘Rebels and Rage’ extract: The many angles to the free higher education debate | Is there legitimacy to the ANC’s position that free higher education for all is not immediately feasible in [South Africa]? Of course, it depends on what one means by free higher education. Should it simply involve tuition, as in Germany and Mexico, or should it take a comprehensive form and cover accommodation and subsistence as well, as in Scandinavia? Ironically, here there is substantive agreement among all role players. Everyone recognises that free tuition would not be sufficient as there are too many students without the financial means to cover the costs of accommodation and subsistence. The net result would be wasted resources, as these students would be unable to progress through the system in any case.
Higher education in crisis | Only three bold and honest endeavours look plausible for transforming Nepal’s higher education. One, the government, expectedly the federal one, can put political weight and resources to establish a flagship world class public university, at least in the technological and humanities streams, which, in due course, can obtain instant global equivalence of the degrees it awards. This also suits the present, supposedly, socialism-oriented government. Second, market-like freedom can be granted to private colleges to choose pedagogy, course books and lesson delivery mechanisms while maintaining only administrative affiliation with the university concerned. This will end the completely board-exam orientated teaching-learning environment. Three, a multi-university concept under a level-playing field but with an effective regulatory mechanism focused mainly on quality insurance will lead to competition-induced quality in the long run, as they must strive to deliver the best to survive in the market.
Third level staff and students to stage protests over funding ‘crisis’ | Third level students and lecturers across [Irish] college campuses are set to stage lunchtime protests on Thursday to highlight what they say is a growing crisis in higher education funding.State funding for third level fell by almost 40 per cent as a result of austerity-era cost-cutting between 2008 and 2015 at a time of rising student numbers. While the Government says it has invested millions of euro in extra funding in recent years, campaigners say only a fraction of what was cut has been replaced.
Drop in public and private spending on education | The economic recession in Greece in recent years has led to major cuts in education spending by both the state and individuals, a new study indicated on Tuesday…According to the study, following a major increase recorded between 2001 and 2009, in the 2010-16 period the government cut spending by 22.7 percent for secondary education and 14.1 percent for higher education, compared to 2.4 percent for primary education.
U.S. National
Why transparency matters in combating the college cost explosion | One new free resource, HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, enables visitors to instantly compare administrative and instructional spending at nearly 1,500 public and private colleges and universities nationwide. It also allows users to compare a college’s spending history to that of other institutions, especially those in its peer group. By unveiling a wealth of financial data, the site offers insights into a college’s commitment to what should be its primary mission: educating students. With such benchmarking tools, college spending patterns and potential red flags can be made visible for all.
How to Reduce Student Debt & Increase College Affordability | Student debt has exploded to $1.5 trillion as a result of increasing costs, declining state funding and federal programs that have failed to keep up with college cost inflation. Average state funding per student at public colleges is 16% below pre-recession levels, and the purchasing power of Pell Grants has fallen from covering 39% of college costs in 2000 to just 30% in 2016, according to James Kvaal, president of The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), and is likely even lower today.
The real college crisis: Student debt drags down economy | Consider a recent analysis from staff at the Federal Reserve. It found that the average student loan debt held by those in the 24- to 32-year-old age group doubled from $5,000 to $10,000 between 2005 and 2014. And that same report found that home ownership fell 9 percentage points in that same time period for those in that age group. Homeownership fell across all age groups by about 4 percentage points, but the millennial drop was much steeper.
Unpacking the Power of Privileged Neighborhoods | [Junia Howell, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh,] found that advantaged neighborhoods mattered much more for their residents—the boost they provided was much stronger than the negative effect distressed neighborhoods had on their residents. Put another way, living in an advantaged neighborhood would make a substantial difference to educational attainment of a person, compared to another with comparable family and individual profile. But for people living in moderate or very disadvantaged neighborhoods, educational outcome is similar if everything else is similar. So parental education level and income may matter more.
The Cruel Irony of ‘Free’ College Promises | For lower- and middle-income students “free public college” isn’t truly free if only tuition is taken care of. According to the College Board, nontuition expenses took up over two-thirds of the average budget for community college students in the 2017-18 school year….[A]s a result of largely neglecting college expenses beyond tuition, too many states are generating perverse outcomes regarding who receives public aid. In 2018, researchers at the Education Trust found that in many states free college policies actually end up providing more resources to upper-middle-class students than more needy ones. A similar study that zeroed in on Tennessee’s community college program showed that about half of qualifying students received no aid at all. Meanwhile, a student from a family earning over $160,000 annually could receive more than $1,400 in state subsidies.
Presidential Hopefuls Are Pushing Free College Back Into the Spotlight. But What Does ‘Free’ Mean, Anyway? [Subscription required] | Candidates are staking out their positions, and new plans are emerging. But the proposals vary widely, creating confusion about whom they really help.
Confused About How ‘Free College’ Programs Differ? This Primer Can Help | Free college may be stalled on the national level, but it’s riding a wave of momentum in statehouses and city halls. It’s still seen by many as a litmus test for presidential candidates’ commitment to college affordability. But as programs and proposals proliferate, so has confusion over what exactly is meant by free. Here’s a primer to help sort through the many flavors of free among the more than 300 programs that have been rolled out so far.
The Baby Bust Goes to School | [I]in 2007, when the number of babies born in the United States hit the all-time high of 4.32 million, topping even the baby boom peak, few could foresee the baby bust that was about to come. But come it did. By 2010, the number of children born in the U.S. that year had declined by 7.3 percent to 4.0 million. Perhaps that was understandable, given the shock of the Great Recession. (Birthrates declined during the Great Depression, too.) But another surprise followed: the birth rate continued to fall, even amid a historically long economic recovery, and even though the huge cohort of millennial women was reaching prime childbearing age. A decade after the peak, and seven years after the recovery began, the downward trend continues. The 3.85 million babies born in 2017 represent a 10.7 percent decline from the 2007 high.
College Affordability Advocates: What Comes After the Admissions Cheating Scandal? | Lawmakers in some states are revisiting rules that allow tax breaks for charitable donations to colleges and universities in the wake of the cheating scheme. Payments made in the cheating scandal were written off as charitable donations to colleges’ private funds, which often support infrastructure or even scholarships. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) proposed banning tax benefits for donations to elite colleges from parents of children who are seeking admission to a school. “The federal government shouldn’t be perpetuating this system by awarding tax breaks to these contributions, contributions that return to the donor a benefit of inestimable value,” he said.
Free College – Top 3 Pros and Cons | Is tuition-free college an economy-boosting solution to unequal college access and sky-high college debts? Or is tuition-free college a taxpayer burden that will still result in high student debt and drop-out rates? The pros and cons of the tuition-free college debate are detailed below.
Executive Order’s Free-Speech Provisions Draw Criticism | President Donald J. Trump’s signing of a controversial executive order Thursday was met with immediate criticism from areas of higher education, particularly aspects intended to address a perception that some schools are intolerant of conservative political views. Research grants and other federal money, though not student aid, could be withheld from schools judged to have not evenly upheld free speech and other First Amendment rights of students and faculty.
College admission scandal reveals a fundamental “crisis” in American society | As a researcher who has studied how young athletes get admitted to college, I don’t see a major difference between this admission fraud case and how many wealthy families can buy their children’s way into elite colleges through “back” and “side” doors. In my research, I show how most intercollegiate sports are fed by wildly expensive “pay to play” youth sports pipelines. These pipelines systematically exclude lower income families. It takes money to attend so-called “showcase tournaments” to get in front of recruiters. In many ways, then, those ensnared in the current criminal case – which alleges that they paid for their children to get spots on the sports teams of big name schools – couldn’t have succeeded if the college admissions process wasn’t already biased toward wealthier families.
What’s Missing in the Admissions Madness Discussion? | I am troubled by a few of the angles in the news media coverage of the [admissions] scandal — certain ways of framing it that are misleading and that only reinforce exaggerated or inaccurate views of higher education. First and foremost, the whole system is not “rigged,” as a number of so-called experts are declaring. People of all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds have been accepted into elite colleges based on their hard work, intelligence and true accomplishments. And, yes, admission madness has escalated in recent decades, resulting in absurd actions by drone parents who don’t have faith their children can do well in life unless they attend an Ivy League or other top-ranked institution. Yet we know that’s not the case — those who have attended not-so-elite institutions have achieved just as much success and made just as significant contributions to our society.
U.S. States
Business and Education Leaders Meet To Advance Graduation Rates | The initiative, supported by the ECMC Foundation, leverages the organization’s Game Changer strategies, data-driven interventions designed to restructure systems, to improve student outcomes and eliminate achievement gaps. The Inland Empire lags behind much of the state in its student outcomes. Less than 30 percent of adults in the two-county area have an associate degree or higher, compared to 38 to 48 percent of adults in adjacent Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Only 151 out of every 1,000 high school freshmen in the region will complete a bachelor’s degree at a California public university.
Wall & Main: Will Worcester’s higher education institutions fall off the cliff? | And Worcester’s Eds may be much worse off in the years ahead thanks to the “cliff” — the plunge in the U.S birth rate that accompanied the financial crisis. This means a dramatic decline in the college age population. According to a March 6 article in The Boston Globe, “The 2008 recession resulted in a historic downturn in the U.S. birth rate — effectively lighting the fuse of an 18-year time bomb for American colleges. Studies estimate that nearly 2.3 million fewer babies were born in the United States between 2008 and 2013, and the birth rate has continued to drop since then … [U Mass president Marty] Meehan said that the decline will result in a 32,000 to 54,000 decrease in the number of college-aged students in New England beginning in 2026.
Another Vermont College Will Close | The College of St. Joseph, in Vermont, announced Thursday that it will shut down at the end of the semester. The college has been struggling for the last year, most recently with demands from its accreditor, the New England Commission on Higher Education, that it show that it has the financial resources to operate effectively.
Institutional
Press Release:‘Crisis, Compassion, and Resiliency in Student Affairs’ Offers Strategies for Responding to College and University Crises with Mindfulness | Crisis events on college and university campuses have become all too common. In these most challenging situations, student affairs professionals are expected to be among the first to respond. A new book from NASPA–Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education examines the significant personal impact campus crises have on staff and students, with recommendations for practices to foster well-being.
Campus must continue to improve students’ access to basic needs | After digging deeper into the UC Berkeley financial aid system, it became clear that food insecurity was a symptom of a much larger systemic crisis. Today, the majority of states have not recuperated their state dollars for public higher education to prerecession levels. The Pell Grant, which is our federal government’s largest investment to support the access, affordability and completion of higher education, is at a four-decade purchasing power low. Unfortunately, funding within California has not been able to support public higher education equitably to sustain — much less increase — funding for its public higher education system.
US higher education crisis: lessons from the Chicago schools | Chicago has been leading the way in trying to retool the community college system. Since becoming mayor in 2011, Mr Emanuel has demonstrated two things. First, there is a large pent-up demand for technical education among young Americans, particularly in depressed urban areas. Second, it does not have to be free to all. Mr Emanuel’s model is to make vocational education free to any high school student who achieves reasonable grades. Following the German model, employers are integrated closely with the curriculum. The aim is to offer them marketable skills.
Leatherwood: The role community colleges play | As higher education professionals, we seek to avoid an admissions system that allows for these examples of inequities and loopholes. For example, geographic inequities can exist within the college admission system. According to a study by UCLA and the University of Arizona, colleges and universities prefer to recruit at high schools in urban or suburban areas compared to rural areas — where the average family income is above $100,000. The result is 59 percent of graduates from rural high schools attending college the following fall — compared to 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban high school graduates (National Student Clearinghouse). This outcome could have a ripple effect to the broader economy in rural communities.
Remaking Higher Ed From Within | Federal policy is getting all the attention of late, with the U.S. Department of Education considering significant changes to the rules that shape higher education across the country and Congress simultaneously working to update the Higher Education Act for the first time in more than a decade. And both certainly stand to have a far-reaching impact on the landscape of colleges and universities. But the real revolution in higher education isn’t being led by policy makers. It’s being driven by individual learners and employers who are demanding that learning become cheaper, better and faster. This is the learner revolution.
Why Do Colleges Die? | “Long-vulnerable” colleges tend to close or merge when a crisis pushes them “over the cliff,” writes Boston University political scientist Virginia Sapiro, who has studied the life cycles of colleges going back more than two centuries. Usually it’s debt that has become unsustainable to the institution or to its parent organization, such as a church or religious order. Most colleges that fail are small, private and relatively nonselective, with “very particular or unusual missions” and graduation rates that are often as low as those at nonelite public universities, Sapiro said.
Tensions Over International Students | A series of recent reported incidents have raised the specter of tensions between faculty members and the international students they teach. The most recent such incident involved the resignation of a professor from the University of Maryland College Park — first reported by WAMU 88.5 — after the professor…accused a group of students from China of cheating and was accused in turn of discriminating against students based on their race and national origin.