International
One Belt One Road towards a China-led HE area? | As China includes higher education, science and research in the mix of its massive One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure and trade project with Asia, Europe, the Middle East and East Africa, a China-dominated global higher education area could emerge, an international seminar of experts heard last week.
Learning outcomes miss the point of higher education | Universities’ growing obsession with learning outcomes is widely disparaged by academics. In a spot-on piece in The New York Times last month, Molly Worthen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, warned that “when the effort to reduce learning to a list of job-ready skills goes too far, it misses the point of a university education”. That point, especially in the humanities, is to carve out “space for intellectual endeavours that don’t have obvious metrics or market value”.
U.S. National
Lessons Learned | Many popular critiques of higher education focus on a series of straw men: soaring costs, indifferent faculty, pointless research, rampant political correctness, administrative bloat, country club amenities, inflated grades, undermotivated, underprepared, and disengaged students, and a ratings-fueled pursuit of reputation and status. Higher education’s real problems lie elsewhere.
A ‘Workaround’ to U.S. Ban on Student-Level Data | The University of Texas System on Monday released a database of its graduates’ earnings, a first-of-its-kind tool using Census Bureau data that its officials say is designed both to help students and to show the benefits of investing in higher education. System representatives described the project as a powerful but “imperfect” workaround to the current ban on a federal database that would link student-level educational data to national employment data, which was forbidden by the 2008 Higher Education Act.
Sen. Brian Schatz The student debt crisis threatens the American way of life. Washington can’t keep ignoring it. | Since the start of the Great Recession, student loan debt in the United States has doubled, with every graduating class owing more for their college degree than the class before. More than 44 million people — or the population of 20 states combined — owe a total of $1.4 trillion (more than the nation’s credit card debt) for their college educations.
U.S. States
California needs a new master plan for higher education. It won’t happen. Here’s why | Every bit of data tells us that California faces a potential crisis because it is failing to generate enough college-educated workers to replace retiring baby boomers and fill the demands of an increasingly sophisticated economy. That failure underscores the irrelevance of the state’s nearly 60-year-old “master plan” for higher education, which envisioned seamless, low-cost access to community colleges, the state university system and the University of California.
Institutional
Amid protests at UW-Stevens Point, lawmaker calls for commission on higher ed | In a display of public distrust of UW administration, students, faculty, staff and community members in Stevens Point joined in the protest of a plan to cut 13 majors to respond to a $4.5 million structural deficient. Art, English, history, political science and other humanities and social science majors would be cut in favor of more technical fields of study.
Tuition Hikes Hurt Diversity | Tuition hikes are linked to decreased student diversity on public college campuses, according to a new paper finding the strongest effect at two-year institutions and nonselective four-year institutions. But tuition hikes can help public colleges’ diversity — when those hikes take place at private universities in the area. Public institutions can actually see the diversity of their student bodies increase when nearby private institutions increase their tuition, researchers found.
Uplifting HBCUs As Models of Student Success | Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have a long history of developing influential scholars and leaders. These institutions represent the foundation of African-American success stories through leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison.
Fred Walker’s Career May Not Be Over. But His Presidency Is. | Walker had said he could not “reason with the faculty,” so he had to work around them. The president, a Navy veteran, had said he needed to send the professors to “boot camp” so that they would go along. In a phone call later with The Chronicle, Walker realized the full measure of what he’d said. He wondered aloud whether he had sunk his career.
Combining graduate studies and institutional effectiveness | “The biggest improvement that could be made is to make sure that everybody realizes that institutional effectiveness is not something that is only done at one point, and it’s not something that people should view as being a burdensome thing, but that it’s really done to ensure that each program is in fact continuously improving,” said Boulahanis.