News Items from the Week of May 18, 2018

International

Universities issue warning over low applications from disadvantaged students | Universities don’t get enough qualified applicants from Scotland’s poorest communities to meet tough access targets, according to a new report.

Student Loans in Brazil: Investment or Expenditure? | Brazil is on the cusp of the big social changes. The government is working on a list of unpopular actions to tackle the current economic crisis. In the nearest decade, Brazil might have to move towards charging fees for public education, even if that means a change in the Brazilian Constitution.

Attacks on schools and universities are on the rise | The 300-page report, Education under Attack 2018, identifies more than 12,700 attacks from 2013 through 2017, harming more than 21,000 students and educators.

Machine learning algorithm is claimed to predict which students will drop out | A machine learning algorithm which predicts the likelihood a student will drop out of university is being trialled in New Zealand and Australia. Using 15 years’ of historical student data, Jade Software data scientists built the tool in just four weeks as a research project.

How global university rankings are changing higher education | University rankings do not just feed humanity’s competitive urges. They are also an important source of consumer intelligence about a good on which people spend huge amounts of time and money, and about which precious little other information is available. Hence the existence of national league tables, such as US News & World Report’s ranking of American universities. But the creation of global league tables—there are now around 20, with Shanghai, the Times Higher Education (THE) and QS the most important—took the competition to a new level.

U.S. National

‘My Professional World Has Gotten Smaller’ | Women who have experienced harassment have described its often-invisible professional repercussions — skipped conferences, spurned research opportunities, fractured personal networks.

Rising college rates spur Hispanic progress in higher education | As the Hispanic population in the United States has exploded, so has the number of Hispanics pursuing higher education. Between 2000 and 2015, the college-going rate among Hispanic high school graduates grew from 22 to 37 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Hispanic undergraduate enrollment more than doubled, to 3 million. More than a quarter of young Hispanics — 28 percent — now have at least an associate degree, up from 15 percent in 2000.

Achieving Equity in Education: Journalists as Truth-Tellers and Teachers | Gathered for the 2018 Education Writers Association (EWA) National Seminar, hundreds of education journalists heard from education experts, thought leaders and other fellow journalists about ways to make their coverage of today’s education issues nuanced, culturally relevant and enlightening.

Yes, College Is ‘Worth It,’ One Researcher Says. It’s Just Worth More if You’re Rich. | In that op-ed, Ellen Ruppel Shell, a journalism professor at Boston University, contends that college is not as effective a catapult for social mobility as students, families, and policy makers think, especially where low-income students are concerned. “It’s a cruel irony that a college degree is worth less to people who most need a boost: those born poor,” she writes. But the researchers behind a paper cited by Shell, “Degrees of Poverty: The Relationship Between Family Income Background and the Returns to Education,” say the professor’s argument mischaracterized their findings. College still largely benefits low-income students, they say.

U.S. States

Poll shows signs of support for increased higher ed funding in Michigan | Results from the April poll by the Michigan Association of State Universities (MASU) comes as lawmakers in Lansing near completion of a budget for the state’s 2019 fiscal that begins Oct 1. Nearly eight in 10 of the 600 residents polled by the research firm Glengariff Group Inc. said they either strongly or somewhat supported a “significant” increase in state funding for higher education to keep tuition down.

Ohio’s public universities seek to close attainment gap | Ohio’s 14 public universities, including The Ohio State University, are launching a statewide campaign designed to raise awareness of the value of public higher education and spur efforts to close the state’s increasing higher education attainment gap.

After Years of State Budget Woes, the U. of Illinois Will Hire Hundreds of Faculty Members | The University of Illinois froze tuition four years in a row, a move unanimously approved by its trustees again this past January. The university did not lay off faculty members like other state colleges, but in 2017, Killeen said Illinois wasn’t immune to the funding problems. The system was down about 400 full-time-equivalent administrative staff members in 2017, he said, “which has stretched us relatively thin.”

Public education losing its affordability | State University of New York at Fredonia President Virginia Horvath remembers when a higher education at a public institution was affordable for just about everyone. When she was student at the State University at Buffalo, the tuition was $300 a semester…Today, a semester’s tuition at a SUNY school is more than 10 times that amount — and that does not even include living quarters or meals.

Institutional

In defense of administrative bloat in higher ed | Seton Hall University Education Assistant Policy Professor Robert Kelchen offers an in-depth look on his blog at institutional personnel spending as a counter-argument to narratives against administrative bloat in higher education. He argues that student services and academic support have been the fastest-growing areas of higher education since the 1990s, but that institutional support has remained largely static over the measured period.

We missed the big data revolution. But we’re going to fix that at UNC. | Groundbreaking new big data studies showing higher education’s impact have yielded astounding results. We know our institutions are doing good work, and we must better use data to document and guide that work in the years ahead.

With enrollment sliding, liberal arts colleges struggle to make a case for themselves | [F]ive decades into a crisis that now has become existential, the to-do list in a session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities earlier this year, about turning this around, began with a remarkably basic question: “Define ‘liberal arts.’” That so important a task has yet to get past such an elementary question provides a confounding look at how far liberal arts colleges and departments have to go to make a case for themselves with students, parents and policymakers — even in a sector known for very, very slowly adapting to change.

Note: Updated with additional stories shortly after posting.