International
The Role of Librarians in Supporting ICT Literacy | Librarians in educational settings try to provide not only physical access but also intellectual access to recorded information. Because digital resources constitute a significant portion of this information, librarians need to pay explicit attention to the effective retrieval and use of these assets. More specifically, users should have the ability to understand both the information itself and the medium through which it is conveyed. These competencies are known collectively as information and communication technology (ICT) literacy.
What If Online Education Simply Doesn’t Work? | At community colleges, where those populations are heavily represented, nearly 60% of the school leaders responsible for online courses told a recent survey that their students performed worse in online classes than in on-the-ground ones. Less than 5% of program leaders at community colleges said students did better in online programs.
Reports of university funding crisis are ‘scaremongering’, says Hinds | Hinds said student numbers at UK universities and tuition fee income had increased since the financial crash, while most sectors had been forced to reduce their expenditure. “I do understand universities are facing some challenges, but reports of financial hardship across the entire sector is scaremongering,” he said.
Radical Democratic Education: Lessons From The Past, Hopes For The Future | Lastly, language matters. If we are to resist the withering betrayal of neo-liberalism we must refute its corrosive discourse of performance and profit. Instead of the now well-established managerial colonisation of education typified by the bullying machismo of ‘delivery’ which distorts and denies the necessary reciprocity of learning, we need a quite different discourse that names, invites and celebrates quite different realities.
How global HE collaboration can benefit local communities | Universities are increasingly playing a central role as hubs for (and drivers of) economic development. This is slowly becoming a reality across Latin America, but it is certainly true in the Mexican border region of Baja California, where CETYS University continues to serve as a critical component of regional growth. From 2010 to 2016, Baja California’s gross domestic product alone grew by more than 25%, to US$33.6 billion. As partners to local and multinational industry, universities like CETYS provide talent and intellectual capital that is foundational for such long-term growth.
U.S. National
‘The College Completion Glass — Half-Full or Half-Empty?’ | I continue to challenge federal guidelines for retention and graduation rates. Unlike the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks enrollment and awarded degrees to explore the six-year outcomes of a cohort of first-time-in-college degree-seeking students to include student completion anywhere, persistence anywhere (not just at the starting institution), college outcomes broken out by student age at first entry, and enrollment status in all terms of enrollment (not just the first term), the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) excludes transfer students, mature students, part-time students and students who begin college in terms other than fall.
How Ohio’s Education Spending Ranks Nationwide | Spending is more effective in areas with established Head Start programs, the paper said, and the marginal impact on school spending may also be dependent on the strength of the unions. The paper acknowledged that the exact context in which increased school spending would most likely improve student outcomes “remains an open question.” But one thing appears clear: By and large, the question of whether money matters is “essentially settled.”
U.S. States
Michigan has messed up education but it’s not too late to fix it | Today Michigan ranks among the bottom states nationally when it comes to helping its vulnerable students succeed in the classroom. And it’s not just students of color and poor students who are struggling. White and higher income students in Michigan are, too.
State, college officials say educational quality measures need a boost | Concerns about the value and purpose of higher education could be quieted if states adhered to better and more consistent standards for educational quality, according to a new report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and the National Association of System Heads (NASH).
Boosting Aid With a Tax on Business | Lawmakers in Washington State are taking a novel approach to funding higher education with a new scholarship program that will make tuition at the state’s colleges and universities free for thousands of low-income families. Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat, on Tuesday signed into law a work-force investment bill that creates the Washington College Grant. The scholarships, which will be fully funded through an increase in the state’s business and occupation tax, guarantees financial aid for more than 110,000 low- and middle-income Washington residents. The grant will help students pay little or no tuition.
Virginia public colleges freeze tuition for 2019-2020 school year | For the first time in nearly 20 years, every four-year Virginia public college has frozen tuition, this time for the 2019-2020 school year.
Fewer than half of public colleges are affordable to low-income students, report finds | NCAN defines an affordable college as one with a total cost of attendance not exceeding the combination of: its average grant and federal loan awards; average expected family contribution for Pell Grant recipients; average Federal-Work Study award; and summer wages, plus $300. According to this formula, about half (48%) of community colleges and one-fourth (27%) of four-year public colleges were affordable in the 2016-17 academic year. That’s down from 54% and 35%, respectively, in 2012-13.
Institutional
What Colleges Can Do About the ‘Dropout Crisis’ | They should focus on serving the students they have, says an Urban Institute scholar, instead of just drawing from the ranks of the well-prepared.
Competition for Employer Tuition Benefits | A new spin-off from Arizona State University, dubbed InStride, is seeking to tap in to some of the estimated $20 billion that companies spend each year on tuition benefits for their employees…Building off the high-profile partnership between Arizona State and Starbucks, InStride will help large companies manage tuition benefit programs while offering their employees online credentials and courses from ASU Online and a developing group of other universities; the first announced partner is the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Big Data And The Problem Of Bias In Higher Education | Decades of research on implicit bias show the limitations of human decision making across a number of settings. A recent report from the Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity specifically cautions against the use of predictive analytics. The report asserts that there are potential cognitive and systemic racial biases that impact both the design of data models and the interpretation of their findings.
‘Crisis on campus’: North Dakota college facing low morale, management issues, higher ed leader says | A higher education leader defended the North Dakota State College of Science on Thursday, May 30, in the wake of a negative state audit, but another leader says the school is in a crisis because of morale and management problems.
Ensuring the success of at-risk students entering college | And while those efforts should continue, the underlying data show that much more focus needs to be placed on what happens after these at-risk students enroll. The Pell Institute at the University of Pennsylvania has conducted a multi-year study not just on access, but also on bachelor’s degree attainment. According to Pell, if students are from the highest quartile of income, their odds of graduating from college are nearly 60 percent. However, if a student came from the bottom quartile of income, the likelihood of completing college drops to 11 percent.