International
President announces fee-free undergraduate education | Defying the advice of the commission he appointed to look into the issue of fee-free higher education, South African President Jacob Zuma on Saturday 16 December announced in a statement that the African National Congress-led government would introduce fully subsidised free higher education for poor undergraduate students from 2018.
Free university education for poor: breakthrough or hollow promise? | President Jacob Zuma’s announcement of free tertiary education for certain students is being greeted with cautious optimism.
The story of how Singapore became a research nation | Bertil Andersson became president of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University or NTU in 2011. He had first joined NTU as provost in 2007, after being chief executive of the European Science Foundation. As he leaves his post in January 2018, he looks back in this interview with University World News Asia Editor Yojana Sharma at 10 years of higher education in Singapore, the dramatic changes in the research and higher education landscape and the rise of Singapore’s research universities in global rankings.
U.S. National
Where the Grass Is Greener | With the dearth of available tenure-track faculty positions, professional organizations and others are working to change how Ph.D. programs prepare students for the careers they’re likely to have outside academe. In good news for those efforts, a new study of some 5,000 humanities and social sciences Ph.D.s finds that those working in nonprofits are more satisfied with their jobs than are their peers in tenure-track faculty positions. That’s true even for Ph.D.s who intended to work in academe but did not end up there.
The Missing Women | The study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that some 3,652 colloquium speakers at 50 selective institutions in 2013-14 were more likely to be men than women, even when controlling for rank and representation of men and women in the disciplines that sponsored the events — the factors often cited to explain gender imbalances in academe.
Enrollment Slide Continues, at Slower Rate | College enrollments in the U.S. decline for a sixth straight year — although at a slower rate — while the bachelor’s degree got more popular.
What Colleges Need to Know About the Tax Overhaul Poised to Become Law | Legislation championed by congressional Republicans to overhaul the nation’s tax code appears poised to become law soon, possibly as soon as Wednesday.
Report: Challenges Persist for Latino Students | According to a study published last week by The Education Trust, the gaps in graduation rates between White and Latino college students have persisted.
Will colleges become more equal in 2018? | In an ideal world, higher education institutions are supposed to work as engines of mobility — helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds earn the credentials they need to move up the economic ladder.
U.S. States
Improving educational outcomes of underserved students | Our community has many pockets of outstanding schools, but not all students and families are served equally. For example, only 50.4 percent of the county’s more than half-a-million students met the academic standards to apply to a University of California or a California State University in the 2014-2015 academic year. The outcome is that approximately 250,000 local students are underserved, resulting in reduced access to higher education and other workforce development programs.
Institutional
UC Riverside listed among ‘top-performing universities’ for Latinos | UC Riverside is among the 10 “top-performing universities” for Latino students, a new study found. The report, released Thursday, Dec. 14, by The Education Trust, put universities into groups based on their enrollment, the number of Pell Grant recipients and other variables. It then looked for schools that did significantly better — or significantly worse — than their peers. (Full report: https://edtrust.org/resource/look-latino-student-success/)
Note: IUPUI, the college featured in The Chronicle as an example of the AIR’s “new vision” and its benefits to Latino student retention, is in the bottom half of performers in the Education Trust report on Latino students. Moreover, according to the data set (3-year weighted averages), only 3.5% of the graduation rate cohort is Latino. The graduation rate of white students is 43.9% and the Latino graduation rate is 41.5%. Even if IUPUI retained every Latino student in its student body, the graduation rate would only go up by 2 percentage points total, or up to 46%! Thus, in addition to its condescending representation of institutional researchers, the way this article paints Latino students generally as a drag on graduation rates at IUPUI is reprehensible. IUPUI does not graduate its 96.5% of non-Latino students at adequate rates!
Tensions in St. Louis | Protests and altercation at St. Louis Community College board meeting highlight division over layoffs and a budget deficit in a large district that is losing students.
My Turn: Donald J. Farish: Tax cuts or educated workers? | Yet while the $1.5 trillion investment in this plan is real, the outcomes are hoped for, not guaranteed. This tax reduction is, in effect, a gamble. And most economists don’t expect it to pay off.
Note: Includes a few posts from final week of 2017.