International
Engaging first-in-family university learners | Globally, learners who are the first in their family to come to university are a growing and significant proportion of our commencing student population. Yet internationally, these high rates of participation do not necessarily equate to similarly high rates of success within the higher education environment.
Graduate unemployment plays key role in elections | With more than 24,000 members, the Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana, or UGAG, is one of the leading advocates for unemployed graduates in Ghana.
Gurib-Fakim’s vision for African science and innovation | Brendan O’Malley interviews the first elected woman President of Mauritius, Ameenah Gurib, who says there has to be a transformation within the African higher education landscape so that universities start to become producers of knowledge that addresses the fundamentals of Africa’s problems.
The Thusanani Foundation’s rejects ISFAP and other views on higher education | Despite a strong national policy commitment to making higher education accessible to poor and working class youth, a post-1994 neoliberal approach to education has underpinned the continued commodification of higher education as a private good increasingly inaccessible to millions of poor and working class youth.
Putting “Learning” Back in Analytics | Some organizations such as Educause and others in the United Kingdom and Australia have sought to define it, yet many discussions about learning analytics still lump it together with other forms of analytics. Most tend to equate it with “operational analytics,” which is an approach that aims to examine institutional data for discovering patterns of enrollment, retention, and other areas not directly tied to student learning.
Widening participation: any more for any more? | We need more higher education. That is a statement with which few in education policy circles would disagree.
World study sees warning signs for future R&D spending | A decline in public-backed science and technology research in a number of countries could pose a threat to innovation at a time when global challenges like climate change and ageing populations demand solutions, according to new OECD data.
Direct instruction is better for teaching children science, says OECD | The OECD has found that science teaching in schools is more effective if teachers use direct instruction to explain concepts rather than let students work it out for themselves in the increasingly popular “problem-based” approach.
U.S. National
After falling, college graduation rates begin to rebound | The proportion of students who started college in the fall of 2010 and graduated within six years rose to 54.8 percent, up just under 2 percentage points from the proportion who started in the fall of 2009…
The High School Graduate Plateau | The stagnating number of graduates breaks nearly two decades of reliable increases and comes as significant demographic changes reshape where students live and from what backgrounds they come. The pool of high school graduates is projected to become less white, more Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander, and increasingly located in the South over the coming years, according to a new set of projections in a report released Tuesday by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education | Our racially stratified postsecondary education system serves as a passive agent that mimics and magnifies the race-based inequities it inherits from the K-12 education system and projects them into the labor market.
Completion and the Value of College | The national college completion agenda has reached an inflection point. Republican control of the White House, U.S. Congress and most state capitols likely means less focus on the production of higher education credentials, at least those earned at traditional, four-year colleges.
The New Ph.D.s | American universities awarded a record number of doctorates in 2015 — although the rate of growth in the number of Ph.D. recipients continued a several-year decline. And the 55,006 recipients were more likely to be men and to be American citizens or permanent residents than they were the year before.
U.S. States
Report: Housing, Food Insecurities on Rise for Community College Students | Food and housing insecurities continue to be a major issue for community college students across the nation, particularly African-American and Southeast Asian students.
What Remains of Tenure | Faculty members across the University of Wisconsin System have fought — mostly unsuccessfully — a number of changes to their tenure protections since 2015, when the Wisconsin Legislature voted to strike tenure from state law.
California Today: Is a U.C. Education Affordable Anymore? | Since the lofty idealism of the 1960s, the goal of making college affordable for all Californians has been in dogged decline. Tuition at both the University of California and California State systems has tripled over the last 15 years. And now, leaders of both institutions are pondering another increase.
Institutional
Alumna, college affordability expert talks student finances | Goldrick-Rab, who is considered a leading voice on college affordability among higher education experts, emphasized the importance of looking at college finances from the student’s perspective.
Intellectual Property Problems | Rooksby, associate dean of administration and an assistant law professor at Duquesne University, details the ways in which universities have used patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets to become more protective of their intellectual property.
USM online learning gets No. 1 rank for affordability | The University of Southern Mississippi has been named No. 1 in the nation for affordability of its online offerings. Affordable Colleges Online ranked Southern Miss as the most affordable online college in the U.S.
The Case Against Oversimplified Accountability | A new study examining the use of labor market outcomes concludes that use of a single metric cannot accurately evaluate institutional performance, but that a mix of several different measures sorts institutions better than using no labor market indicator at all.
Meeting the Challenge of Demographic Change | If we fail to act decisively and collaboratively, college enrollments could decline at the same time that our need for college-educated workers will increase. Colleges must change the way they recruit and retain an increasingly diverse student body or they will face declining enrollments and declining revenue.
VP finalists visit for interviews | Three runners-up for vice president of college services visited this college Nov. 28-30 for a campus tour, open forum and daylong interviews. For nearly nine months, the role of vice president of college services has yet to be filled since the death of David Mrizek in March.
Note: Last Updated at 19:59 GMT
Comment: In light of the numerous News Items above regarding the education of nontraditional students, h|r brought attention to the plateau in the college-age population and the increasing diversity of the college student body in the next ten years in one of our first Briefs from March 2015:
In the economic environment, however, corresponding to what Moody’s calls a period of “overall stable enrollment,” U.S. higher education has only nominally recovered from the second substantial decrease in the traditional 18-24 year old college age population during the past twenty years. In 2002, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projected a decrease in the secondary school population beginning in 2007, similar to the decline in the millenial generation that came of age in the mid-1990s to early 2000s. More recently, the NCES released projections to 2022 affirming that the high school graduate population peaked in 2009-10 and would not again reach similar headcounts through 2022-23 at the earliest. The total number of high school graduates declines by 2% across the nation between 2009-10 and 2016-17, effecting the northeast (-8.8%) and midwest (-7.6%) most dramatically. While the volume of graduates stabilizes in 2014-15, the demographics of the American high school graduates will transform the college-aged population. The “white” high school graduate population reached its largest total in 2007-08 (1.9 million) and will fall thereafter through 2022-23 (1.6 million, or 16% fewer), while the nonwhite population will grow to be 50% of the American high school graduate population in the next 7-10 years. During the same era, in contrast, the federal government projects total enrollments in 4-year institutions and conferrals of bachelor degree to incrementally increase through 2022-23. In order for these two projections to be realized, 4-year colleges and universities need to enroll a growing a number of the traditionally underrepresented student populations in higher education: minorities, first generation, and low income students. In light of the current high school graduate and 18-24 year old demographics trends, the 2.7% revenue growth recently projected for 4-year private, nonprofit institutions by Moody’s Investor Service perhaps may be regarded as an accomplishment in light of the U.S. national projections for the baccalaureate-aged population and its demographics.
We emphasized that era of increasing college-tuition discounting and enrollment management had produced positive outcomes, but run its course. A new era of institutional effectiveness in higher education we believe is the next step. Learn more about the h|r approach here.