International
The continued rise of East Asia and the Pacific in higher education | Interest in university rankings continues to rise despite strong criticism of their meaning, relevance and methods. QS’s 14th edition of its world university rankings, released on 8 June, considers more than 4,000 higher education institutions, although rankings are only disclosed for 959 institutions from 84 different countries.
Salary data lift lid on universities whose graduates earn most | Graduate salaries vary much more according to the university a student attended in disciplines such as economics, business studies and law than in humanities subjects, new statistics reveal. The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, released by the UK’s Department for Education, pinpoints for every subject area which universities produce the highest-earning graduates after they have been in the labour market for five years.
U.S. National
Quality assurance in US higher education: one size does not fit all | Earlier this year, we convened a group of experts and stakeholders from across the higher education spectrum to consider the future of quality assurance. We are publishing a set of recommendations informed by that discussion and our research on quality assurance in the US and abroad, in higher education and other industries.
Is Online Ed Missing the Mark? | According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, students who are the least well prepared for traditional college also fare the worst in online courses.
‘For the Common Good’ | Many histories have been written of American higher education, but Charles Dorn has taken a new approach in For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press). The book is in some senses chronological, telling the story of the founding of the early New England institutions and proceeding onward.
DeVos Will Roll Back 2 Obama Regulations, a Blow to Consumer Advocates | The U.S. Department of Education is beginning the process of rolling back two Obama-era regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable and helping students who may have been misled or defrauded by them: the borrower-defense-to-repayment regulation, which was scheduled to go into effect on July 1, and the gainful-employment regulation, which was already in effect.
Trump Signs Executive Order to Increase Apprenticeships | Citing the “increasingly unaffordable” cost of higher education and arguing that many colleges and universities “fail” to help graduates get the skills needed for high-paying jobs, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order Thursday that calls for the expansion of apprenticeships and more support for institutions that infuse apprenticeships into their coursework.
U.S. States
Class Warfare: Higher education is about to become the next political battlefield | For decades, both nationally and here in New York, elected officials focused on higher education policies when they were thinking about their legacies, from former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Higher Education Act to a grant program championed by U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell.
Guest View: Time to fix the damage done to our universities | Thanks to the state budget crisis, the higher education destination of choice for many Illinois teens is “out of state.” Every year, about 32,000 Illinois high school grads go out-of-state to college while only about 16,000 out-of-staters come here.
Pensions blamed for college costs pushing through the roof | Eastern Illinois University’s (EIU) average cost of tuition and fees increased by 78 percent over the course of 10 years, according to an Illinois Policy Institute report on the state’s higher education crisis.
Institutional
Baylor provost Jones resigns after one year in the role | After about one year in the role, Baylor University Executive Vice President and Provost L. Gregory Jones is stepping down, the school announced Monday.