International
Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators (510 pages) | Education at a Glance is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides key information on the output of educational institutions; the impact of learning across countries; the financial and human resources invested in education; access, participation and progression in education; and the learning environment and organisation of schools.
Gender wage gap persists in Canada, but narrows with education: OECD | The gender wage gap persists in Canada but gets smaller with higher education, the OECD says in a new report.
UN call to ease visa restrictions for refugee students | UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, is calling on universities to support scholarships for refugees and on governments to invest in education for refugees and to ease the provision of visas for refugee students.
Developing a culture of transformation at universities | Higher education can only rise to the challenge of the changes buffeting the world and education itself shifts the culture of its own organisations, according to Richard Gerver, the opening keynote speaker at the annual conference of the European Association for International Education or EAIE held in Liverpool last week.
IN FULL: Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande on 2017 university fees | Our public universities are a significant national asset. They empower the next generation with skills and knowledge‚ and contribute significantly to the ability of our economy to compete globally through innovative and appropriate research.
Australian student fees fund university research: OECD report | Australian tertiary institutions siphon off a large chunk of their earnings, largely obtained from students, to pay for research that is of little benefit to students.
Outcry over new government Higher Education regulations | UK Higher Education institutions are criticising the government’s newly proposed regulatory legislation.
World University Rankings 2016-2017: The nine big challenges global higher education must confront over the next five years | To remain relevant in a rapidly changing world, the global university sector must work harder to convey its value to policymakers and the wider public, says Hamish Coates, professor of higher education, University of Melbourne.
U.S. National
Time to Degree: A National View of the Time Enrolled and Elapsed for Associate and Bachelor’s Degree Earners (36 pages) | This report examines time to degree completion for a cohort of students who earned an associate degree as their first and only postsecondary degree or a bachelor’s degree as their first four-year degree between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015.
What’s Causing The Increased Enrollment At HBCUs? | Historically black colleges and universities are having big increases in student enrollment. Dillard University president Walter Kimbrough thinks it’s because of increased racial tensions on campuses.
Underemployment in the Early Careers of College Graduates Following the Great Recession (NBER Working Paper, 51 pages) | Contrary to popular perception, we show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of knowledge and skill. We also find that the likelihood of being underemployed was lower for those with more quantitatively oriented and occupation-specific majors than it was for those with degrees in general fields.
Tougher Scrutiny for Colleges With Low Graduation Rates | A year ago, The Wall Street Journal called regional accreditors the watchdogs that “rarely bite,” and in recent months the federal panel that oversees those agencies has increasingly asked them to justify how they approve colleges with low graduation rates and high rates of student loan defaults. Today, the seven regional accrediting agencies took a step toward responding to that criticism with the announcement of a joint effort to further scrutinize institutions with extremely low graduation rates.
College Board: Reform Institutions to Curb ‘Undermatching’ | At a Capitol Hill briefing Tuesday, the College Board helped launch a new book that seeks to take the discussion on college match to the next level and bring about what one expert referred to as “Match 2.0.”
Is Political Science Too Pessimistic? | Jennifer Hochschild, who recently wrapped up a term as president of the American Political Science Association… thinks that her fellow social scientists — generally a liberal lot — have moved further and further away from the belief that individuals or groups can improve the world.
A Primer on the College Student Journey, Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (60 pages) | The United States’ impressive, if still incomplete, efforts to expand access to college have not been matched by comparable progress in achieving college success.
Education Outcomes: Report Exposes Depths of Colleges’ Completion Crisis | “The higher ed lobby doesn’t want any accountability—they want money, and they want money without limitations, without restrictions, without accountability to anybody outside the academy,” David Bergeron of the Center for American Progress said in an interview with ProPublica.
Gates Foundation Pushes More Data Tracking in Higher Ed, Linking Outcomes to Funding | According to the foundation’s latest report on its priorities for post-secondary education, one of its major priorities in the coming years will be to “[s]upport the development of a comprehensive national data infrastructure that enables the secure and consistent collection and reporting of key performance metrics for all students in all institutions….”
More Aid for the Needy | A new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics found that the percentage of both independent and dependent students who received Pell Grants increased from 1999 to 2011.
U.S. States
Iowa’s Catholic colleges unite in new partnership | The Iowa Catholic Collegiate Association, which was announced Friday, includes Loras in Dubuque, Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Mercy College of Health Sciences in Des Moines, Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Clark University in Dubuque and St. Ambrose University in Davenport.
Faculty at state universities vote to go on strike, no walkout date set | The tally of the three-day strike-authorization vote, released on Monday, showed 93 percent of the 82 percent of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties members who cast ballots voted in favor of a strike. The union represents 5,500 professors in the State System of Higher Education.
Institutional
[Western Michigan University] Revised strategic plan being implemented through 2020 | [T]he revised plan encompasses five instead of three years and has been augmented to include a series of measurable objectives for each goal, with each series of objectives aligned to a set of measurable strategies.
Lack of Student Participation at [Frostburg State University] PACIE Open Forum | The Open Forum was aimed at providing the opportunity for campus feedback from all representatives of the university, as the plan will affect everyone. However, of the 18 attendees, none were students.
Arizona State Aggressively Opening Doors for First-generation Students | Nieland — a first generation student at Arizona State University — is thriving, thanks to the support that he and his family have received from the American Dream Academy, an ASU program that works directly with high schools and parents to ensure that first-generation students are admitted to college.
Student Diversity at More Than 4,600 Institutions | The table that follows shows the race, ethnicity, and gender of students at 4,605 colleges and universities in the fall of 2014, the latest year for which statistics are available from the U.S. Department of Education.
The mindboggling barriers that colleges create — and that end up hurting their own students | Colleges and universities “make decisions that seem, on the face of it, reasonable, but in effect actually end up restricting opportunities for students,” said William Moses, managing director of education at the Kresge Foundation, which funds organizations that coach low-income and first-generation students through the complexities of earning degrees.
Zero Correlation Between Evaluations and Learning | A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
Pressure to Build the Class: 2016 Survey of Admissions Directors | The pressure on college admissions offices to produce a new class is getting more intense, according to the 2016 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Admissions Directors. And the percentage of colleges that met their goals by May 1, the traditional date by which colleges aim to have created their class, is down.
When a C Isn’t Good Enough | Two years ago, Arizona hired Civitas, an education technology company that uses predictive analytics, to track student behavior in an effort to boost student graduation rates. One finding jumped out: students’ performance in commonly required courses was linked to whether they would graduate or drop out.