Posts Categorized: Homeslide

Learning to Do During High Unemployment

Even as the economy appears to have turned a corner, high unemployment persists. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the national unemployment rate teetered at 7.9% in January 2013, and New England’s was 7.3% in December 2012. Strangely, as millions nationwide struggle to find work, there are millions of jobs that remain unfilled. The BLS reports that on the last business day o...

Trendsetting: A New Way to Keep Up With Trends & Indicators in New England’s Education and Economy

Introducing NEBHE's new Trends & Indicators ... It should go without saying that data is tricky (or is it are tricky?).Take the issue of student aid as one example. Some states have annual budgets; some have biennial. Some states report all kinds of aid in one place; others leave it to observers to patch together the hodgepodge of merit and need-based programs from the state’s gener...

Tales from the BIF

Click here for videos of BIF-8 storytellers! The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) held its eighth annual collaborative innovation summit on Sept. 19 and 20 in Providence, and the key, as always, was the art of storytelling. No themes, said summit facilitator and BIF founder and “chief catalyst” Saul Kaplan. You decide which connections you can make, he told the 400-plus attendees. Granted...

Shifting Landscapes, Changing Assumptions Reshape Higher Ed

In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to provide all its citizens access to a free public education. Over the next 66 years, every other state made the same guarantee. Based on a factory-model classroom and inspired in part by the approach Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843, it seemed to adequately prepare American youth for the 20th century industrialized economy.Massachusetts may again b...

Higher Education Needs a Dialogue with the 99%

Higher education is at a crossroads, not only in the U.S. but also globally. This challenge is prompting an immigrant union, on the centennial anniversary of the “Bread and Roses” strike at Lawrence Mills, to once again take up the labor movement’s historic role of speaking for the common good and the broad interests of working people. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 61...

New Kind of Ellis Island as Second-Generation Immigrants Land on College Campuses

Demographics in American higher education are changing dramatically. A recent study by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) reveals that 11.3 million people ages 16 to 26 (one in four) are first- and second-generation immigrants. Moreover, the report continues, between 1995 and 2010, immigrant-origin youth accounted for half of all growth in the nation’s population of young people overall. This ...

Obama’s FY13 Budget Would Boost Community Colleges, Reward Tuition Restraint

President Obama's proposed FY 2013 budget would encourage community college partnerships with employers, target student aid for colleges that restrain tuition prices, and increase overall spending on U.S. Education Department programs by 2.5% to nearly $70 billion. That would be the largest percentage increase for any domestic department in the president's proposed federal budget for FY 2013, whi...

Letting Off STEAM at Montserrat College of Art

For over a decade, educators, government representatives, entrepreneurs, social scientists, economists and journalists have espoused a constant drumbeat on the critically important skills and habits of mind that students will need to possess not just to survive, but also thrive in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world. Each commentator, in his or her own way has underscored the need to p...

Implementing System-Level Graduation Standards

Driven by external pressure for increased accountability and internal pressure for improved learning outcomes, colleges across the country have been developing and refining assessment systems for several decades. In some cases, assessment results have significant positive impact, for example, when used to enhance teaching and learning or as a lever for organizational change. In other cases, the re...

LGBTQA: Big Letters on Campus

Editor’s Note: NEJHE has strived to document and improve the experiences of groups historically underserved by higher education, including ethnic and racial minorities. Academia is more tolerant than many sectors, but spending a brief time on any campus reveals that people who are “different” in any way are also underserved and underacknowledged. This article explores the particular situatio...