Posts Categorized: Commentary

A New Way to Rank Colleges: What Percentage of Students Vote?

The recent March for Our Lives at hundreds of locations around the globe rattled my cage, particularly as I stood in the middle of hundreds of thousands of protesters in Washington, DC. Had we finally found a way to increase activism, to get more and more people of all ages and stages involved in the well-being of their communities? As I listened to the young speakers both over the loudspea...

A Harvard Attorney Whose Job Is Advising Undocumented Students in the Age of Trump

As an immigration attorney for the past 14 years in both private practice and legal services, I feel confident in saying there is not a single kind of immigrant or one kind of immigration story. There are multifarious individuals and families of diverse global origin bearing a cornucopia of ideas, perspectives, hopes and dreams. This past year, I was given another vantage point to observe the mani...

Changing Public Perceptions of Higher Ed

American confidence in higher education began waning at just the time that more people began to see colleges as more concerned about their bottom lines than about education and making sure students have a good education experience, according to Public Agenda President Will Friedman. That was among observations that Friedman made to educators gathered in Boston on Monday at a NEBHE panel dis...

Back in the Shadows? The DACA Saga Continues

From 2012 to 2017, nearly 15,000 New England residents participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA students are ineligible for federal financial aid programs, but state and institutional aid can flow to undocumented students. As of March 2017, 20 states, including Connecticut and Rhode Island, offered in-state tuition rates to undocumented students. It’s a mo...

About Face: Helping Leaders Avoid Prejudgment

I can tell within the first few seconds of seeing a student in my class, from their face, their clothes, where they sit in class, what their final grade will be and sometimes I’m actually right. – College Professor: Initial impressions of the classroom. As a teacher and designer of leadership classes, I am often asked to speak at organizations around the world about topics dealing with busin...

Leadership in Higher Education Is Due for a Change: Co-Presidents (Really)

Harvard University recently appointed a new president, Larry Bacow. He’s a well-known, highly regarded leader, having spent the better part of his adult life in educational administration. He’s been president of Tufts and chancellor of MIT; he also served on the Corporation, Harvard’s governing board, prior to being considered a presidential candidate. And the announcements have been clear: ...

New Models at Lasell: Q&A with President Michael Alexander

NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney had the chance to catch up with Lasell College President Michael Alexander about the small Newton, Mass. college’s plans to challenge the higher education business model. Harney: NEJHE recently published a piece on how data on colleges in NEBHE's 2018 Guide to New England Colleges & Universities—namely their acceptance rates, percentage of fres...

Organized Anarchies: 13 Steps to Building a “Learning Organization”

In many ways, higher education has not changed in the nearly 1,000 years since the first university was founded in Bologna, Italy in 1088. Many courses still have professors or “masters” lecturing in front of students, with exams being reproduction of facts learned in lectures. But in other ways, higher education changes daily. A brief perusal of headlines from the Chronicle of Higher Educatio...

Innovation and Accreditation: A Natural Pairing?

Accreditation has been in the hot seat of late. It is both faulted for being asked to do too much—serving a “regulation-by-other-means” function as gatekeeper for federal student financial aid dollars—and for asking too little in terms of student learning and life outcomes. Along with these criticisms have come some interesting proposals for improvement. The following summarizes the more c...

John Hennessey, Barrier Breaker

John Hennessey lived a remarkable, full life as a professor, as a leader in his field of management and business, and moral, ethical leadership, and as dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and provost at the University of Vermont. He was extraordinary on many fronts, a great man who lived in tumultuous times marked by world war as a young man, later as a graduate student and then ...