Posts Categorized: Commentary

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Deborah Floyd on Community Colleges Offering Bachelor’s Degrees

In this installment of NEJHE's New Directions for Higher Education series, Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviews Deborah Floyd, professor of educational leadership at Florida Atlantic University, editor in chief of the Community College Journal of Research and Practice and author of the book, The Community...

How Obama’s Tuition-Free Community College Plan Would Affect One State

President Obama started off the year with a proposal to make a community college education as “universal” as high school by making the associate degree or first two years of a bachelor’s degree tuition-free. The details of how this would be funded are still emerging. Should the proposal successfully move through Congress, Massachusetts, for one, stands to gain much from it. Here’s why: ...

Illegal Procedure? Title IX and Sexual Assault

Florida State University quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston was recently cleared of sexual assault charges following the university’s two-day investigative hearing. The high-profile investigation was launched under Title IX, which requires schools to investigate such allegations even in the absence of criminal charges. Winston’s attorney immediately took to his Twitter accoun...

Key NLRB Decision Opens a Wide Door for Faculty Organizing

In a stunning and far-reaching decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) opened the door to union organizing among faculty at thousands of private-sector institutions, both secular and religious. The board’s majority decision in Pacific Lutheran University (12/16/14), issued in the face of powerful dissents, will inevitably spark controversy and ongoing litigation both about the leg...

Living with Abundant Information: What’s a College to Do?

With its October 2014 daylong conference on competency-based education and Higher Education Innovation Challenge (HEIC), the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) has firmly grasped the horns of disruptive change. It is creating a space in which New England states and institutions can wrestle with the critical issues driven by abundant information. Collectively, these issues encompass ever...

Amid Focus on Affordability, a Call to See HEIs as Laboratories where Getting it Right the First Time Matters Less than Learning from Mistakes

We are familiar with the Greek concept of chronos, or chronological time, of which we too often lament there is not enough. Perhaps we should embrace the other Greek concept of time: kairos, or the right time, the time when something remarkable is about to happen. I believe that now is the right time for higher education to distinguish itself by becoming, from its leadership to its staff and stude...

Breaking the Teaching and Learning Gridlock

If higher ed is to remain relevant, faculty and students must find common ground on what it means to teach and learn at “college level.” In 2011, PayPal co-founder Peter Theil introduced the first Thiel Foundation Fellows—students who agreed to drop out of college to do scientific research, start a tech company or work in a social movement. Although this may have been seen as a ...

New England Takes Stock of Midterm Elections

The recent midterm elections brought New England two new governors. Rhode Island elected its first woman chief exec in Gina Raimondo (D). Massachusetts elected Charlie Baker (R), a former Harvard Pilgrim CEO and official in the Weld and Cellucci administrations. Otherwise, the New England corner offices cautiously welcomed back incumbents: Democrats Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, Maggie Hassan in N...

Mind the Gap … Between Grad Skills and Employer Expectations

Much has been written in both the business and higher education press about the gap between today’s jobs and the skills presented by those seeking work. The fact that U.S. Department of Labor statistics show 9.6 million people out of work with 4.8 million jobs still unfilled (August 2014) suggests a problem. However, little agreement exists as to the source of this disparity or what needs to...

View the Middle-Skills Gap Through a Competitiveness Lens

It’s not every day that one finds Harvard Business School (HBS) advocating for community and technical colleges. Adding its own voice to an increasingly loud refrain on the country’s "middle-skills" gap, HBS’s recent report co-authored with Accenture and Burning Glass, addresses this problem from a unique perspective—that of U.S. competitiveness. Bridge the Gap: Rebuilding America’s M...