For the past 30 years, the student debt issue has been slowly simmering. Government loans quietly edged out grants as the primary form of financial aid, while college tuitions continued their rise. All the while, we piled debt on to students without adequately preparing them to manage it.
Now, student debt has come to a boil. An astonishingly high 30% of the 37 million Americans with student lo...
Southern Vermont College's recent first-year seminar, From the Shoes of Our Ancestors, was a collaborative effort with the nearby Bennington Museum and Lincoln High School in Yonkers, N.Y.
The students traced their roots by recording oral histories, documenting them through genealogical research, which included vital records searches and online investigations, and illustrating findings in famil...
In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.
The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Anthony Bryk, president of t...
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days and are being offered as a potential way to shorten the degree-attainment process and thereby reduce costs. With escalating tuition at public and private institutions and shrinking median household income, the energy around MOOCs is fueled by the question often asked by students, parents and policymakers: Can a meaningful higher educa...
The idea of “doing good while doing well” is hardly new. But the Y Generation’s response to it is different. They are literally taking on a youth revolution that extends from one part of the world to the other, while changing the conversation around social good and entrepreneurship.
My colleague Ahmad Ashkar, founder and CEO of the Hult Prize, one of the world’s leading pl...
Higher education officials have long been familiar with the concept of “summer melt,” where students who have paid a deposit to attend one college or university instead matriculate at a different institution, usually presumed to be of comparable quality. While melt may be a concern for individual institutions as they try to predict their fall enrollments, historically it has not been viewed as...
NEJHE’s New Directions for Higher Education series examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.
The convergence of forces driving change in higher education is transforming the academic enterprise—reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is and what the value of higher education is.
On...
Much has been written about the failure of “developmental education” in mathematics. Failure has not been our experience at Worcester State University. In response to concerns about both the placement rate into developmental math courses and the failure rate in those courses, we made substantial changes in our placement program and in our course delivery. We have decreased by 50% the n...
More than three-quarters of administrators, faculty and staff at Jesuit colleges agree or strongly agree that “admitting, enrolling, and supporting undocumented students fits with the mission of the institution.” And yet 40% recently said there were no known programs or outreach to undocumented students of which they were aware. There is then an obvious disconnect between a theoretical...
NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever
It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.
I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and “value proposition” of higher education. From Thomas Frie...
For the past 30 years, the student debt issue has been slowly simmering. Government loans quietly edged out grants as the primary form of financial aid, while college tuitions continued their rise. All the while, we piled debt on to students without adequately preparing them to manage it.
Now, student debt has come to a boil. An astonishingly high 30% of the 37 million Americans with student lo... 
Southern Vermont College's recent first-year seminar, From the Shoes of Our Ancestors, was a collaborative effort with the nearby Bennington Museum and Lincoln High School in Yonkers, N.Y.
The students traced their roots by recording oral histories, documenting them through genealogical research, which included vital records searches and online investigations, and illustrating findings in famil... 
In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.
The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Anthony Bryk, president of t... 
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days and are being offered as a potential way to shorten the degree-attainment process and thereby reduce costs. With escalating tuition at public and private institutions and shrinking median household income, the energy around MOOCs is fueled by the question often asked by students, parents and policymakers: Can a meaningful higher educa... 
The idea of “doing good while doing well” is hardly new. But the Y Generation’s response to it is different. They are literally taking on a youth revolution that extends from one part of the world to the other, while changing the conversation around social good and entrepreneurship.
My colleague Ahmad Ashkar, founder and CEO of the Hult Prize, one of the world’s leading pl... 
Higher education officials have long been familiar with the concept of “summer melt,” where students who have paid a deposit to attend one college or university instead matriculate at a different institution, usually presumed to be of comparable quality. While melt may be a concern for individual institutions as they try to predict their fall enrollments, historically it has not been viewed as... 
Much has been written about the failure of “developmental education” in mathematics. Failure has not been our experience at Worcester State University. In response to concerns about both the placement rate into developmental math courses and the failure rate in those courses, we made substantial changes in our placement program and in our course delivery. We have decreased by 50% the n... 
More than three-quarters of administrators, faculty and staff at Jesuit colleges agree or strongly agree that “admitting, enrolling, and supporting undocumented students fits with the mission of the institution.” And yet 40% recently said there were no known programs or outreach to undocumented students of which they were aware. There is then an obvious disconnect between a theoretical... 
NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever
It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education.
I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and “value proposition” of higher education. From Thomas Frie...