Posts Categorized: Commentary

Trends & Indicators: College Success

Updated November 2012New England’s traditional public and private nonprofit colleges and universities conferred more than 201,000 degrees at all levels in 2010—or more than 6% of the U.S. total, compared with the region's less than 5% of the U.S. population. However, those traditional public and private nonprofit colleges make up an ever-smaller portion of the U.S. total, and the U.S. ...

University Unbound! Higher Education in the Age of “Free”

Innovators and entrepreneurs are using technologies to make freely available the things for which universities charge significant money. MOOCs ... free online courses ... lecture podcasts ... low-cost off-the-shelf general education courses ... online tutorials ... digital collections of open learning resources ... open badges ... all are disrupting higher education's hold on knowledge, instructio...

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...

Breaking Ground in Higher Ed: A Look at New Models

The debate about the need for change in America’s K-12 education system has been raging for decades. Teachers, parents, administrators and government leaders alike have been grappling with how to transform a system that has been failing too many students for too long, according to a recent Center for Education Policy study. Until recently, the higher education system, on the other hand, has been...

Pardon the Disruption … Innovation Changes How We Think About Higher Education

The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. Indeed, that number is not far from the total of all the students enrolled there since the 19th century. MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,...

Quants at the Gate: The Unique Education of Actuaries

Universities typically emerge as gatekeepers of the professions, by wresting control over the training and certification that is required. The process generally begins outside academe—with apprenticeships and voluntary associations—and evolves toward a new norm of academic credit and degrees. Faculty then become the experts who determine the body of knowledge budding professionals need...

Can the Writing Center Reverse the New Racism?

Writing center workers are agents of change whose practices might reverse the resegregation and new racism occurring in our country. As leaders in the academy who advance a pedagogy of hope, writing center workers model a practice for bringing about a lasting and abundant multicultural community. Starting with the writing center at the University of Iowa in the first half of the last century, t...

In Rhode Island, Building a bRIdge to the Knowledge Economy

"Your students come here for four years and leave."For some time, this had been a common perception among many Rhode Islanders regarding to the state's independent colleges and universities. But that's changing.The state’s housing bubble had burst in 2006, leading to interest in developing less volatile economic sectors that would provide the stable high-end services jobs. By 2008, Rhode Isl...

Humanitarian Efforts

If you won the lottery tomorrow, how would you spend your time? Being a good social scientist, Jack Cheng, a former UMass Boston art historian, said he would go to Walmart, the new Peoria, and ask that question. “Most of them, after they buy a house, after they buy a car ... would go to the movies, they would read books, they would listen to music,” Cheng said. “They’d sit around cafes ...

Morrill at 150: Creating American Manufacturing Universities

Editor's Note: NEJHE devotes special attention in 2012 to the changing roles of land-grant institutions on this 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. Here, Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, proposes a new kind of research university ... In the 2000s, American manufacturing suffered its worst decade since at least World War II...