Posts Categorized: Admissions

Career Coaching and Connecting: Improving the Talent Pipeline from New England Colleges to New England Employment

New England colleges and universities are often presented as a source of economic advantage in the New England states for providing a strong talent pool for regional employers. Yet, many state officials and others are questioning the efficacy of colleges and universities in serving regional labor market needs, as employers across New England are currently experiencing pronounced shortages of skill...

How to Beat the First-Year Blues: Advice from Somebody Who Has Been There

The students who walk into the office of Jaydeen Santos at the University of Vermont are burdened by a familiar litany of troubles. They feel isolated. Homesick. Overwhelmed by classes. Unsure where to turn. Santos, the student services advisor at UVM’s Mosaic Center for Students of Color, knows just how they feel. Because 17 years ago, she was right there with them, among the first stud...

Reclaiming Liberty

When teaching Political Philosophy to high school juniors in New York City, I would spend evening hours pondering John Stuart Mill’s treatise On Liberty, asking myself how to help students through the difficult syntax and even more difficult ideas. Often, students would say at the outset that they agreed with Mill, but when I pressed them further, I found more differences of thought. Indeed, the...

Celebrating International Education While Closing Minds and Borders?

In 2018, like in the past 17 years, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education have designated one week in the fall “to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchanges worldwide.” With this year’s International Education Week upon us November 12-18, we must ask which international education benefits we are celebrating. The very policies of this administ...

International Affairs: Survival Kit for Small and Medium-Sized Universities and Colleges

The future looks very bleak for many small and medium-sized colleges and universities in the U.S. According to a report published in Inside Higher Education, the high school graduation rate is expected to drop over the next seven years, and the numbers are aggravated by up to 4.5 million fewer babies being born since the financial crisis of 2008. U.S. colleges and universities can no longer mee...

Why We Must Rethink the Dialogue on the Humanities

As we see more U.S. higher education institutions dropping their humanities majors, we also read about the need for academia to actively defend the humanities. A number of colleges, including my own, are linking humanities and liberal arts majors with career-preparation programs. Some welcome this trend. Others view it as another reason to defend the traditional teachings of humanities in an era o...

What Would Higher Education Look Like If Run By IKEA?

Benchmarking higher education with the values, culture and service design of the world's most successful furniture company ... As a professor of entrepreneurship and management, who received his master’s and doctoral degrees in Northern Europe, I often come to think of IKEA as one of the most mission- and value-driven examples of disrupting an industry and the way people live globally today. ...

Preparing Students for the Future: Questions to Ask Colleges about Career Education

Investing in higher education today is an important decision for any family to consider. The media is rife with stories about the value of higher education, the return on investment and the significance of certain majors in today’s economy. Coincidentally, there is also extensive discussion around employer expectations of how colleges and universities are preparing the future workforce. Employer...

Help Employers Navigate Higher Ed Transcripts

These are very tumultuous times in higher education. Unprecedented numbers of institutions are facing closure, and quite a few are unsure how to proceed. Added to institutional pressures are issues around the ever-rising price of the college degree, and the overwhelming question as to the value of the degree, especially given the amount of debt that many students go into to finance their education...

Coming to a Campus Near You: Social Entrepreneurship Ed

Today, many higher education institutions are faced with declining enrollment, increasing tuitions and calls to infuse their degree tracks with more practical experiences for students, leading more directly to meaningful careers. At the same time, college students are searching for programs offering practical, academically rigorous work-related experiences that tie into their social consciousness ...