Posts Categorized: Admissions

The 2013 Guide Arrives

Announcing the 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities! The 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities, produced by NEBHE in association with Boston magazine, lists key data for each college, such as: admissions application deadlines and acceptance rates; faculty-student ratio; enrollment totals and breakdowns for part-time, commuting, female, international and minority stude...

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” Rebounds: Can MOOCs Educate as well as Train?

In the days since NEBHE convened hundreds of educators and opinion leaders in Boston for the University Unbound conference, we've received a surge of reactions including this one from George McCully, founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy. NEBHE has begun focusing the attention of New England institutions on the MOOC movement, which will affect them all. Already, within months of their pub...

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...

Developing Story: A Forum on Improving Remedial Education

Why is remedial or developmental education such a hot issue? Partly because it costs time and money and casts doubt on the elementary and secondary education systems that we assume will prepare students for college. The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) explored solutions to the problem at a recent forum in Kennebunkport, Maine, called “Ready for Real: Innovative Strategies for Im...

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...

Special Deliveries: Certified Nurse-Midwifery Programs Lacking in New England

With Boston serving as a hub of both educational and medical excellence, it’s no wonder that New England has a high reputation to uphold in both of these areas. However, Boston and the rest of the region lack a specific degree program that is putting New England below the radars of potential midwives. Certified nurse-midwifery is a popular field with registered nurses seeking higher education...

Shifting Landscapes, Changing Assumptions Reshape Higher Ed

In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to provide all its citizens access to a free public education. Over the next 66 years, every other state made the same guarantee. Based on a factory-model classroom and inspired in part by the approach Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843, it seemed to adequately prepare American youth for the 20th century industrialized economy.Massachusetts may again b...

Before We’re Up to Our Necks in Aggregators, Let’s Get Out Our Net Value Calculators!

No sooner has the Net Price Calculator wave crashed ashore, the next wave of college-choice transparency in the form of third-party data aggregators is threatening to engulf us. A Net Value Calculator can help us recapture the high ground. Since last October, Net Price Calculators (NPCs) have become a fact of life for American colleges and universities. Some are doing the bare minimum to co...