Posts Categorized: Demography

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with ACE’s Molly Corbett Broad on Attainment

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 Carnegie Foundation President ...

Limping to the Top

New England is aging ... but gracefully? Last week, the Census Bureau reported that three New England states are the oldest in the U.S. in median age: Maine (43.5 years), Vermont (42.3 years) and New Hampshire (42 years). The other states in the region are old too: Connecticut (40.5 years); Rhode Island (39.8 years) and Massachusetts (39.3 years), compared with a national median age of 37.4 yea...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Lumina’s Merisotis on Increasing College Enrollment and Graduation

NEJHE's New Directions for Higher Education examines 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 Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future ...

Beyond the “Two-Body” Problem: Recruitment with Dual-Career Couples Support

“When both of the partners meet our standards for excellence in teaching and research, and where they can both make contributions to the curriculum, it’s a great way to both recruit and retain. ... It also brings us the greater richness of what two people bring.”—Cristle Collins Judd, Dean for Academic Affairs, Bowdoin College Though Dean Judd is referring to faculty couples, she could be...

We’ve Let Student Loans Become a Horror Story … Now Is Time to Face It

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...

Dreams Can Come True

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...

A Business School on a World Mission

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...

Can Text Messages Mitigate Summer Melt?

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...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the Credit Hour

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...

Undocumented Students Ask Jesuit Higher Ed: “Just Us” or Justice?

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...