Posts Categorized: Economy

To Invest in America’s Future, Double the Pell Grant

Following is an op-ed from James T. Brett, president and CEO of  the New England Council, the region's oldest business organization ...          College affordability and access to higher education has been a topic of much discussion in Washington D.C. and throughout our region in recent years. And rightfully so. The price of higher education continues to increase, and millions of Am...

Teaching the Active-Shooter Generation

I’ve been teaching political science for about a decade now. I teach students about the international system, the functioning of government, foreign policy, national security. My teaching is based on my 12 years of higher education and shaped by my life experiences. I’m a Cold War kid. In grade school and junior-high classrooms, we had “duck and cover” drills for what to do in the case ...

Remote Courses Do Not Make an Online College

Remote learning was a key component of college strategies for addressing the COVID-19 crisis across the country. More than 1,100 colleges went entirely remote by March 2020, according to the education consultancy Entangled Solutions. The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College indicated that 44% of institutions had developed fully (or primarily) remote instruction by September 2020. This mas...

Trauma, the COVID-19 Pandemic and Immigration

How these forces intersect at a community hospital focused on the underserved ... A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual healthcare delivery system. Questions of effic...

Racial “Reckoning” (Via Zoom)

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black...

Practitioner Perspectives: The DOERS3 Collaborative on OER in Tenure and Promotion

In the following Practitioner Perspective, Andrew McKinney, OER coordinator at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Amanda Coolidge, director of Open Education at BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada, share the development of an adaptable matrix to help faculty include OER (Open Educational Resources) in their tenure and promotion portfolios.  A critical part of sustaining OER in higher...

Nurturing Nature: Leadership, Fractal Thinking and the Myth of Creativity

I love being a Black woman. I am awed by how powerful Black woman are and how unspeakably overlooked we have been because of it—consider Stacey Abrams and Keisha Lance Bottoms. Whether you agree with their politics or not, they have shown us that leading humans to and through change requires emergent thinking, creativity leaps and a loving ability to envision a more democratized future. They...

Colleges May Have Survived COVID … But Surviving Post-COVID May Prove More Difficult

Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost reven...

Addressing Climate Change the Smart Way

Climate change is real and accelerating. It requires an urgent response that focuses all the strategies and tactics necessary to stabilize the Earth’s temperature regime. The objective to guide research, development and implementation is straightforward: Achieve an all-electric economy. Simply put, all sectors of energy use—agriculture, transportation, industrial, residential, business, etc...

Why Civic Education Is Key to Protecting Democracy

In an era of rising authoritarianism, civic education and political literacy, especially for future voters, is key ... American democracy just survived a near-death experience during the slow-motion coup that was the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. It culminated in his rejecting his electoral loss and pressuring officials and political allies to back his claims that the election was ...