Posts Categorized: Topic

Kavanaugh Campus Conundrum

The events surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court will have an effect of college campuses—and not just in the near term. This is not a political statement. It is a statement about reality. Campuses will be brimming over with concerns about how people treat each other, how people engage with each other, how people of different views can respond to each other and how we fo...

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 ...

unConference: Convening Women on Campus in the Age of #MeToo

Another women’s conference? Those three words haunted our Alumni Relations team’s discussions last summer as we considered which programs to fund for MIT alumni in the year ahead. The MIT Alumni Association had produced or sponsored a series of women’s conferences over the years. Was it the right time for another one? Even simply by event-planning standards, things in 2017 were differe...

Cultivating Self-Advocacy for All Students on College Campuses

Over the past year, an increasing number of students have come forward to speak out against school violence. And there has been increased attention placed on helping students seeking support if an incident occurs and exercising their right to speak out against those who may perpetuate such behaviors. With high-profile cases of sexual assault, such as Brock Turner from Stanford University in 2015 a...

A Tech Blame Game

It’s an unpleasant reality, but also an inevitable one: Technology will cause harm. And when it does, whom should we hold responsible? The person operating it at the time? The person who wrote the program or assembled the machine? The manager, board or CEO that decided to manufacture the machine? The marketer who presented the technology as safe and reliable? The politician who helped pass legi...

From Power Walks to Common Reading Programs, Modest Ways to Innovate in Higher Ed

I’ve grown tired of reading the literature on innovation in higher education, much less the offers for services, consulting, webinars and infrastructure that flood the inbox daily. So many of the recommended innovations are beyond the fiscal means of even the most venturesome administrators and their institutions. To this generalization, there are happy exceptions of course; but much of the lite...