Posts Categorized: Regionalism

Pushing Back on Idea of Learner-Centered Institutions

It is time to push back at least a little on this very fashionable rubric. While the NEBHE Conference on the subject was generally excellent, especially in the morning, its uncritical acceptance of the whole idea was worrisome. See Center of Attention: Learners. A fundamental problem is its metaphor. There can be only one “center” of anything, so the question is: In institutions of what use...

Trafficking in Economic Forecasts

NEEP delivers latest forecast ... this time with a special focus on infrastructure … Is it because the economy is not in crash mode (we don’t think) that the crowd at the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) fall 2015 outlook conference was decidedly smaller than in NEEP’s heydey? Or is it because it’s hard to get people to pay attention to regional issues? Especially infrastructure...

Autumn Almanac

NEBHE’s annual fall meetings explored the federal Higher Education Act and aligning state policy with higher ed … The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) held its annual fall board meeting last month in Mystic, Conn. In a session on reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA), Sarah H. Flanagan, vice president for government relations and policy development...

BIF and the Brains

Last week, I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep covering BIF2015, the Business Innovation Factory's summit of innovators. It was BIF’s 11th summit, my fifth as a guest. I was attending under a quasi-media category called RCUS, standing for the BIF mantra of “Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects.” BIF founder and "chief catalyst" Saul Kaplan opened the talks by noting that earlier in th...

Rebranding STEM for Millennials

What if schools in the U.S. treated their innovation and emerging technologies with as much glamour as they give to athletics? At the New England Board of Higher Education’s recent Advanced Manufacturing Problem Based Learning (AM PBL) Showcase, industry representatives addressed this question and discussed ways to improve the branding and appeal for STEM (science, technology, engineering and ma...

Scholarship Group Unveils Policy Agenda With Heart

After nearly 60 years of helping students afford college, Scholarship America unveiled its first public policy agenda offering a refreshing focus on “advancing equity in postsecondary education and strengthening support for low-to-moderate income students.” The priorities: Expand public-private partnerships Look to the private sector for experimentation, innovation and best practice...

Powering a Slow Recovery

The economic recovery is not jobless as economists once warned, but it is slow and uneven. Every month, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution reports on the number of jobs the U.S. economy will have to create to return employment levels to where they were when the Great Recession began in December 2007, while absorbing people who enter the potential labor force. At the end of May, t...

A Spectrum of Liabilities for Off-Campus Housing

Liability of higher education institutions (HEIs) for off-campus housing risks is tricky, focusing on the institution’s role in off-campus housing arrangements.If an HEI “assumes a duty” to its students who rely on that duty, it must fulfill the duty with due care. This general rule applies to off-campus safety: For example, if the college offered a limited shuttle bus service to...

What Philanthropy’s Paradigm Shift Means for Higher Ed Fundraising

This is an unprecedented era of human history, in which simultaneous transformations of every technically advanced field are being driven by the powerful technological revolution in information and communications. Technically, these transformative changes are “paradigm shifts”—a distinct kind of historical change in which the governing model of a mature field is superseded by a radically new...

Small Colleges Can Survive Despite Challenging Circumstances

Times are tough for institutions that do not have access to substantial endowment funds or benefit from a top ranking position. Whether with a rural or metropolitan setting, a large number of colleges are discovering that there is a limit to raising tuition prices. Prospective students no longer automatically queue up. And once the “at risk” notice is up, the perceived deficiency becom...