Posts Categorized: Schools

Foundation President, Professor and “America’s Best Social Critic” on Higher Ed and the State of Intellectual Life: A NEJHE Q&A with Andrew Delbanco

"It’s time, as the phrase goes, to ‘take control of the narrative,’ or at least tell our story better than we have been doing—to convey how hard most faculty work, how modestly most are paid, how little job security they enjoy, and, most broadly, that higher education remains an indispensable public good in a democratic society.” Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American Studies at C...

Young People Are Hungering for Conversation, Even on Difficult Matters … A NEJHE Q&A with Mary K. Grant of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute

"Regardless of disciplinary area, problem-solving requires us to ask questions, to be curious and open-minded, to think critically and creatively, incorporate a variety of viewpoints and work in partnership with others." In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Mary K. Grant, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, about the institu...

Undercover Professor: How Becoming a Student Made Me a Better Teacher

Three years ago, I graduated with an associate degree in liberal arts from Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Haverhill, Mass. Although I was one of over a thousand students to graduate that day, my situation was a little different than those of my peers. You see, I am a full-time faculty member at NECC with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. I had decided the year before to go undercover by...

Summer (Finally) … And Other News from the NEJHE Beat

A few tidbits from the editor after a long wet spring ... Unvites. I recently enjoyed a fascinating panel discussion on Protesting the Podium: Campus Disinvitations sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The panelists were former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, Middlebury College professor Matthew J. Dickinson and Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth. T...

Expanding Opportunities for High School Students to Earn Industry-Recognized Credentials

A shared challenge for our higher education institutions and employers is the large number of students graduating high school unprepared for success in college and the workforce. It leads to lower-than-acceptable college completion rates, particularly for our most disadvantaged youth, and a broken workforce pipeline that threatens economic growth and opportunity. The lack of skilled workers to ...

Taking a Twitter Dip in New England’s New Enrollment Pools

Our Twitter content allows us to bring readers a broader base of resources—a larger canvas, in a sense—than NEJHE articles alone. We urge you to see us as parts of a whole. Every NEJHE item automatically posts to Twitter, but we also use Twitter to disseminate interesting news or opinion pieces from elsewhere. These tweets are often juxtaposed with something NEBHE has worked on in the past an...

Do the Gains from GEAR UP Participation in School Fade Out in College? A Follow-Up

The federally financed GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program) was organized two decades ago with the purpose of increasing high school completion and college enrollment among low-income students. The College Crusade of Rhode Island’s GEAR UP program was designed as a long-term effort to buttress student success by providing various kinds of educational and soci...

A Former Southern Vermont College Provost Comforts Colleagues at the Endangered School

I was born in Lawrence, Mass., the first son of first-generation, working-class Italian-American parents—my mother, a nurse, and my dad, a shoe cutter in the old Everett Mills. The Everett Mills are across the street from the Holy Rosary Church. In that church, I walked barefooted down the aisle when I was 7 in an unsuccessful attempt to barter God for the sight back in my left eye, its cornea b...

Prospective College Students: Hiding in Plain Sight

As an unprecedented number of colleges and universities close their doors forever while others struggle to survive, a deep pool of prospective students—and the key to accessing them—is hiding in plain sight. Students from rural America attend college at lower rates (59%) than their urban (62%) and suburban (67%) counterparts and comprise only 29% of all students ages 18-24 enrolled in highe...

Could Addressing College Food Insecurity Be a SNAP?

Food insecurity—defined by the nationally respected Wisconsin HOPE Lab as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or the ability to acquire such foods in a socially acceptable manner—is a troubling trend on college campuses across the country, including in New England. For example: A 2016 survey by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education...