Posts Categorized: Students

The Massachusetts Community College Performance-based Funding Formula: A New Model for New England?

The Massachusetts community college system is entering a second year with funding for each of its 15 schools determined using a new performance-based formula. Under the new model, 50% of each college’s allocation is based on performance on metrics related to enrollment and student success, with added incentives for “at-risk” students completing certificates and degrees and those graduating i...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Ed Dept’s Studley on College Ratings, Feds

 In April 2013, 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. Past installments of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing: Carnegie Foundation Pr...

Fighting Campus Sexual Assault

Massachusetts has always led the way on higher education. Right now, we need to lead when it comes to the appalling crisis surrounding sexual assault at colleges and universities across the country. As parents, brothers and sisters, or friends—simply as caring human beings—we cannot hear and read the stories coming out of our colleges and universities with anything short of outrage. As the ...

A Case of Do or Die? The Fundamental Things that Apply to Online Leadership

This is the second of a two-part essay on the organizational implications of online distance education. Previously, I suggested that a gradual redistribution is occurring across American higher education, especially among adult learners. Local hegemony is at risk, as online interlopers, increasingly from top-tier universities and other academic behemoths, offer students choice they never had be...

Laying Down a Higher Education Innovation Challenge

Some notable developments in higher ed ... ... As Southern Maine goes, so goes the nation? College faculty and administrations get along a bit like Congress and the president. In the tradition of shared governance, the administration may offer a sharp change in business policy; the faculty applies the brakes. But at the University of Southern Maine, faculty leaders and President Theo Kalikow ar...

Online Leadership at the Vortex of Academic Destiny

This is the first of a two-part essay on the organizational implications of online distance education. As online education becomes more ubiquitous nationally, it becomes even more strategic locally on each college campus. But these efforts are not dispersed comparably across institutions. Some higher education institutions have been more dynamic and decisive, and others paralyzed to act. The very...

Community College Transfers Can Thrive at Best Colleges and Universities

Not surprisingly, low-income students are more likely than their higher-income peers to start postsecondary education at lower-cost community colleges than at four-year institutions. Add this fact to the booming enrollment at community colleges—approximately 7 million students or nearly half of all undergraduate students today—and one can quickly surmise that community colleges are an importan...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Education Scholar Adrianna Kezar on the Changing Faculty

In April 2013, 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. Past installments of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing: Carnegie Foundation Pr...

Is the Northwestern Decision a Wake-Up Call for Higher Ed Institutions?

The recent decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Northwestern University football players on scholarship are “employees” entitled to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) should serve as a wake-up call for higher education administrators. Part of a trend in which both the NLRB and unions are trying to expand the reach of collectiv...

Remember to Just Think

"I was just thinking" was columnist Mike Barnicle's lazy motif in the Boston Globe. Still, it's hard not to copy a lazy motif. So … I was just thinking ... Business leaders confirmed for the record this spring what they’ve been grousing about for years: Too few recent graduates have the skills to be good workers. That was the key finding in Northeastern University’s third annual survey on t...