Posts Categorized: Technology

Dean of Women’s Deans (Book Review)

Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement: Emily Taylor’s Activism; Kelly C. Sartorius; Palgrave MacMillan Press (Historical Studies in Education) St. Martin’s Press; 2014. Remember when every coeducational college or university had a “Dean of Women”? It was a powerful and influential position, at least for the “coeds” under her charge (and it was always “her”). The dean of women...

The Short Life of a Provost: A Q&A on New Challenges for Chief Academic Officers

Whether dean, provost, or vice president for academic affairs, the role of the campus chief academic officer (CAO) has changed steadily from the on many current faculty and administrators remember when they began their careers. Along with traditional pressures related to governance, budgets and faculty professional development, CAOs also face new calls to raise their institutional ranking or to ad...

Reducing Math Obstacles to Higher Education

The last few months have brought changes in the leadership of public education in Massachusetts. The new secretary of education and chair of the Board of Higher Education both have deep expertise in education reform and accountability, and broad experiences in business. This new leadership could bring momentum for a "systems approach" to reduce the achievement gap and increase rates of high school...

Trying Times for “HEIs”

It’s an especially bruising time for New England colleges and universities, which we now call higher education institutions (HEIs)—to cover all the new varieties and hybrids. NEBHE has noted that the HEIs face threats based on shifts in academic content and delivery (increasingly online), student demography (diversifying but shrinking) and institutional finances (challenged). Plus, consid...

To Knock Down Barriers for Returning Adult Learners, RI Tries Something New

In a historic unanimous vote on May 20, 2015, the Rhode Island Council on Postsecondary Education welcomed College Unbound as a degree-granting postsecondary option in the state, designed to serve the more than 110,000 Rhode Island adults who began but did not complete bachelor’s degrees. The college is the adult-learning initiative of Big Picture Learning, a nonprofit organization dedicated ...

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...

Counterbalancing Student Debt with “Asset Empowerment” and Economic Mobility

Education provides one of the best opportunities for American children to build the capacity to climb up the economic ladder. It has even been called the “great equalizer” in American society. In today’s tightened labor market, providing equal access to postsecondary education is more critical than ever. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce projects that 70% of jobs by 2020 w...

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...

A Consortium of Consortia … and Other Collaborative Struggles

Do more with less is a rarely questioned mantra in an age of austerity. But higher education consortia can turn that declaration on its head, allowing each partner higher education institution (HEI) to do more with more. Consortia can offer ways to save money without killing jobs and valuable programs. The Higher Education Consortium of Central Massachusetts began getting Worcester colleges to ...