A review of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, by Cathy N. Davidson (New York, Basic Books, 2017); a summary of the recent announcements of a major restructuring of MIT, and a synthesis of other relevant developments.
It is increasingly obvious that we are living in one of the greatest ages of paradigm-shifts in Western history, compa...
In September 2016, I wrote an op-ed for Harvard Business Review called “We Need a Better Way to Visualize People’s Skills." In it, I describe a Github of competencies for the workforce, but here’s how the same idea would translate into higher education.
George McCully wrote recently in “Pushing Back on Higher Education as Trainer for High-Tech Jobs” (The New England Journal of Higher Ed...
NEBHE’s upcoming annual Leadership Summit scheduled for this coming October poses the question, “How Employable Are New England's College Graduates, and What Can Higher Education Do About It?”
The Summit will address numerous well-chosen, commonly current questions in and around this topic, predicated on the assertion that “New England employers consistently claim that they can't find s...
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...
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changes are “paradigm shifts”—a distinct kind of historical change in which the governing model of a mature field is superseded by a radically new...
In the days since NEBHE convened hundreds of educators and opinion leaders in Boston for the University Unbound conference, we've received a surge of reactions including this one from George McCully, founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy.
NEBHE has begun focusing the attention of New England institutions on the MOOC movement, which will affect them all. Already, within months of their pub...
Late last month, NEBHE senior fellow and Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Chair Charles Desmond and I launched a series of interviews with key leaders in New England philanthropy. Our goal was to paint a picture of what philanthropies see as the key issues and challenges facing higher education and how potential funders can have the most meaningful impacts on education in New England.
Our ...