Looking back at New England higher ed and its impact on the economy and quality of life ...
From 1990 to 2010, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney wrote quarterly columns on angles in higher education and New England for The New England Journal of Higher Education and its predecessor Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education. Here are links to these “Editor’s M...
A few items from the quarantine …
Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs ado...
Every September, I get a new fix of inspiration at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) summit of innovators. Last week, I was at BIF’s 12th summit, my sixth. My main inspiration this year came from Dave Gray. The founder of the strategic design consultancy XPLANE, co-founder of Boardthing and author of Liminal Thinking gave a simple message: Shut off autopilot. As he said, the only place we...
Pecking orders. Harvard and Cornell recently tied for the U.S. higher ed institutions that educate the most CEOs who run U.S. companies listed by Forbes in the top 100. We would often pore over such lists of where top CEOs went to college and meticulously note how many graduated from New England colleges. The predictable story was how many went to Harvard, Yale and MIT and how few went to New Engl...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
President Obama will outline a plan during next week's State of the Union address to make the first two years of community college tuition-free.
The president's proposal—if adopted by the Republican Congress—could smooth America's notorious educational inequity while acknowledging that some college education is as important economically today as high school education was nearly a cent...
Looking back at New England higher ed and its impact on the economy and quality of life ...
From 1990 to 2010, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney wrote quarterly columns on angles in higher education and New England for The New England Journal of Higher Education and its predecessor Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education. Here are links to these “Editor’s M... 
A few items from the quarantine …
Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs ado... 
Every September, I get a new fix of inspiration at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) summit of innovators. Last week, I was at BIF’s 12th summit, my sixth. My main inspiration this year came from Dave Gray. The founder of the strategic design consultancy XPLANE, co-founder of Boardthing and author of Liminal Thinking gave a simple message: Shut off autopilot. As he said, the only place we... 
Pecking orders. Harvard and Cornell recently tied for the U.S. higher ed institutions that educate the most CEOs who run U.S. companies listed by Forbes in the top 100. We would often pore over such lists of where top CEOs went to college and meticulously note how many graduated from New England colleges. The predictable story was how many went to Harvard, Yale and MIT and how few went to New Engl... 
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... 
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... 
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... 
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... 
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 ... 
President Obama will outline a plan during next week's State of the Union address to make the first two years of community college tuition-free.
The president's proposal—if adopted by the Republican Congress—could smooth America's notorious educational inequity while acknowledging that some college education is as important economically today as high school education was nearly a cent...