According to a new survey of more than 4,000 undergraduates at 10 community colleges across the nation, half of all community college students are struggling with food and/or housing insecurity. Fully 20 percent are hungry and 13 percent are homeless. These numbers are startling and indicate the need for a multi-pronged, comprehensive set of institutional, state, and local policies to alleviate the barriers presented by poverty, so as to improve educational success.
In order to meet the demands in a cost-effective manner of an emerging knowledge society that is global in scope, structural higher education policy changes have been introduced in many countries with a focus on systemic and programmatic diversity. There has been an ongoing debate about institu- tional diversity in Ontario higher education, especially within the university sector, for at least five decades. This paper will provide insight into issues of quality, accessibility, and funding through the lens of the current policy de- bate about institutional diversity by using document and policy analysis, and by drawing on a number of semi- tructured interviews with senior university and system-level administrators.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being
knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In
every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.
Every year around this time, those of us on a college campus begin to engage in an ancient ritual — talking about the quality of next year’s incoming class.
The end of winter and the emergence of spring is when I start to overhear, or participate in, conversations with my peers or with admissions staffers about how smart our next year’s students will be. Our admissions office ranks prospective students on a numerical system, and everyone wants to know the new numbers: How many 1s and 2s are we getting? How many 7s or 8s? We cock our heads and consider the ratios, hoping for the best possible batch of students.
Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assumptions—eudaemonism, inherent value, and amplification. Secondarily, this connotation produces two important outcomes—a fixed point for coping with change, and benefits for constituencies who may never be affected otherwise. The meaning and advantages of responsible leadership as virtuous leadership are discussed.
When a person enrolled in university in 1967, he or she entered a world barely recognizable to most students today. Today’s students can only gaze back at it with envy.
Tuition was $2,750 a year (in current dollars), less than half today’s. Unlike many students today, few students then had to work during the school year to pay for their education, so they could devote as much time as they wanted to their studies.
As governments around the world struggle with doing more with less, efficiency analysis climbs to the top of the policy agenda. This paper derives efficiency measures for more than 8,600 schools in 30 countries, using PISA 2012 data and a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis as a method. We estimate that given current levels of inputs it would be possible to increase achievement by as much as 27% if schools improved the way they use these resources and realised efficiency gains. We find that efficiency scores vary considerably both between and within countries. Subsequently, through a second-stage regression, a number of school-level factors are found to be correlated with efficiency scores, and indicate potential directions for improving educational results. We find that many efficiency-enhancing factors vary across countries, but our analysis suggests that targeting the proportion of students below low proficiency levels and putting attention to
students’ good attitudes (for instance, lower truancy), as well as having better quality of resources (i.e. teachers and educational facilities), foster better results in most contexts.
The increases in tuition and fee prices in 2015-16 were, like the increases in the two preceding years, relatively small by historical standards. However, the very low rate of general inflation makes this year’s increases in college prices larger in real terms than those of 2014-15 and 2013-14. Significantly, and perhaps counter to public impressions, price increases are not accelerating over time. However, the average published tuition and fee price of a full-time year at a public four-year institution is 40% higher, after adjusting for inflation, in 2015-16 than it was in 2005-06.The average published price is 29%
higher in the public two-year sector and 26% higher in the private nonprofit four-year sector than a decade ago.
This report is part of a wider three-year program of research, Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market, which is investigating the educational and occupational paths that people take and determining how their study relates to their work. Previously the authors theorised that vocational streams, whereby people study for a field of practice rather than a specific job, could support occupational progression; for example, a ‘care’ vocation could include workers within aged care, mental health, child care and disability care.
This report looks specifically at mid-level qualifications, such as diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, and how they assist entry to and progression in the labour market. In order to explore these issues, the authors analyse data from the Student Outcomes Survey and the Survey of Education and Work. In addition, they undertake case studies of mid-level qualifications in engineering and finance and also examine the roles of physician assistants in health, and veterinary technologists in agriculture, to see how mid-level qualifications can be strengthened.
There can be little doubt that the reliance of community colleges on adjunct faculty has grwon significantly over the past several decades, especially with the cuts in budgets that institutions are being forced to make.
Problem statement: Graffiti is about self-expression. When youth cannot find people to listen to them, they may express their strongly felt, internal experiences and emotions safely by writing on public property. Thus, graffiti can be handled as a counseling issue. When this self-expression of a thought, wish, or attitude comes from prospective teachers, the difficult
work of sorting these issues out may help us develop better teacher-education programs and produce better teachers. Thus, this work takes the issue of graffiti by prospective teachers as an interdisciplinary issue, bridging counseling and teacher training.
In the summer of 2012, the Administration Committee proposed and agreed to the creation of a working group whose mandate would be to set recommendations on online teaching and learning based on the University’s particular situation. The Working Group on E-Learning was created in the fall and started meeting in November 2012.
The E-Learning Working Group met twice a month and heard the views of different people. It also undertook detailed research to learn about the benefits of e-learning and blended learning and reviewed what other institutions are doing on e-learning.
Perhaps we in higher ed should consider motivating students to graduate by focusing more on what they have left to do than what they have already done, argues Alexandra W. Logue. July 26,
THE PAUCITY OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE HAS BEEN documented over and over again . A 2012 Report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million engineers and scientists will result in the United States if current rates of training in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) persist (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012) . It’s not hard to see how this hurts the United States’ competitive position—particularly if women in STEM meet more gender bias in the U .S . than do women elsewhere, notably in India and China .
One of the commitments emerging from the Canadian Education Association’s What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education? workshop in Calgary in October 2013 was to convene a series of Regional Workshops designed to expand
the conversation about change in Canada’s education systems. To this end, in the Spring of 2014, similar workshops were held in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia with a final session held in Quebec in August, 2014.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
Many people who work at colleges and universities have expressed concern about the new administration’s executive orders and policies regarding immigration, as well as the reactions of international students and scholars to it. However, more fundamental issues related to the internationalization of higher education that should not be ignored have been emerging for some time.
In this age of global connectivity, internationalization in academe has become an increasingly normal practice. That has proven to be profitable for institutions and beneficial for the career prospects of international students. But even before the recent political turmoil and upheaval, not all has been as good as it may have seemed. Those directly involved in the process -- domestic students, international students and professors -- have been voicing dissatisfaction.
Over the past decade, the Government of Ontario has increased investment in postsecondary education significantly, including increasing operating grants by 80 per cent since 2002–03. These investments helped to improve access to postsecondary education, supported significant enrolment growth at universities and colleges, and drove community and economic development. The tremendous expansion of Ontario’s postsecondary education system was made possible thanks to the commitment of our postsecondary education institutions to access, and their willingness to respond to the demand.
Enrolments in graduate programs in Ontario and across Canada have grown substantially over the past 15 years. This growth has been supported and encouraged by strategic investments from provincial and federal governments. Although it has been argued that an increase in the number of Canadians with master’s- or PhD-level education is needed to support increased innovation and economic advancement, there is a growing view that many recent master’s and doctoral graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The current lack of evidence regarding the employment outcomes of master’s and doctoral graduates makes it difficult to evaluate the extent to which this might actually be the case. Several reports have highlighted the need for universities to document and report on the employment outcomes of master’s and doctoral graduates.
Friendships can blossom naturally between scholars and students, but are they always problematic? Nina Kelly
navigates the boundaries.