My father once told me that the genius of Social Security is that it’s inclusive: Every working American — regardless of socioeconomic class or skin color — pays into the system and is entitled to financial benefits. That’s why it’s popular. I didn’t know it then, but my father was describing “interest convergence,” a theory put forward by Derrick Bell, who said that white people support minority rights only when it’s in their self-interest. Bell’s theory might also explain why affirmative-action and campus-diversity programs that seem to focus narrowly on minority groups might stigmatize those groups further and breed resentment among whites who believe others are getting special treatment. But a provocative NPR piece by David Shih, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, suggests that we’ve been looking at those diversity initiatives all wrong. He asks, What if those programs actually help white people?
As Canadian universities seek to attract more international students, there is a need to recognize and respond to the diversity within this group and to question the binary categories of domestic students and international stu- dents. Relying primarily on 116 qualitative interviews with international undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, we utilize American students as a case study from which to explore the complex and blurred boundaries between these two categories. Americans resemble domestic stu- dents in some respects and international students in others, yet they are often less prepared to meet adaptational challenges because they have low expecta- tions of cultural and institutional differences. We compare the experiences of
Americans and international students from other countries, as well as other groups of students who fall between the cracks of the domestic and inter- national student classifications. We argue that, by targeting services on the basis of these broad administrative categories, categories that were created for financial purposes, the university reduces the take-up of the very services students need.
At a time when graduate schools are under pressure to produce more minority Ph.D.s, surveys at Yale and Michigan show the challenges facing nonwhite doctoral students.
Overview
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Introduction
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Growth of International Student Enrollment in Ontario
3.
Analysis of First Year College Students
4.
Analysis of College Graduates
5.
Conclusionsand Policy Implications
Students Will Rise When Colleges Challenge Them to Read Good Books
Colleges can not only help students past their immediate crises, writes Joseph Holtgreive, but also encourage them to unlock capacity that they didn't know existed and ways of tapping into it.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
College and university leaders have been consumed since last summer with trying to understand public attitudes about them, as surveys and studies -- like this and this and this and this -- have delivered evidence of growing skepticism and doubts about the value of what consumers and society get from higher education.
Gallup injected yet more data into the mix Friday, with a new survey that both reinforces the idea that higher education has seriously alienated white male Americans without a degree and underscores that people think very differently about the topic depending on the words you use.
This year, my first in a Ph.D. program, I counted how many times I said "Sorry!" in a single day and found that the tally reached upwards of 30. Each "Sorry," pronounced with bubbly inflection, was an apology for more than whatever I was ostensibly apologizing for: speaking in seminar, again, even though that’s what you’re supposed to do in seminar, or disagreeing, again, even though the discipline of philosophy trades in opposition. These local apologies were part of a global apology for existing in the male-dominated discipline of analytic philosophy: for being the wayward creature I am, 5-foot-2 and female but brash and contrarian.
In Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World, author Mike Bottery uses Rittel and Webber’s (1973) framework of tame and wicked problems across the book’s three sections. This situates and contextualizes current complex and seemingly intractable issues in education by connecting them to equally wicked issues in economics and the environment. Each of the three sections is comprised of three to four chapters.
predictable political camps. Gun-rights advocates called for expanded mental-health services, insisting that no law could have stopped an obvious madman like Paddock. Nonsense, gun-control supporters said; whatever Paddock’s mental state, the easy availability of firearms makes violence more likely.
I’ve been thinking about this debate following a recent suicide on my own campus, the University of Pennsylvania, where at least 14 students have taken their lives since February 2013. Whenever a suicide happens, the spotlight turns to mental-health services. Do students know whom to call in times of crisis? And are there enough services for
everyone who needs them?
In August, a report by Rand Europe confirmed what many had long suspected: that academics face a greater mental
health risk than the population at large. About two in five scholars have common mental health disorders, such as
depression or stress-related problems. Among the reasons behind this, the report, which was commissioned by the
Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust, identified environmental risk factors such as heavy workloads and lack of job
security and management support. But is there anything that academics themselves could do to boost their wellbeing?
Here, scholars from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience share their insights into how the
search for happiness should be conducted – if it should be conducted at all
I love math, but I know that I’m unusual. Math anxiety is a rampant problem across the country. Researchers now know that when people with math anxiety encounter numbers, a fear center in the brain lights up — the same fear center that lights up when people see snakes or spiders. Anxiety is not limited to low-achieving students. Many of the undergraduates I teach at Stanford University, some of the most successful students in the nation, are math traumatized. In recent interviews, students have told me that learning math in school was like being on a "hamster wheel” — they felt like they were running and running, without reaching any meaningful destination. A seventh grader told me that math learning was like prison, because his mind felt “locked up.”
In 2012 Sebastian Thrun, founder of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Udacity told Wired magazine
that in 50 years, there would be only 10 higher education institutions in the world and Udacity had a “shot” at being
one of them.
In 2012, Thrun was honored with a Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Award for Education.
https://blog.udacity.com/2012/11/sebastian-thrun-wins-smithsonian.html
By 2013 Thrun, concerned that fewer than 10% of original enrollees were completing their Udacity courses, declared
that Udacity offered a “lousy product.”
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
Year after year, school boards receive reports echoing what many before them have concluded — that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students don’t achieve as highly, or graduate as often as the average Alberta student.
Educators often call it the “achievement gap” — a large, measurable difference in how Indigenous students fare in school compared to students overall.
How do you teach the same concepts and skills to students with diverse abilities and interests? Different learning profiles? And how do you do that in real classrooms, with limited time to plan?
Fostering Mentorship
When he was an undergraduate at Denison University in the 1980s, Fred Porcheddu would have told you that his professors were mentoring him. They saw him as a strong student who could follow in their footsteps, and they groomed him to join the professoriate.
Today, Mr. Porcheddu, who is an associate professor of English and chair of the department at his alma mater, sees mentorship differently. It’s something that should be available to all students, not just those at the top of the class. And its goal should be helping students along whatever path they choose, not nudging them into academe.
When I was an advanced graduate student preparing to take my chances on the academic job market, I approached the head of the freshman-writing program for a recommendation. "What do you want me to say about you?" he asked.
The question caught me off guard. No professor had ever asked me that before. Without thinking, I told him to describe me as a "teacher-scholar." It made sense at the time, and decades later, I still see myself as some combination of teacher and scholar. So do most of us in academe, I believe — although scientists might prefer a term like "teacher-investigator." ("Investigation" was the all-purpose word used in 1891 by William Rainey Harper, the president of the newly established University of Chicago, to describe what professors would do there once the place opened.)
Higher education communications professionals need to understand and apply digital marketing as part of their toolkit in order to stay relevant in a highly competitive marketplace.
Digital marketing refers to the many ways you can reach and market to your target audiences through digital channels and devices, including social media, email, digital advertising, and landing page/form strategies.