Throughout this past decade, scholars and higher education practitioners have asked: Who will lead the nation’s community colleges in the future? This question is especially critical today since at no previous time in the nation’s history have community colleges confronted such an array of monumental challenges. Presidents and key leaders are departing in droves; in a recent survey by the AACC (2012), as many as 40% of presidents plan to retire within the next five years. This phenomenon occurs at a time when our colleges are faced with a variety of previously unimagined threats, many resulting from the impact of conflicting socio-economic changes. Further, colleges must address the American education and skills gap in an effort to meet the emerging needs of the new knowledge economy, while simultaneously struggling with the task of educating those students with the greatest needs during a time of dwindling funds.
The question of how to hold Ontario’s universities accountable to the needs of students is a relatively complex one. One must be careful to balance the need for academic freedom with the public’s (and especially students’) right to be assured that its considerable investments into postsecondary institutions are being used effectively and appropriately. OUSA’s Accountability paper offers recommendations to improve quality assurance and strategic goal-setting in Ontario’s universities. In essence, it
describes students’ vision of to whom, for what, and how universities should be held accountable.
The University of Guelph (U of G) is committed to creating a campus founded on the principles of equity and inclusion. As part of this commitment, the University has undertaken a review of salary equity among the faculty, with a particular focus on gender equity. In addition to gender equity, U of G attempted to identify salaries that were unusually low compared to what could be expected based on various characteristics of faculty members. The review was overseen by the Office of the Provost, with support from the Office of Institutional Analysis and Research, the Office of Faculty and Staff Relations, and the Office of Diversity and
Human Rights.
It is necessary and desirable to enhance student learning in higher education by integrating multiple perspectives during institutional policy reviews, yet few examples of such a process exist. This article describes an institutional assessment policy review process that used a questionnaire to elicit 269 students’ perspectives on a draft policy document. Among the key findings were a lack of focus on using assessment to inform instruction, and a lack of clarity around the purposes for assessment. Within the final policy, there seemed to be an absence of focus on assessment as supporting learning and informing instruction, although there was a significant focus on the role of assessment in measuring achievement, despite students’ emphasis on the former two characteristics. The study’s implications point to the important theoretical contributions
students offer to institutional policy reviews, and the practical challenges institutions face in providing mechanisms that facilitate engagement and reflect shifts in culture.
As sites of work-force development, community colleges must be responsive to the demands of the rapidly changing job market. Now, many community-college systems are turning to job-market data that are more up to date and more precise than ever before.
When I was younger, much younger, I read a science-fiction book where life on a particular planet was difficult because the landscape was constantly shifting. If one substitutes conceptual and occupational for physical landscape, one could as easily be talking about Earth at the beginning of the 21st century.
Our system of higher education was designed for a stable conceptual and occupational landscape, the kind where our parents and their parents grew up. One went to school, maybe even attended college, and took a job. One retired from this job, perhaps having been promoted along the way. Many of today’s jobs did not exist during our parents’ days and those still existing often have the same name as before but require much more sophisticated skills. Jason Wingard and Michelle LaPointe note in Learning for Life: How Continuous Education Will Keep Us Competitive In the Global Knowledge Economy that we have left many of today’s citizens ill-prepared for the current occupational landscape. Our citizens’ skills, even many of our youngest, mismatch with the demands of today’s economy. Cynical politicians sometimes promise a return to the good old days, but they do so only
to collect the votes of the disenfranchised. Similar to other educated people, they know that the old jobs a e not coming back because the world has moved on; many people have not moved with it, are stuck in an occupational landscape that no longer
exists, and have become lost.
When Michael Maccoby wrote this article, which was first published in early 2000, the business world was still under the spell of the Internet and its revolutionary promise. It was a time, Maccoby wrote, that called for larger-than-life leaders who could see the big picture and paint a compelling portrait of a dramatically different future. And that, he argued, was one reason we saw the emergence of the superstar CEOs—the grandiose, actively self-promoting, and genuinely narcissistic leaders who dominated the covers of business magazines at that time. Skilled orators and creative strategists, narcissists have vision and a great ability to attract and inspire followers.
The times have changed, and we’ve learned a lot about the dangers of overreliance on big personalities, but that doesn’t mean narcissism can’t be a useful leadership trait. There’s certainly a dark side to narcissism—narcissists, Freud told us, are motionally isolated and highly distrustful. They’re usually poor listeners and lack empathy. Perceived threats can trigger rage. The challenge today—as Maccoby understood it to be four years ago—is to take advantage of their strengths while tempering their weaknesses.
For college and university presidents, the process of apologizing after high-profile missteps can seem to take as long as a tortoise walking a mile.
As a result, the actions Wednesday of University of California, Irvine, Chancellor Howard Gillman stand out as noteworthy. Days after news broke that the university revoked admission offers from 499 students, Chancellor Howard Gillman issued a public statement offering a personal apology. The university would admit all accepted students except for those who dropped below its academic standards, he said.
The relative speed and decisiveness with which Gillman acted raise the question of why more university presidents don’t step in so swiftly. Higher education’s recent history is littered with instances of leaders who seemingly hesitated to offer forceful apologies. Instead of pleasing the public by uttering two little words and a promise to fix
things, such presidents have been seen as incompetent, stonewalling or hemming and hawing.
The main players in First Nations’ public finance agree on one thing: The present fiscal regime is
broken, and needs to be fixed. Many of the arrangements that govern aboriginal communities’
revenues, borrowing and spending date back to the 19th century, and remain riddled with
paternalism, uncertainty and inefficiency.
First Nations finances are on a far more fragile footing than other levels of government in
Canada. The provinces and territories obtain a significant portion of their revenues through
federal transfers -- such as the Canada Health Transfer, the Canada Social Transfer and
equalization payments -- based on negotiated and pre-determined formulas. These
jurisdictions, as well as municipalities, also generate substantial tax revenues from a variety of
sources.
Independent college students, once considered “nontraditional,” now constitute the majority of students in the United States. As of 2012, just over half of all U.S. college students were independent (51 percent)—meaning they had at least one defining characteristic outlined in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), including being at least 24 years old; married; a graduate or professional student; a veteran; an orphan, in foster care, or ward of the court; a member of the armed forces; an emancipated minor; someone who is homeless or at risk of becoming homeless; or having legal dependents other than a spouse (Federal Student Aid n.d.; IWPR 2016a).
Working with, not on behalf of students with disabilities.
It’s been said that no one dreams of becoming an academic leader when they grow up. It’s a tough job that’s only gotten more challenging as budgets shrink, public scrutiny rises, and responsibilities continue to grow. It requires a unique skill set – part field general, part mediator, part visionary, and part circus barker – to name just a few. But what does it really take to be an
effective leader?
A philosophy is a set of principles based on one’s values and beliefs that are used to guide one's behavior. Even though your educational philosophy may not be clearly defined, it is the basis for everything you do as a teacher (DeCarvalho, 1991). It guides your decision making, influences how you perceive and understand new information, and determines your goals and beliefs (Gutek, 2004). An educational philosophy outlines what you believe to be the purpose of education,
the role of the student in education, and the role of the teacher.
Educational philosophies address the following kinds of questions: Why do we educate people? How should we educate people? How does education affect society? How does education affect humanity? Who benefits from a particular type of education? What ethical guidelines should be used? What traits should be valued? Why type of thinking is of worth? How should we come to know the world and make decisions? What is the educational ideal? What is the natural of reality? What do we believe to be true in regards to knowledge and truth? How do we come to know? What do you believe to be true in regards to humans and human
learning?
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.
Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) occupy a unique position in teaching and learning in higher education. Typically, individuals arrive at graduate school already socialized into disciplinary ways of knowing. GTA pedagogical professional development offers opportunities for GTAs to engage with current “best practices” and different pedagogical ways of knowing, and to initiate new and innovative practices. Research has demonstrated that as content knowledge and expertise develop, experienced instructors do not always recognize the ways that their expertise (e.g., how they organize materials or knowledge) can interfere with student learning (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). GTAs are therefore well positioned to scaffold learning for content novices such as undergraduate students. The teaching preparation and pedagogical development of GTAs is not just a resource to support learning; in fact, the teaching and instructional skills that GTAs acquire can be transferred to professional domains outside academia (Osborne, Carpenter, Burnett, Rolheiser, & Korpan, 2014; Rose, 2012). GTA professional development has never been just training to fulfill a particular niche or to achieve a singular goal such as teaching; however, the current post-secondary climate of accountability and quality enhancement does bring the goals and purposes of GTA professional development into view.
If any part of the university should understand leadership, it would be the business school. Not only do the faculty research leadership, they also impart this knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as participants from across the globe in a variety of executive education programmes.
This handbook is intended to serve as a resource for fculty, staffk academic leades and educational developers engaged in program and course desing/review, and the assissment of program-level learning outcomes for program improve. The assessment of learning outcomes at the program-level can assist in making improvements to curricula, teaching and assessment plans.
The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of organizational attributes on social integration in particular, and more generally on the student withdrawal process. Theory elaboration (the application of new concepts borrowed from other theoretical perspectives to explain the focal phenomenon) is used to help with the revision of Tinto's interactionalist theory of individual student departure. The existence of empirical evidence supporting the importance of organizational attributes in the persistence process makes the addition of organizational characteristics a logical choice as a possible source of social integration in an elaboration of Tinto's theory. The results from this study provide strong supp elaborating the revised version of Tinto's theory through the inclusion of concepts from organizational theory.
As Gallagher (2016a, p. xv) points out, universities, as well as offering an education, also deliver degree
certificates to those students who successfully complete their studies. Along with this credential, a student
receives a transcript that indicates the grade achieved (usually in the form of a grade point average)
together with details of the courses taken and the individual grades for these courses.
This state of affairs does not serve most undergraduate students well: the graduating student’s credential
and the associated transcript indicate the extent of the student’s knowledge of content, but neither directly
conveys any information to employers about the level of the student’s skills. As a result, employers, in
respect of most undergraduate degrees, must infer the level of skills from information about content
knowledge.
Can all the universities that claim to be “world-class” actually live up to the claim? If they could be, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of “world-class” that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the defi nition of “world” is determined locally when conceptually it should be defi ned internationally. This paper discusses different kinds of institutional quality, how quality is formed and how it can be measured, particularly by comparison. It also discusses the subtle but fundamental differences between quality and reputation. The paper concludes with the suggestion that world-class comparisons of research quality and productivity are possible, but that any broader application to the “world-class” quality of universities will be at best futile and at worst misleading.