Yale Beats Harvard: 3.4% to -2%  Quarterbacks at Harvard’s endowment keep getting sacked  more

 

Can Public Colleges Survive?  Years of funding cuts have made the question reasonable  more

 

Turn Off the Lights Lowering costs with efficiency can work  more

 

Admissions Offices Pressed to Fill Seats  Despite media hype to the contrary, it’s easy to get into college  more

 

Profs End Walkout  But more strikes are predicted  more

 

Politics and Political Correctness  Democratic history professors outnumber Republicans 33 to 1   more

 

Student Fees on the Rise  So much for digital media lowering costs   more

 

LA Tests Free Tuition  Hillary and Bernie talked about it; City of Angels is trying it   more

 

The Stone Stops Rolling at UVA  A two-year-old magazine cover story may finally be going away  more

 

 

href="https://www.paideiatimes.org/mission"r u s t | Who Needs a College Education? Americans losing faith in higher ed  more

 

The Golden State Upends the Golden Rule  That’s how some view new California law directed at private colleges more

 

Feds Push Accreditors on Grad Rates If you’re not graduating 25% of your students, look out  more

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P U R P O S E

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CURRICULUM

 

Biff! Bam! Kapow!: The Philosophy of Superheroes If that college course leaves you cold, read What Will They Learn: 2016-17–A Survey of Core Requirements at Our Nation’s Colleges and Universities, a project of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. ACTA examines requirements for required core courses at over 1,100 colleges and universities to see if they meet “the challenges of the modern workforce and the demands of engaged citizenship”: composition, literature, foreign language competence, history, economics, math, and a natural science. A college got an “A” if it required six or seven of those subjects and an “F” if it required zero or one.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

“Future-Proofing” Careers  Speaking of “the challenges of the modern workforce,” a new study from Oxford warns that half of today’s jobs will soon be lost to automation. So reports Joe Pinsker, an associate editor at The Atlantic, who solicited advice from professors of economics, information technology, and public policy, and business authors and directors of economic and employment programs on what students should learn in order to make themselves employable. Though STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math) remain a popular recommendation, one expert thought the field would soon be glutted; others considered good writing and communication skills still essential.  TO THE TOP

 

 Sources & Further Reading

 

What Students Think About Technology on Campus Do students really care about the tech-based projects and initiatives that campus administrations love spending so much time and money on? The editors of eCampus News analyzed their own reporting to find out. Here are three (of five) takeaways: (1) 70 percent of students say that campus technology needs a major overhaul, thanks to a lack of digital options and tedious online protocols. (2) A majority of Gen Z students still prefer studying with paper materials, but they also expect resources and texts to be available online for anytime, anywhere access. (3) Although technology is woven into their lives, most students have no interest in IT-based careers.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Self-Censorship in Academia   Whether they’re teaching the History of the Holocaust or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, professors are under intense pressure to tiptoe around subjects that students find “sensitive” or “challenging.” As a result, far too many academics are censoring themselves, and the number of topics deemed sensitive will only continue to expand. So says Fred Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, in his new book, What's Happened to the University?: A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation. Even in the general culture clowns are losing out. And that was before Halloween, which had its own frightening lessons for higher ed.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Making the Case for the Liberal Arts—and Bob Dylan  Classes in Bob Dylan—the songwriter, singer and now surprise winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature—have long been big on campuses. Many students and intellectuals alike quote Dylan as if he were Shakespeare. The good news is that the job market is improving for those who study Shakespeare and Plato (as well as Dylan). Research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 2015 liberal arts grads were earning more than their counterparts a year earlier and were also more likely to be working full time. And a new report from the Hamilton Project shows that strong soft skills—noncognitive skills such as conscientiousness, adaptability and perseverance—give workers a big advantage in the labor market. What’s more, contrary to what many believe, soft skills can be taught—but the earlier, the better.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

COMMUNITY

 

$85M to Promote Diversity  The University of Michigan has committed $85 million over the next five years to promote diversity and inclusion on its Ann Arbor campus. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan, initiated by UM president Mark Schlissel, is made up of 49 individual unit plans from the university’s 19 schools, administrative divisions, student life, athletics department and health system. The announcement came just days after the discovery of racially charged “alt-right” flyers in various spots on campus.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

NCAA “Encourages” Administrators to Sign Diversity Pledge  The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is urging college administrators and conference commissioners to sign a diversity and inclusion pledge and “commit to establishing initiatives for achieving ethnic and racial diversity, gender equity, and inclusion with a focus on hiring practices in intercollegiate athletics.” An internal NCAA study shows that less than ten percent of athletic directors are African-American, while ethnic minorities hold only 13 percent of all administrative positions in college athletics. Conferences and colleges that sign the pledge will be added to a public listing on the NCAA’s website, but no sanctions will be imposed on those that decline to sign it or fail to fulfill their commitment.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

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governance

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TRUSTEES

 

Boards Should Back Teacher Training  The better the teaching the more likely students will graduate, says Kevin Reilly, founding member of the board of advisors for the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). Therefore, says Reilly, colleges need to provide ongoing professional development for faculty who, while experts in their field, might benefit from high-level development workshops advocating best practices.  TO THE TOP

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Shared Governance: Is OK Good Enough? A new report from the Association of Governing Boards concludes that the principle of “distributed authority,” known as shared governance, is “a basic tenet in higher education.” AGB based its report on surveys of 300 college presidents and several thousand board members as well as a focus group of college professors. Among the findings: boards and presidents felt there was no difference in the governance input from the changing face of the faculty and agreed that faculty members understand and respect the fact that presidents must oversee the entire college or university.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

 

ADMINISTRATION

 

It’s the Partisanship, Stupid  In a searing op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Charles Pruitt, a vice chair of the Association of Governing Boards, argues that elected officials, once “unified across partisan lines in not merely support of but also pride in their public universities,” have increasingly “retreat[ed] behind those lines to attack the schools.”  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Overseas Studies Take a Hit Three alums of Tisch Asia—who said they paid $100,000 to study at the now-defunct Singapore offshoot of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts—are suing NYU. Describing Tisch Asia as an “educational scam,” the three claim that they had to put up with “subpar” faculty, equipment and facilities, along with limited access to grants and networking opportunities. Promises of celebrity involvement didn’t materialize either: Oliver Stone, Tisch Asia’s “artistic director,” last visited in 2011. NYU has denied the allegations, but its financially troubled Asia branch, which opened to much fanfare in 2007, officially shuttered in 2015. If successful, the lawsuit could have major implications for the global branches of many U.S. universities.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

To Kneel or Not to Kneel The non-playing actions of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has chosen to kneel in protest during the national anthem, have brought out a variety of college copycats. At Oklahoma U., when football players protested a fraternity that had chanted racist slurs, Bob Stoops, head coach, marched his team, dressed in black, onto the field.  But when the band at East Carolina U. knelt during the national anthem in support of Black Lives Matter, some angry fans spit on the band during its halftime performance.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Yale Beats Harvard: 3.4% to -2%  Thus the Wall Street Journal announced a leadership shakeup at Harvard after its endowment recorded its worst performance since 2009, losing to Yale, whose endowment returned 3.4 percent, for the sixth year in a row. Harvard’s endowment lost $1.9 billion over the same period. Harvard’s losses reflect the challenges facing all college endowments. While its endowment is still the world’s wealthiest at $35.7 billion (about $10 billion more than Yale), some are questioning the school’s unusual “hybrid” investment model. Estimates are that Harvard spends at least $70 million on its endowment-management office—enough to cover the school’s $45,000 tuition for its 1,600 freshmen! Harvard has announced that it will hire a new manager (from Columbia University, which has the nation’s ninth largest endowment, which has had returns of 10 percent annualized the past ten years), N. P. Narvekar, previously with Yale, the school’s fourth endowment chief in the past ten years.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

Can Public Colleges Survive? Severe funding cuts are forcing state colleges and universities to make tough decisions about financial aid, curricula, research and other programs and services. Reflecting the “unprecedented erosion of public support” in many states since the Great Recession in 2008, public funding for higher education is down 56 percent in Arizona, 25 percent in Wisconsin and 33 percent in Pennsylvania, according to The Washington Post. This trend is particularly alarming given the fact that eight out of ten undergrads, or 17 million, attend a public institution. One of the hardest-hit states is Illinois, where funding is down 54 percent and students are fleeing to out-of-state schools. The Chicago Tribune warns that the state is undermining its economic future.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Turn Off the Lights: Lowering Costs With Efficiency  After years of promising to save money, some colleges are finally being forced to streamline operations and cut bureaucracy. The University of Maine, under its One University Initiative, consolidated the budget, legal, personnel, information-technology, insurance, purchasing and other departments from its seven campuses—cutting 37 percent of administrators, for a savings of $6.1 million a year. Winston-Salem State University is one of four universities in the country participating in the Purposeful Pathways Program, an initiative to lower the cost of college by reducing the number of credit hours students attempt. The average bachelor’s degree requires 120 credit hours, but students often end up taking more. Other schools participating in programs to help students graduate more efficiently are Community College of Philadelphia, University of Houston-Downtown and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.   TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Admissions Offices Pressed to Fill Seats Despite the media hype that it’s nearly impossible to get into college, the pressure on college admissions officers to produce a new class keeps growing, according to the results of the 2016 Survey of College and University Admissions Directors. The majority of those surveyed say that concerns about student loan debt is negatively affecting their applicant pool—nearly nine in ten respondents at private schools versus 51 percent of their public school counterparts agree. Only 37 percent of respondents had met their enrollment goals for the fall class by May 1 (down from 42 percent last year). In another survey the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) found that most colleges admit most students, giving grades and classes more weight than SAT or ACT test scores.   TO THE TOP

​Sources & Further Reading

 

FACULTY

 

Professors End Walkout─More Strikes on the Horizon? Thousands of University of Pennsylvania faculty members returned to the classroom after the union representing striking professors at 14 state universities reached a tentative contract on day three of the walkout. About 80 percent of the faculty had joined the strike, which affected more than 100,000 students at colleges across the Keystone State. The union, which represents about 5,500 professors and coaches, said it accepted salary and benefit concessions in order “to preserve quality education.” Strikes are still rare in higher education, but in the wake of the National Labor Relations Board landmark ruling that graduate teaching or research assistants at private universities can unionize (see “Singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ at Grad School,” Paideia Times Summer 2016), labor disputes could become more far more commonplace. TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Politics and Political Correctness According to a recent analysis, registered Democratic professors outnumber Republican professors nearly 12 to one in history, economics, journalism, psychology and law programs across the country. Of these, history is by far the most Democratic department, with more than 33 Democratic professors for every Republican. And as more schools strike the word “man” from their vocabularies—e.g., “freshman” being replaced by “first year students” or “frosh”—what about “the sexist Prince’ in Princeton?” asks John Leo, editor of Minding the Campus. One might certainly wonder whether political persuasions have anything to do with that question, but there seems to be some evidence that student evaluations of teachers have little to do with student learning.   TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 STUDENTS

 

Student Fees on the Rise So much for digital media’s lowering costs. According to a study by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, the transition to digital books and resources may be increasing student fees, not reducing them. Students in many courses are being asked to buy online educational materials that require one-time digital access codes, which come with an “access fee” of as much as $100─and there’s no sharing or trading or reusing. Meanwhile a controversial new student fee─although agreed to by the student government─may arrive at the U. of Maryland at College Park: a $34 annual charge to  support the school’s Title IX office. Not everyone was happy. As the Student Free Press Association put it in a headline, “Maryland students pay for their own sexual witch hunts with new Title IX fee.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

LA Tests Free Tuition As commentators continued to voice strong opinions about Hillary Clinton’s free college tuition plans, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti began offering free tuition at community colleges in the City of Angels─if you go fulltime. “We’re taking one barrier, one burden, away,” says Scott Svonkin, president of the board of the Los Angeles Community College District. “And we know if they go full time, students succeed in astronomically higher numbers.”  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

The Stone Stops Rolling at UVA After a three-week trial a federal jury found Rolling Stone magazine and one of its journalists guilty of defaming a University of Virginia administrator. The 2014 cover story called “A Rape on Campus” drew intense media attention and set off a nationwide firestorm when it hit the newsstands and was later retracted. Nicole Eramo, who w as UVA’s dean overseeing sexual assault cases on campus, sued, seeking $7.5 million damages, saying she was portrayed as “chief villain”—“an uncaring, callous and ineffective voice who sought to suppress” a rape victim’s allegations.  Such charges were not only untrue, claimed Ermo, but made her despondent and, according to The Washington Post, threatened to “ruin her career—and her life.” The jury agreed. Meanwhile, campus life remains a complicated affair as sexual assault─and the binge drinking that seems to go along with it─remain a front-page story across the U.S. (see Further Reading), while, according to the Wall Street Journal, college students are “flood[ing] college mental-health centers.”  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

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PUBLIC TRUST

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CRITIQUE

 

Who Needs a College Education?  Going to college is seen as a right of passage by many, yet Americans are divided on whether college is a good investment—with 52 percent saying yes and 46 percent saying no—according to a recent survey from Public Agenda, a nonprofit educational research and assessment organization. Seems a good time to pick up the 50th anniversary issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Past and Future of Higher Education.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

REGULATION

 

The Golden State Upends the Golden Rule California’s governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Sept 30 that will require private (primarily religious) colleges to make public any regulations that might be considered discriminatory towards the LGBT community. Though well-intentioned, legislators from California might do well to read the new report from the American Enterprise Institute, which warns that state regulatory agencies of higher education are poor overseers.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Feds Push Accreditors on Grad Rates The Department of Education (ED), backed by senators Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, and Brian Schatz, is pushing accreditors to increase scrutiny on four-year colleges with graduation rates under 25 percent and two-year colleges with rates under 15 percent. The president of the Southern Association of Colleges & School Commissions says her group is asking ED to seek the most accurate data since different agencies seem to arrive at different conclusions regarding student outcomes.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Holding Ed Schools Accountable  Should teacher colleges bear some responsibility for the quality of their graduates in the classroom? The U.S. Education Department obviously thinks so, judging by its newly revised guidelines for teacher-prep programs—perhaps the strictest federal accountability rules in all of higher ed. Under the new rules, low-performing programs could lose access to federal TEACH grants. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and more than two dozen other organizations registered their objections, calling the regs “unfunded mandates” that “encroach… on both local and state decision making” and “the academic autonomy of higher education.”     TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

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EMERGENT ORDERS

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HIGHER EDUCATION

 

How “Financialization” is Leading Colleges to Disaster That’s part of the audacious headline in a lengthy New York Review of Books feature focusing on seven recent books that, according to Rana Foroohar, prove the ruin that is higher education financing. Foroohar, an assistant managing editor at Time and the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, blames “neoliberal” economic practices—such as letting the unfettered market determine how resources are allotted and “the subsequent financialization of everything”—for the student debt crisis, diploma mills, skyrocketing tuition, and just about every higher ed ill. Mentioned in Foroohar’s review is William Bowen, whom NPR called The Man Who Shed Light on Why College Keeps Getting More Expensive. Bowen died at age 83 on October 20, in Princeton, where he was also a “popular provost” of the Ivy League college in that town.  Among his many accomplishments, reported The New York Times, was “transforming Princeton from a fusty, predominantly white male preserve to a more diverse and inclusive institution.”     TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Rethinking Bankruptcy U.S. bankruptcy laws are designed to help people and businesses get a fresh start financially. But in 1990, Congress amended the Bankruptcy Code, making for-profit colleges seeking such protection instantly ineligible for Title IV federal grants and loans. The Department of Education then took it a step further: forever barring them from the federal student aid programs. While schools today can declare bankruptcy, it’s the educational equivalent of “assisted suicide… with the U.S. Department of Education as Dr. Kevorkian,” say two attorneys and bankruptcy experts in the latest issue of Trusteeship. TO THE TOP

​Sources & Further Reading

 

The Innocent Victims in the War on For-Profit Schools The Obama administration proclaimed victory with the closure of ITT Tech on September 6 (see “Who to Trust, Expert or Market?” Paideia Times, Summer 2016), but what about the innocent victims in the “assault on for-profit schools”: the nontraditional students—full-time workers, single moms and veterans, mostly from low-income backgrounds—who attend these schools? In the wake of ITT’s closure, 8,000 employees lost their jobs and 40,000 students, including 7,000 vets, were suddenly school-less. Students were advised by the Department of Education to transfer to other schools or request a loan discharge (an option not available to students who transfer credits). In actuality, though, few community colleges will accept the credits. The effect on military vets is of “historic proportions,” said one analyst. The law makes no exception for restoring GI Bill benefits paid if a school goes out of business. As a result, many vets will have no recourse but to take out federal student loans and begin again at new schools.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

More Rankings  Oxford University has been named the top global university by Times Higher Education─the first time that a British institution has claimed the top spot─in part, for its record research funding. (After the killing of Cecil the Lion by a U.S. dentist, the school’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit received donations of more than half a million pounds.) Caltech, ranked number one for the past five years, dropped to second place. The U.S. has 63 schools in the top 200 on the list, more than any other country. In another ranking of top schools—the inaugural ranking of U.S. colleges by the Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education (see “Rankings: the More the Better,” Paideia Times, Summer 2016)—Stanford University took the top spot. Rounding out the top five are: MIT, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. A key component of the WSJ/THE ranking is students’ own views on the quality of the programs, not objective measures of test scores or acceptance rates.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

 

K-12 EDUCATION

 

Are Dual-Enrollment Students College-Ready? High school programs that encourage students to take college courses  are popular, yet not all K-12 CEOs are convinced they are proof of college readiness. According to a new survey, a quarter of superintendents believe that some dual-enrollment students may be intellectually but not  emotionally ready for college. In addition, many respondents cited cost as a barrier to implementing these programs. To further encourage college-going, if not readiness, New York City has announced that it will waive the $65 application fee to all City University of New York programs for public school students from low-income families, a move that will affect an estimated 37,500 students. More than half of the city’s public school students attend City University of New York for their higher education.    TO THE TOP

 Sources & Further Reading

 

SAT: Inconsistent and Biased? On the one hand, according to a Reuters investigation, the new SAT test stacks the deck against low-performing students; on the other, says the College Board (CB), which creates the test, it’s packing the new PSATs with opportunities for students who haven’t necessarily had them before. One of the problems is overly wordy word problems in the math section, which critics says unfairly measures reading skills. The good news is that the CB now offers free test preparation.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

GOVERNMENT

 

Obama Administration’s Impact on Higher Education In a 12-essay special report, The Obama Issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education examines the impact President Obama has had on higher education, from the so-called Scorecard to effects on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to the possibility of tuition free college. Wellesley president Michael Roth says that the administration’s new Scorecard focuses too much on salaries after college, thus discouraging careers such as teaching, firefighting and nursing, but praises the administration for its use of Title IX to deal with sexual assault on campus. Eddie Glaude Jr., a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton, accuses Obama of betraying HBCUs by changing the Parents Plus Loan terms and not including them in the “free tuition” basket.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

Student Loan Defaults Dip Slightly There’s a smidgen of good news regarding student loans: the percentage of students defaulting on them within three years of leaving school has fallen in recent years. But the numbers remain alarmingly high.  According to the Department of Education, 11.3 percent of the 5.2 million students who left school in the fiscal year through September 2013 have since defaulted on their federal student loans. That’s down from 11.8 percent for the class of 2012. (The default rate peaked at 14.7 percent for the class of 2010). This is one of the most closely watched metrics in higher education because schools with default rates of 30 percent risk losing access to federal student aid. Altogether, 3.6 million borrowers are in some stage of delinquency with their federal student loans. In the bad news column: a study by the Urban Institute shows that income-based repayment plans tend to help those who need it least—e.g., high earners with high credit scores.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

TECHNOLOGY

 

Graduate Programs Lead the Way in Online Education  With an already well-known on-site MBA program, Georgia Tech has proven to be a tech education pioneer by taking the program online─for only $7,000. The University of Illinois is now offering an iMBA, for $22,000, and is encouraged by the diverse response the program is getting.  University of Michigan, also an early adopter of MOOCs, has recently established an Academic Innovative Initiative for its faculty, undergrad and grad, to experiment with technology in the classroom. California has started an Online Education Initiative to let students take part in online classes in community colleges other than the one they physically attend. And several colleges are offering “micro” Masters programs, in which students can skip the admissions process and take a third or half of their classes online.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

CULTURE

 

Trends in Philanthropy: Donors Want Recognition Public affairs schools used to be named for government leaders—e.g., the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. But a new trend names schools after their donors.  CUNY’s Baruch College received a $30 million donation from Austin Marxe, an alumnus and investment banker, for its school of public and international affairs, the largest gift ever made to Baruch and one of the largest any CUNY school has received. In a nod to the importance of public education, Marxe says his father gave him two choices after he graduated from high school: go to a city school or don’t go at all. And in a nod to the donor, the school has been renamed the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. And George Mason University has announced that its public affairs school has been renamed the Schar School of Policy and Government, in honor of a $10 million gift from businessman and philanthropist Dwight C. Schar. In other news, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, the largest social work school in the world, is being renamed after Suzanne Dworak-Peck, an alumna who pledged $60 million  to the school.  TO THE TOP

 

​Sources & Further Reading

 

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