Monthly Archive for January, 2012

We’ll Always Be Here For You

Published on January 29, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Jon Marcus, Times Higher Education

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in southern California. But in a slumping economy, there is a lot of competition for the venture capital that fuels them.

So the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, usually deserted on a weekend, overflowed with a crowd of 350 on its annual networking Saturday, when entrepreneurs had valuable access to potential investors and prospective customers. Most of the people who attended the event had two important things in common, in addition to a desire to do business and make money.

First, most were graduates of USC’s Marshall School of Business. And second, they were living examples of the new ways in which US universities are working to engage their alumni at a time when such support is crucial.

“There has been a huge shift towards providing career services and networking opportunities to alumni, not just opportunities to meet and talk socially,” says Rae Goldsmith, vice-president for advancement resources at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, an international professional organisation for people who work in educational alumni relations and fundraising. More…

 

Dissing the Dissertation

Published on January 25, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

SEATTLE — The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University’s main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented.

So much has changed, he said, but dissertation norms haven’t, to the detriment of English and other language programs. “Are we writing books for the 19th century or preparing people to work in the 21st?” he asked.

Leaders of the MLA — in several sessions and discussions here — indicated that they are afraid that too many dissertations are indeed governed by out-of-date conventions, leading to the production of “proto-books” that may do little to promote scholarship and may not even be advancing the careers of graduate students. During the process, the graduate students accumulate debt and frustrations. Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, used his presidential address at the MLA to call for departments to find ways to cut “time to degree” for doctorates in half. More…

Image: Jomphong

Global: International Students Choices Changing

Published on January 21, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Sarah King Head, University World News

Not only are more students than ever before travelling abroad to realise their higher education ambitions, they are also increasingly gravitating away from traditional educational hotspots in order to do so – and this trend looks set to continue, with competition for international students growing worldwide.

Over the course of a decade, the number of tertiary students enrolled in programmes outside their home countries has almost doubled, from just over two million in 2000 to nearly four million in 2011.

This staggering increase may among other things be a testament to successful implementation of governmental higher education strategies and policies. But emerging patterns of distribution, belying general global economic and social trends, are perhaps even more worthy of note. More…

Image: nuchylee

M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

Published on January 17, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

James Marshall Crotty, Forbes Magazine

M.I.T.'s Simmons Hall

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience. More…

Image via Forbes.com

New University Ranking Aims for Objectivity

Published on January 8, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

By David Jobbins, University World News

A new university ranking seeks to use a sophisticated set of bibliometric indicators to rate scientific performance to establish the world’s top 500 research universities.

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 aims to provide highly accurate measurements of the scientific impact of universities and of universities’ involvement in scientific collaboration.

Of the top 20 universities, 18 are from the United States and two from Switzerland (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and ETH Zurich).

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology heads the table, followed by Princeton with Harvard in third place. Cambridge is the top UK university in 31st place, with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology the highest placed university outside the US and Europe in 58th place.

To Read More…

Image: 89studio

Journal Axes Gene Research on Jews and Palestinians

Published on January 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Robin McKie, The Observer

A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.

Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.

‘I have authored several hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,’ said the article’s lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. ‘I am stunned.’

British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: ‘If the journal didn’t like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?’

To Read More…

Image: jscreationzs