Archive for the 'News' Category

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The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak

Published on March 31, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Kevin Carey | The New Republic | Original Article

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today. While General Electric remains an industrial giant, the U.S. Leather Company, American Cotton Oil, and others have long since disappeared into bankruptcy or consolidation. Today, the Dow Jones includes giant corporations that hadn’t even been created when Ronald Reagan first sat in the Oval Office. That transition is generally understood as the natural consequence of innovation and competition in a changing world.

Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research institutions created the Association of American Universities. All of them exist today. While a few have faded from prominence, most of the original members—including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale—are now, as they were then, the most sought-after and well-regarded American universities.

The historic stability of higher education is remarkable. As former University of California President Clark Kerr once observed, the 85 human institutions that have survived in recognizable form for the last 500 years include the Catholic Church, a few Swiss cantons, the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and about 70 universities. The occasional small liberal arts school goes under, and many public universities are suffering budget cuts, but as a rule, colleges are forever. More…

Image via The New Republic 

Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion?

Published on March 26, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Marc Parry | Chronicle of Higher Education | Original Article

Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.

Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?

Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience. More…

High Heels Beats Flats: Why I Left Academia

Published on March 22, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Hilary Levey Friedman | Princeton Alumni Weekly | Original Article

“Hilary, you know you shouldn’t wear high heels.”

No, I didn’t know.

“Believe it or not, we’ve been known to talk about female job candidates’ shoes in faculty meetings. You should go with practical shoes.”

Until that moment, I had thought that my nude Kate Spade pumps were practical. As anyone who has been through any sort of extensive job search knows, you have a go-to power suit. My power suit’s pants had been hemmed so they could be worn perfectly with the aforementioned accompanying power, yet now impractical, pumps.

Stunned, I stammered, “Got it, thanks,” before hanging up with my friend, a recently tenured professor in the sociology department I would be flying out to visit the next day to interview for an assistant ­professorship.

I tossed a pair of flat black boots into my suitcase — and realized that maybe this academic thing wasn’t for me.

Of course, it wasn’t the shoes themselves that sent me over the edge (though they were gorgeous). In a way, this had been a long time coming. More…

Image: Catherine Meurisse via Princeton Alumni Weekly

Satisfaction and its Discontents

Published on March 17, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Frank Furedi | Times Higher Education | Original Article

One of the striking features of a highly centralised system of higher education, such as that of the UK, is that the introduction of new targets and modifications to the quality assurance framework can have a dramatic impact in a very short space of time. When the National Student Survey was introduced in 2005, few colleagues imagined that, just several years down the road, finessing and managing its implementation would require the employment of an entirely new group of quality-assurance operatives. At the time, the NSS was seen by many as a relatively pointless public-relations exercise that would have only a minimal effect on academics’ lives. It is unlikely that even its advocates would have expected the NSS to acquire a life of its own and become one of the most powerful influences on the form and nature of the work done in universities.

The frenetic chain of emails crowding lecturers’ in-boxes and demanding that they hassle their students to complete the online questionnaire indicate that it is “that time of year” again. The annual ritual of imploring undergraduates to fill in the NSS is upon us, and up and down the country staff are exhorted to be on their best behaviour and to do the business. Multiple emails are also dispatched to students to inform them that their views are really very important and that, in any case, if their name is drawn they can win a “fantastic prize!”. Some universities hold special NSS weeks and devote considerable resources to publicity campaigns involving posters, postcards, plasma screens, lectures and online promotions. Sometimes it appears that universities spend as much time worrying about what students think of them as undergraduates spend worrying about grades.

World Bank Calls for University Autonomy, Quality Research

Published on March 12, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Yojana Sharma | University World News | Full Article

A major World Bank report on China has called for universities to be given more autonomy by the state. This is key if they are to make a substantial contribution to innovation that would drive economic growth and enable China to leap the difficult hurdle from being a middle-income to a high-income country by 2030.

Innovation would be key to future growth as the rapid economic growth of the past few decades begins to slow, said the report China 2030: Building a modern, harmonious and creative high-income society, published last week.

To this end China must improve the quality of research in its universities, give institutions more autonomy and link up researchers in national and international R&D networks. More…

 

Oxford Opens Up on Graduate Destinations

Published on March 8, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Simon Baker, Times Higher Education

While arguments have raged about the hike in tuition fees, with thousands taking to the streets to protest, another key element of the coalition government’s higher education reforms will be easier for students to swallow: the promise to “radically improve” information on university courses.

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction.

But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector.

The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates’ careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 – undergraduate and postgraduate – sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college. More…

Image from “Long-term destinations of Oxford Graduates,” via University of Oxford Career Services

Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching

Published on March 3, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning.

Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education.

In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.

“It really requires someone to be doubly expert,” Mr. Wieman said. As sometimes happens in some disciplines and departments, a few people develop deeper knowledge of pedagogy. These doubly expert faculty members, he said, can show colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching the discipline. More…

Image via jscreationzs

Europe Leads World in Student Mobility Despite Lack of Policies

Published on February 28, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Brendan O’Malley, University World News

Given the great importance that most governments in Europe attribute to student and academic mobility in public statements, and the 1.5 million non-Europeans now studying in the region, it is remarkable how few have comprehensive and systematic mobility policies, a just-released study for the European Commission has found.

“With few exceptions, countries vaguely endorse mobility as a desirable activity and adopt a ‘the more the merrier’ approach,” the report says.

Mapping Mobility in European Higher Education was released by the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) last week, although submitted to the European Commission last June.

It says Europe attracts far more foreign degree-seeking students than any other part of the world. Europe’s global market share has even increased in the past decade, despite growing competition worldwide. Increasingly, foreign students in Europe come from other world regions. More…

‘Name and Shame’ Warning Over Slow Research Reform

Published on February 24, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Brendan O’Malley and Jan Petter Myklebust, University World News

European Union Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has warned that she will “name and shame” member states that fail to speed up reform of research. “With Europe crying out for growth, the European Research Area can’t wait any longer,” she said.

“We can’t continue with a situation where research funding is not always allocated competitively, where positions are not always filled on merit, where researchers can’t take their grants across borders, where large parts of Europe are not even in the game, where there is a scandalous waste of female talent and where our brightest and best are leaving, never to return.”

Geoghegan-Quinn said she wanted an entirely new ERA partnership, with a stronger role for key stakeholders, and much tougher monitoring of member states’ progress. More…

Image Courtesy of Kaihsu Tai, Wikimedia Commons

How Higher Education Uses Social Media

Published on February 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Matt Silverman, Mashable.com

Schools are on a short list of organizations that have been notoriously slow to adopt emerging tech. But within the last few years, as social media becomes more integral to students’ lives, educational institutions are finally catching on, and catching up.

When it comes to higher ed, there are not only opportunities for digital learning, but digital marketing too. Some schools have taken the reigns on both sides, with mixed results.

The infographic below takes a look at how schools have fared with social media over the last few years — what platforms are best, where they’ve succeeded, and the challenges that lay ahead. Full Graphic.