Without a college education, you can't get very far at all these days.With a college education, you can get far enough in life to be able to pay for that college education. That's the dilemma that faces most kids who are graduating from high school these days. Like the parents that work to avoid daycare, or the kid who works to pay off the car he uses to get to his job, high school graduates are confronted with the need to go to college in order to get a job to pay for the college they attended...
Higher education has been a growth industry in the United States, evidenced by swelling enrollments, expanding campuses and growing endowments. But the global economic crisis has caught colleges and universities in a vice. With their endowments shrinking along with stock markets, some schools may raise tuition more than usual, even as students complain it is already too expensive and struggle to get loans...At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the school’s US$1.8 bil (RM6.3bil) endowment has shrunk by 18% since the start of the year, said Sandy Wilcox of the University of Wisconsin Foundation...
...Tough economic times have come to public and private universities alike, and rich or poor, they are figuring out how to respond. Many are announcing hiring freezes, postponing construction projects or putting off planned capital campaigns. With endowment values and charitable gifts likely to decline, the process of setting next year’s tuition low enough to keep students coming, but high enough to support operations, is trickier than ever...
Nearly one in five college seniors and 25% of freshmen say they frequently come to class without completing readings or assignments, a national survey shows. And many of those students say they mostly still get A's...
This year, 386 four-year colleges and universities in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are participating in an ongoing collaboration between USA TODAY and the National Survey of Student Engagement to provide new tools and information to help college-bound students assess the quality of the undergraduate experience at schools they're considering...
...Educators love to hear about experiences like Carey's. They call them "high-impact activities," which stimulate and sustain the active learning that distinguishes highly engaged undergraduates. Whether these activities consist of terms abroad or internships near home, they're leaving profound imprints. Schools that successfully encourage high-impact activities win kudos from the National Survey of Student Engagement. They also testify to what can happen, on campuses of all types, when students are coached to follow their hearts and adhere to intellectual disciplines in the process...
...Keeping transfers engaged can sometimes pose a challenge. They lack the personal contacts on campus that other students have built up. And almost two out of three transfers are older than most of their classmates...Despite the challenges, many transfers thrive in their new settings. The NSSE identifies schools where transfers are as at least as academically engaged as their native classmates, thanks in large part to their schools helping them make a smooth transition...
Sometimes, professors are more than just classroom instructors. Sometimes they're mentors, or cheerleaders. Other times, they're citizens doing their civic duty...
...The real story is that good writing assignments are definitely a good thing. When courses provide extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the NSSE report found, students engage in a variety of positive activities. They are more likely to analyze, synthesize and integrate ideas from various sources. They grapple more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. And they report greater personal, social, practical and academic development...
The government announced plans Friday to expand purchases of the student loans it backs in an effort to head off a potential shortfall next year. While student loans are typically considered among the most secure assets — especially ones that carry government guarantees — the fear that has spiked financing costs for mortgage and auto loans has spread into student loans as well...
The U.S. Education Department will announce today that it is adding a third major component to its existing effort to ensure that, despite the worsening economic picture, student loan providers have sufficient financial backing to ensure, in turn, that students and families have enough federal help to pay for college...
The University of Iowa has capped the number of online students and courses that faculty members can teach after discovering a handful of professors received hefty bonuses for teaching up to three times more classes than their regular loads. Demand for online instruction is growing, leaving universities across the country to wrestle with the issue of how to staff the courses and how to pay for the professors who teach them...
Viewbooks, rankings, and accountability measures cast colleges as distinctive and readily comparable. But the average student experience doesn't differ that markedly among institutions, says this year's National Survey of Student Engagement. Rather, the survey found, more than 90 percent of the variation in educational quality occurs among individual students on the same campus...
Attending more than one college is increasingly common, and transfer students tend to be disconnected from and overlooked on their new campuses, says this year's National Survey of Student Engagement...
...What the moment demands, is that colleges and universities join together across their traditional divisions — public and private, two-year and four-year, high-endowment and low-endowment, sectarian and non-sectarian and all sorts of demographic variations — to suggest and advance the priorities with the potential to help shape the president-elect’s agenda...(Author is Arthur Levine is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, and president emeritus of Teachers College, Columbia University)...
