For many college students, mortarboards
aren't the only things up in the air on graduation day. The National
Association of Colleges and Employers reports that an estimated
1 million alumni dropped from their parents' health insurance coverage
upon graduating this year. Replacing that insurance is a problem
for former college students because they're often short on cash...
There was near-universal praise this
week as President Obama announced a plan to spend an unprecedented
$12-billion over 10 years to improve programs, courses, and facilities
at community colleges. The money, the president said, would position
two-year institutions to produce five million more graduates over
the next decade and to play a leading role in rebuilding the economy...But
after the dazzle of the dollars dims -- along with the novelty
of the presidential spotlight on what even Mr. Obama called the "stepchild
of the higher-education system" -- many questions will remain...
Measuring value and
productivity in higher education can be a complex and controversial
topic: Lawmakers, taxpayers, and people paying tuition want to
get the most for their money, while college administrators and
faculty members argue that the quality of their educational product
is directly tied to the amount of public support they receive.
Now, a new report from the the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education
Costs, Productivity, and Accountability attempts to rank which
states are getting the most college bang for their bucks...
Continuing its efforts to identify and
encourage new ways to measure higher education performance, the
Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and
Accountability issued a new report Thursday designed to gauge how
successfully public colleges in various states use their available
resources to produce graduates with credentials that are valued
in their markets. The report, "The Dreaded 'P' Word: An Examination
of Productivity in Public Postsecondary Education," also ranks
states using the measure...
...The California Faculty Association,
which represents 23,000 faculty members, from part-time lecturers
to tenured professors, will finish voting Monday on whether to
take as many as 24 unpaid furlough days to help fill the university's
$584 million or 20 percent state budget gap...The vote presents
a particular quandary for full professors, who must decide whether
to reduce their own compensation by about 10 percent, largely in
the interest of saving other people's jobs. While not immune from
layoffs themselves, tenure and tenure-track faculty are considerably
less vulnerable than the lecturers who comprise about half the
faculty in the union. On the other hand, professors' lives and
workloads may change considerably if lecturers are laid off en
masse. The use of lecturers, while often criticized in higher education,
helps reduce class sizes, increases section offerings and – in
some cases – reduces the number of general education courses
full professors have to teach...
