SCUP Links Magazine: The inbox for SCUP’s weekly environmental scanning

The Texas House gave tentative approval to billions of dollars in bonds for campus construction projects on Monday.

We are surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Soon we'll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, and even save our lives.

While perhaps not a direct rebuke to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the blockbuster 2011 book that documented what its authors argued was meager learning on campuses, the studies, by the Council for Aid to Education, do offer a sunnier counternarrative.

"It's probably a more nuanced story," said Roger Benjamin, the council's president, in an interview on Friday. The results described in reports on the studies, "Does College Matter? Measuring Critical-Thinking Outcomes Using the CLA" and "Three Principle Questions About Critical-Thinking Tests," were presented in an off-the-record session here at the American Enterprise Institute.

In "Does College Matter?," the council found that, at a typical college, students' scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, rose 108 points, on a scale that ranges from about 400 to 1600, between freshman and senior years.

Higher education should be closing the gap between the rich and the poor. But college economics are driving them further apart

The Call for the 2013 Perry Chapman Prize is live through May only. Respondents are asked to address the question: How does the physical campus support institu…

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.

When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, one of our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy, suggests another reason for the meltdown.

Women have come a long way in the arts, but there’s still a long way to go.

Really, though, it is a university’s faculty, and not technology vendors and their collaborators, that is responsible for reining in reckless administrative efforts, says Mr. Noor. “Ultimately, faculty at individual colleges need to be the driving force behind what students at their campuses are using,” he says.

“And if that’s not the case” at San Jose State, says Mr. Noor, then MOOCs are “the least of the faculty’s problems.”

USDOJ: Departments of Justice and Education Reach Settlement to Address and Prevent Sexual Assault and Harassment of Students at the University of Montana in Missoula

The college has met its goal in the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment and declared itself climate neutral. That means—essentially, with some caveats—that the college has zero greenhouse-gas emissions.

After signing the climate commitment, Colby set a goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2015—a date far sooner than most other institutions that had signed. Only three other colleges have achieved climate neutrality under the commitment: the College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, and the University of Minnesota at Morris. (However, the College of the Atlantic may no longer be climate neutral—more on that below.)

College of Saint Mary supports the concept of a Federal College Scorecard in order to provide transparency and comparative information to prospective students and their parents. While theFederal College Scorecard attempts to address these issues, there are limitations in that only students who are attending college for the first time are reflected in some of this data. College of Saint Mary, like many other colleges and universities across the nation, serves a large number of transfer and non-traditional students, who are very successful and yet are not reflected in the Federal College Scorecard. In addition, much of the data on the Federal College Scorecard does not explicitly state the time period over which the data was collected.

College of Saint Mary has thus assembled our own CSM College Scorecard, which clearly addresses both of these limitations. We believe that the CSM College Scorecard is a more accurate reflection of the students College of Saint Mary serves.