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Depressing, even with the lift at the end. It's tough being a student nowadays.
"But when I think of how it was for me then compared to how it is for students now, my reaction is, selfishly, 'Whew!' And I look at the efforts of people like Juliet Garcia, Ellen Lagemann, and their colleagues with gratitude that they're working so valiantly to right the balance. Gary Rhoades is right when he says, in his article on faculty unionism in this issue, that it will take all the cooperation we can muster to solve the problems that confront us now."
Scholarly and holistic look at higher education, including the examination of some of the challenges to be overcome in implementing new educational approaches. We've been reading in other places about some of the frustration the learning technology enthusiasts are having on campus, in terms of using and leveraging what they have learned about learning. This paper begins:
"The core functions of universities are the storage, processing, dissemination and application of knowledge to address the great issues of our time. Correspondingly, challenges are to define the great issues of our time which are increasingly global, and to manage universities so they can successfully respond to changing demands in rapidly changing technological environments."
And concludes:
"... At a time of rapid technological change, and contested, complex concepts associated with globalisation, knowledge is becoming a primary factor of production in a global economy. ... As knowledge is becoming a primary factor of production and competitive advantage in a global economy, universities face macro challenges in responding to the exponential growth in demand for higher education, and to the changing concepts of globalisation, commercialisation and competition.
While Internet advances can theoretically support constructivist, learner-centred and interactive learning, challenges of Internet-enabled learning such as e-learning considered within the changing nature of knowledge, changing needs of society, changing teacher roles, and learner expectations need further investigation.
These challenges go beyond innovative ICT implementations to the design and development of a holistic university system, that responds national and global needs, and to the community of demand, as for example, in the case of UOC. Answering the challenge entails a paradigm shift from the modern national university to a sustainable global higher learning system that provides rigorous quality in teaching and learning, and processing and application of knowledge to real-life problems in diverse cultural contexts.
How we assess learning effectiveness, and whether we assess according to global and/or local standards will become increasingly important, and contestable as universities seek to respond to the global issues of our time."
Amazon.com: Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation (9780465018321): Grant McCracken: Books...
Do we already have these on campus?
The failure to convey this well could at some point become an Achille's heel for higher ed.
"And merit, many of us have realized with shock, plays a relatively small and marginalized role in who completes a degree and secures an appointment. Because smart, creative, hardworking researchers and teachers are not lacking at all in today’s academic job market. Every discipline is awash with smart, hardworking people doing innovative research and with exceptional teaching skills. As a result, a certain amount of luck will determine which of the 200 qualified applicants is selected for any particular job. From what I can tell, luck is more of a factor early in an academic career than late in one. At the late stages, the people who are most important within a discipline have earned it, through their research, hard work, and creative thinking. But getting one's foot in the door, to even have a chance to establish a career, that's the lucky part.
I'm not sure that there is a way to convey to the beginning graduate student just how much luck is involved in this life. Nor am I sure of how to convey to graduate students, in a way that they will understand and process, just exactly what sort of odds they face, though a recent open letter attempting just that has been making the digital rounds. I do know though that it is the obligation of graduate programs and graduate faculty to be frank and realistic with students about the numbers, now more than ever."
Also in this article: The UC Davis campus police chief says that it was Lt. Pike who made the decision to use pepper spray.
"As the tent city on the University of California, Davis, tripled in size, Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi insisted Tuesday that the school's police department defied her orders when it used force against students in last week's pepper-spray fiasco.
'We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment,' Katehi said in an interview with The Bee in her office inside the administration building, which remains locked down to the public.
'We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it. And then we told them we also do not want to have another Berkeley.'"
Here come the data and the tools!
"If I had to make an early prediction about a hot trend for 2012, I'd point to "data." It's an easy pick: big data is poised to be a big deal regardless of industry in the coming year. Thanks to the data from sensors, cell phones, Web browsing, social media updates, photo and video uploads, credit card transactions, online purchases, e-book readings -- you name it -- we are producing a mind-boggling amount of data. One of the big opportunities in the coming years will be to make meaning out of all the data that we create and store. That's true in banking. It's true in commerce. It's true in healthcare. It's true in education.
And that prompts other questions: what are colleges going to want to do with all their student data? What sorts of insights will they want? What sorts of action will they want to take on it?"
The Educational Lottery STEVEN BRINT on the four kinds of heretics attacking the gospel of education. Felicity Allen, ed. Education Whitechapel/MIT Press (Documents of Contemporary Art), August 2011....
About the heresy of New Restrictionism. You'll need more than lunch time to read this. Maybe the weekend? We like this part of the quote: "[C]olleges only by the grace of semantic generosity."
"One currently growing in popularity we might call “the new restrictionism.” According to the new restrictionists, such as the economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, co-authors of the 2008 paper 'Leisure College USA: The Decline in Student Study Time,' access to higher education may have gone too far. Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat. Instead of studying, they spend time talking on the phone, planning social events, chitchatting about personal trivia and popular culture, and facebooking. Faculty members demand less of these students, according to Babcock and Marks, both because they are incapable of doing more and because they will punish faculty members with bad evaluations if they are pushed to try harder. The students often consider courses that require concentration 'boring' and 'irrelevant.' They argue and wheedle their way into grades they do not deserve. The colleges, out of craven financial motives, do not squarely face the fact that not all of their students are 'college material.' Worse, they cater to ill-prepared and under-motivated students, dumbing down the curriculum to the point where a college degree is worth less, in terms of educational quality, than a degree from one of the better high schools. Institutions at the tail end of academic procession are, as David Riesman once put it, 'colleges only by the grace of semantic generosity.'"
Lots of news for financial officers from NACUBO as 2011 winds down: - Preliminary Data Show Endowments Returned 19.8 Percent in FY 2011
- Preliminary data gathered from 284 of the U.S. colleges and universities participating in the 2011 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments indicate that these institutions’ endowments returned an average of 19.8 percent for the 2011 fiscal year. ... Read more »
- IRS Corrects Auditors’ Misinterpretation of 1098-T Requirements
- 3 Percent Withholding Tax Repealed
- CFPB Seeks Information on Private Education Loans
- Survey Studies GASB’s Accountability Mission
- Number of International Students in U.S. Up 5 Percent
- Tuition Has Increased Faster at Public Than Private Nonprofit Four Year Institutions
- Congress Takes Action on 3 Percent Withholding and Appropriations
- Institutions Invited to Experiment with Financial Aid
- Treasury Report Finds Estimated $3.2 Billion in Erroneous Education Tax Credits
- ED Issues Urgent Call for Action on Fraud
- DoD Posts Clarification of MOU Provisions
- ED Releases Financial Responsibility Scores
- New NCES Report Shows Trends in Stafford Loan Borrowing
- 1098-T Reporting Season Reminders
On November 18, 2011, Richard Schechter, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Houston Community College, interviewed James Morrison, Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership, UNC-Chapel hill on the future of higher education.
This video is Part One. Part Two will be posted in SCUP News shortly. Jim is a SCUPer with decades of experience in environmental scanning of the internal and external higher education environments.
"SCUP Email News" - formerly "SCUP Bitnet News," is the second-oldest continuously transmitted email newsletter in the entire Internet - its first issue was November 1987.
Now you can, once again, read it on line as well as receive it by email if you subscribe.
This book is currently only available to SCUP members, at no cost.
Table of Contents - "Make Way for Millennials: How Students Are Shaping Learning in Higher Education!" by John Ruffo (guest editor's introduction)
- "Building for a New Generation of Learning: Conversations to Catalyze our Construction" by Mark David Milliron, Kathleen Plinske, and Coral Noonan-Terry
- "Changing Minds in Higher Education: Students Change, So Why Can’t Colleges?" by John Tagg
- "The Serious Matter of Informal Learning" by Peter Jamieson
- "What’s Past is Prologue: The Evolving Paradigms of Student Affairs" by Simone Himbeault Taylor
- "Prevention Through Connection: Creating a Campus Climate of Care" by Jesse Owen and Emil Rodolpha
- "Colleges and Universities Want to be Your Friend: Communicating via Online Social Networking" by Tamara L. Wandel
- "Make Way for Millennials! How Today’s Students are Shaping Higher Education Space" by Persis C. Rickes
- "Students in My Backyard:
- Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development" by John Martin and Mark Allen
- "Fusion Building: New Trend with Some Old Roots" by Craig Hamilton
- "Collegiate Recreational Sports: Pivotal Players in Student Success" by Kent J. Blumenthal
- "Let’s Hear from Students" by Claire L. Turcotte
- "The Inheritance of Millennial Students: What Will They Inherit from Their Campus Experience and Consequently What Legacy Will They Leave the Next Generation?" by Freda Pagani
- Book Review, The Learning Paradigm College by John Tagg, Reviewed by Sandra L Kortesoja
- Book Review, The Student Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes & Barry Z. Posner, Reviewed by Clayton McPherson
- Book Review: How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A third decade of research (2005) by Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini, Reviewed by Simone Himbeault Taylor
This report is the most comprehensive of its sort in higher education.
"The news is not all bad as college construction exceeds projections in a recovering economy. Learn about this and more in College Planning & Management’s annual report on what facilities are being built or renovated on campuses across the country."
by Michael Fickes
"America's 2,500-plus college and university campuses comprise a treasure trove of historic buildings. Over the years, campus facility directors and campus architects have grown adept at maintaining these structures, often carrying out major adaptive-reuse renovations. Fire safety ranks as one of the most daunting challenges to successful adaptive reuse of historic buildings."
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Tierney lays out the background and recent past of for-profit institutions, examines their growth to 12% of the industry, and lays out needed improvements for for-profits' success while arguing that they are a needed part of the higher education system going forward. A good read.
"If we agree that increased participation in higher education is critical for the country's economic and social well-being and we acknowledge that 1) the public sector is unlikely to increase its enrollments significantly and 2) the private non-profit sector is not able to meet the ambitious goals that have been set, what alternatives exist other than to ensure that the for-profit sector expands in a way that conforms to ethical industry standards?
Like it or not, the country needs the for-profit sector to ensure economic viability. If we concur, either begrudgingly or happily, that it has a role to play in maintaining the health of American higher education, then what are the key sticking points that ensure that it will do so responsibly?"
U Texas at Brownsville president Juliet V. Garcia was a plenary speaker at SCUP-30 in 1995. In this excellent piece from Change magazine she describes her 20 years at this campus and the regional challenges and successes she has experienced. Planners will enjoy the two-decade and long-term perspective here.
"When I became a new college president many years ago, I interviewed presidents of highly successful colleges. I wanted to find out what the most important job of a college president was. Like a good student, I made a list of the questions I wanted to ask and took copious notes.
'Preserving the democracy of the United States' was the answer from Miami Dade College President Robert McCabe. 'My job is to take in the next wave of immigrants. Sometimes it's Haitians, other times it's Cubans, and sometimes its native Floridians who never had access to college. I help them get educated and vested in the democratic system. If I do this well, they will nurture, defend, and sustain our democracy. Therefore, my job is to preserve the democracy of the United States.'
I closed my notebook and came home. I adopted the same mission. More than 20 years later, this fundamental purpose has not wavered. Providing access and helping students achieve success in higher education goes beyond the benefit to any single graduate or family. It is the most important work that any of us could do to sustain our democracy."
Could it be that language classes are leading edge, in terms of going fully on line, or close to it?
"'You can learn other disciplines by interacting with the material itself. But in a language, you need to interact with human beings.'
Can you recreate that interaction online? The technology to do so is improving."
Shared here by the USGBC Center for Green Schools | Two Forthcoming Webcasts
http://centerforgreenschools.org/utility-nav/blog/11-11-14/Upcoming_Webcasts.aspx LEED Implementation Strategies on a Campus: Utilizing the 2010 Application Guide for Multiple Buildings & On-Campus Building Projects December 2, 2011, 2 p.m. EST
http://centerforgreenschools.org/utility-nav/blog/11-11-14/Upcoming_Webcasts.aspx Members-only Webcast
Establishing a Culture of Performance on your Campus
Thursday, December 15, 2 p.m. EST
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LEED Implementation Strategies on a Campus: Utilizing the 2010 Application Guide for Multiple Buildings & On-Campus Building Projects
December 2, 2011, 2 p.m. EST http://centerforgreenschools.org/utility-nav/blog/11-11-14/Upcoming_Webcasts.aspx
Working on LEED implementation in a campus setting? Interested in streamlining documentation efforts for multiple buildings? USGBC LEED team member Melissa Gallagher Rogers will present the revisions to the Application Guide for Multiple Buildings & On-Campus Building Projects, discuss strategies for minimizing documentation for campus buildings and review opportunities for implementing LEED strategies at a campus scale. If you are working on multiple LEED projects on a shared site this presentation is not to be missed. To download the revised guidance please visit usgbc.org/campusguidance.
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Members-only Webcast
Establishing a Culture of Performance on your Campus Thursday, December 15, 2 p.m. EST http://centerforgreenschools.org/utility-nav/blog/11-11-14/Upcoming_Webcasts.aspx In an effort to reduce carbon emissions and provide more enriching learning environments for their students, institutions of higher education have prioritized the measurement & enhancement of building performance. USGBC is tackling this issue head on in its performance based rating system LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance. Learn how this rating system can support the improvement of existing facilities and infrastructure on your campus and the strategies for scaling the effort from a building level to a campus wide approach. The webcast will review the LEED for Existing Buildings: O&M process and discuss the supporting guidance created specifically for campus implementation efforts. This webcast is the last in a four part series created specifically for higher education institutions. Previous webcasts may be viewed here. To register please use this link
UC Davis student government president Adam Thongsavat was in a meeting on Friday when he received an urgent text message: riot police were on the campus mall, pepper spraying a group of sitting protesters.
"'I took a deep breath, and said, ‘It’s going to be a really different campus,' Thongsavat told TPM by phone Tuesday evening.
And so far it has been. Chancellor Linda Katehi is under increasing pressure to resign. The UC Davis police chief is on administrative leave. The University of California President Mark Yudof said he was 'appalled' by the images on Friday. A number of investigations into the incident have been launched, and the UC Davis student government has requested the state’s attorney general look into the matter."
The concept of a tightly knit, interconnected world -- one where an individual's connection with another is within six degrees of separation...
But ... "In collaboration with academic researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook’s study found that instead of the average of six degrees of separation between each of us, Facebook users are separated by an average of four degrees."
A new report from Stanford University indicates that the academic achievement gap has become "almost twice as wide between students from poor families and students from wealthy families as it is between black students and white students."
On November 18, 2011, Richard Schechter, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Houston Community College, interviewed James Morrison, Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership, UNC-Chapel hill on the future of higher education.
This video is Part Two. Part Two was posted in SCUP News moments ago. Jim is a SCUPer with decades of experience in environmental scanning of the internal and external higher education environments.
Amazon.com: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (9780670022823): Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
We're halfway through this book. It's very worth while and would make great Thanksgiving renewal reading!
This initiative is thought by some to the most far-ranging self-examination and exploration of future accomplished by a small, 4-year private college so far. Planners will certainly want to look at The Futures Initiative Summary, 2010-2011 (PDF).
A crisis is threatening legal education. In constant dollars, tuition at private law schools nearly tripled over the last quarter century. Many a graduate faces a six-figure debt and can’t find a job paying enough to service that debt. Especially...
Interesting idea, to give students who end the first year with terrible grades the option of 50% back if they go away.
Cathy N. Davison is a neuroscientist from Duke University. In August she published the book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She was visiting UC Davis when during the recent pepper spraying:
"We also need to learn from our mistakes, because as protesters are being shifted out of the city parks of metropolitan areas, they are moving to college campuses. First, the claim that the Occupy encampments are unsanitary, unsafe, and insecure is almost comical to someone at Duke, where "tenting" has been a venerable student tradition since 1986. "Krzyzewskiville" is an encampment of students staying in tents, in winter, for weeks at time in order not to lose priority getting into Duke home basketball games. A few years ago, in one of my classes, we studied K-Ville's rules as a model of self-organizing and self-policing communities. If K-Ville can thrive despite the frenzy of winning and losing championship basketball games, so can a well-organized group of students advocating on behalf of their educational future."
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