Higher Education News

Community College Information

At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready
As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work. Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses (New York Times)

Dream Catchers
Community colleges today do far more than offer a ladder to the final years. They train the people who repair your furnace, install your plumbing, take your pulse. They prepare retiring baby boomers for second or third careers, and provide opportunities for a growing number of college-age students turning away from the high cost and competition at universities. And charged with doing the heavy remedial lifting, community colleges are now as much 10th and 11th grade as 13th and 14th. (New York Times)

For Achievers, a New Destination
It’s not without reason that community colleges are often considered the schools of last resort. They have long offered low-cost local schooling for students who couldn’t attend four-year colleges because they lacked the requisite grades or the requisite funds, or were looking for specific job training. “Open admissions” has been the guiding principle, and the colleges work with large populations of students who are underprepared, notes Terry O’Banion, president emeritus of the League for Innovation in the Community College.

But as four-year universities have become more expensive, good students who want to save money are turning to community colleges to earn their core undergraduate credits. (New York Times)

Junior Grows Up
Community college enrollment is up all across the country, as these two-year schools have emerged as a surprising backdoor route to a higher education (North Shore Sunday)

Student Success and Retention

Math-Education Guru Describes Challenges and Solutions for Community Colleges
Community colleges need to do a much better job of explaining to students how the course sequences in mathematics and science fit together and lead to degrees and careers, said P. Uri Treisman, a nationally recognized, prize-winning advocate for change in education, at the National Science Foundation here. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Increasing Student Success at Minority-Serving Institutions: Findings from the BEAMS Project
Building Engagement and Attainment for Minority Students (BEAMS) is a 5 year national study funded by the Lumina Foundation. The conclusions and recommendations from have now been released:

Presidents and other senior administrators must provide leadership for data-based institutional change initiatives if they are to be successful
Institutions must make greater technology and staff investments in their institutional research and assessment offices
All members of the institutional community must play a role in data-informed campus change work
Student success initiatives must be effectively integrated with each other and must relate directly to the institutional mission and goals.

Globalization

With College Affordability an Issue, U.S. Falls Behind in Degree Attainment
The United States continues to fall behind other major industrialized nations in terms of the percentage f the population with a college degree, according to a recent series of joint studies released by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and Jobs for the Future. (Reuters)

Governors Push to Keep U.S. Competitive

Globalization has come to every hometown, every school and every workplace, but students and workers are not given the tools to keep up, governors reluctantly agreed Tuesday. (Boston Globe)

Concern Over Boys' College Enrollment Numbers
American boys continue to fall behind girls in their enrollment numbers at the university level. Commentator Richard Whitmire asks where the boys are, and where the concern is over these falling rates. (NPR Audio Clip)

Spellings Commission

Carrying Out the Commission’s Ideas
Moving with surprising speed, the U.S. Education Department plans to announce Friday that it will hold a series of regional meetings with college officials and others this fall to discuss how it might use the federal rule making process to carry out some of recommendations of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. (Inside Higher Ed)

What Secretary Spellings Thinks of the College Rankings
[…] Spellings is also making a push to make the relatively secretive higher education accreditation process much more understandable. She said in the same speech that accreditation remains veiled and confusing even for many within the higher education community (US News)

Education Secretary plans higher-ed commission
America's system of colleges and universities is famously decentralized, producing experimentation and variety but making it hard to tackle big-picture issues such as access and affordability on a national scale. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans to announce a major initiative today to address that problem: a commission charged with developing 'a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education," according to remarks in an advance copy of a speech she is expected to deliver at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.