By Doug Ward
BOULDER, Colo. – Noah Finkelstein rarely minces words, and the words he offers to public universities carry a lofty challenge.
By Doug Ward
Colleges and universities in Kansas will receive more than $100 million this year from congressional earmarks in the federal budget, according to an analysis by Inside Higher Ed.
By Doug Ward
Randy Bass sees a struggle taking place in higher education.
On one side are those who see the future as “unbundled,” a model in which students pursue discrete skills at their own pace and mostly under their own direction. On the other side are those who see the future as bundled, much as a university is now with classes and programs and a physical environment that draws everything together.
By Doug Ward
Add another lock to the ivory tower.
A majority of college students say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and 20 percent accept the idea of resorting to violence to keep an undesirable speaker from campus, a poll from the Brookings Institution finds.
By Doug Ward
The amount of debt that colleges and universities are taking on is rising even as the number of students in higher education is declining, The Hechinger Report says. It offered these sobering statistics:
American higher education has taken a beating over the last 40-plus years.
Many of those blows came from the outside. Many others were self-inflicted. I won’t rehash those here, other than to say that higher education has done a poor job of fighting back. Much of the time, it has seen itself as above the fray. Its arrogance not only blinded it to its own shortcomings but let critics paint an unflattering portrait that has lingered in the minds of millions of Americans.
The criticism of liberal education often carries a vicious sting. For instance, listen to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor:
By Doug Ward
I’m frequently awed by the creative, even life-changing, work that students engage in.
Those of us in higher education like to think of ourselves as preparing students for the future.
That’s a lofty goal with a heavy burden. Predicting the future is a fool’s game, and yet as educators we have accepted that responsibility by offering degrees that we tell our students will have relevance for years to come.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Faculty members seem ready for a more substantive approach to evaluating teaching, but …