Bloom's Sixth

KU’s big jump in freshman enrollment this academic year ran counter to broader trends in higher education. Around the country, college enrollment has been trending downward (although there was a slight increase in 2023), many campuses have been closing or consolidating, and a lower birthrate after the 2008-09 recession looms in what has become known as the “enrollment cliff.” That is, with fewer births, there will soon be fewer students graduating from high school and thus fewer potential college applicants…

The latest enrollment report for universities in the Kansas regents system (down 1.5%) seems worth little more than a shrug. Longer term, though, the higher education trends in Kansas will require considerable attention – and action. Enrollment at the six regents universities has fallen 13.5%, or 10,100 students, since peaking in 2011. That average masks even bigger declines at individual universities: Pittsburg State, down 28.4% since 2011; K-…

The headlines about KU’s fall enrollment sounded much like a Minnesotan’s assessment of winter: It could be worse. Indeed it could have been, given the uncertainties brought on by the coronavirus and rumblings among students that they might sit out the year if their courses were online. Depending on how you measure, enrollment on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses …

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. John Villasenor, a senior fellow at Brookings, conducted the poll to gauge students’ understanding of the First Amendment. The survey contained responses from 1,500 students in 49 states and the District of Columbia. It has a margin of error of 2 to 6 percentage points. The Blue Diamond…

This fall’s enrollment figures contained much for the University of Kansas to be proud of, and the university rightly bragged about that. Freshman enrollment has grown for five years in a row, and the incoming class is made up of nearly 23 percent minority students. That was great news, especially because more restrictive admissions standards went into place this fall. Those higher admissions standards show up in the 3.58 average GPA of the incoming class. Two other…

Notes by hand or with laptops? Sorry, wrong question. Cathy Davidson raises exactly the right question in the debate about whether students should take notes by hand or with laptops in class. The real issue, Davidson writes, is that instructors should be working to avoid lecture and instead engage students in active learning. Even in a large lecture hall, …