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When I became a student success coach at Northwood University, I did something unusual: I enrolled in a developmental mathematics class. Going to class, taking notes, studying, quizzes, exams—I did it all. I cultivated a strong relationship with the professor, engaged with the material daily and spoke with students about their experiences. I was so immersed in this course that I began dreaming about factoring trinomials and the order of operations. My main motivation for taking this class was to help students. Students enrolled in remedial courses may already lack confidence in their academic abilities, and failing a non-credit-bearing class during their first semester at college is a sure way to rock any confidence they may otherwise have gained, leading to an enhanced sense of impostor syndrome and possible attrition. Additionally, the failing of developmental classes is a universal issue in higher education, affecting completion rates and student swirl . I spent considerable ti

Blog:  Learning Innovation The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity by Michael Tomasky Published in September of 2022. I've been looking for a book to challenge my progressive economic leanings. The Middle Out is not that book. Maybe you have some suggestions? In The Middle Ou t, Tomasky (who edits the political Journal Democracy ) endeavors to provide a political roadmap for Democrats. He observes that conservatives tend to think in terms of values, whereas liberals see the world through an economic lens. Tomasky argues that progressive economic policies are deeply intertwined with values such as fairness, opportunity, and justice — and that Democrats need to make a case for progressive policies in those terms. Suppose you are worried about inequality, climate change, wealth concentration, workers' rights, childhood poverty, access to healthcare and childcare, concentrated poverty, rural poverty, and the hollowing out

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has written the best article that I’ve read on the recent decision by leading law schools to boycott the  US News  ratings.  In an essay entitled “ Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis ,” he makes a highly convincing argument that with or without the  US News  rankings, “college reputations are fixed, valuable, and based on almost no hard evidence.” I regard his argument, that the  US News  rankings are based on almost no real evidence of quality, as absolutely correct, and I wholehearted agree with his main message:  That the rankings simply serve to reinforce the existing structure of institutional wealth and prestige.   Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the  US News  rankings were reverse engineered to ensure that the "right" schools appeared at the top. College ratings take various forms.   Washington Mo

The law schools of the University of Chicago and Cornell University may not love the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but they aren’t walking away from them. University of Chicago dean Thomas J. Miles wrote to students that “my past practice has been to avoid direct, public comment on the U.S. News ranking. The ranking is not our guide, and I prefer to shine a light on the substantive attributes that make our Law School the home of the most intellectually ambitious faculty and the most powerful legal education. Most of the data we supply to U.S. News are already public, and the rest is information we have no reason to withhold. The rankings of academic institutions clearly have a readership, and we wish to prevent the use of inaccurate information. Fundamentally, a ranking of schools is an opinion. A ranking is the product of innumerable and contestable design choices. As our university is dedicated to the free expression of ideas and to questioning viewpoints, our aim is

The leaders of 10 national higher education associations have launched the Paying for College Transparency Initiative. Many colleges use substantially different terms to describe the aid they award to students. The initiative seeks to improve “clarity, accuracy, and consistency of student financial aid offers by producing a set of guiding principles and minimal standards to be used when developing aid offers.” The effort will be led by Peter McPherson, president emeritus of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. There is no timetable for the project, he said. The following are members of the task force: Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators Walter Bumphus, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges Mildred García, president and CEO of

Education Reform Now has released its third report on fairness in the admissions system. The focus of this report is transparency and accountability. The report says that, especially given that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to bar affirmative action next year, “the U.S. Department of Education should expand its collection of admissions data and disaggregate that data by race, ethnicity, gender, and, when possible, socioeconomic status.” The report said, “It is to the benefit of all Americans to expand access to the opportunities afforded by college, which is why it should concern us all that access to opportunity is still not evenly or fairly distributed across society. If those gaps are to shrink, researchers, institutional leadership, equity advocates, and policymakers will need a better understanding of their causes.” And the report added, “Currently, the U.S. Department of Education does not collect or publish disaggregated data for applicants or admits (i.e., admitted app

Ohio State University president Kristina M. Johnson is resigning after serving two and a half years in the role, as first reported by  The Columbus Dispatch . While details remain vague, the newspaper reported that Johnson is stepping down at the request of Ohio State’s Board of Trustees following an investigation by an external law firm into concerns raised by Johnson’s staff. Details of the investigation are unclear. Ohio State confirmed the news in a statement M onday evening  but offered no specific details on why Johnson is stepping down. “I have made the difficult decision to step down as president following commencement at the end of the academic year. This will allow a search for the next president to proceed and adequate time for me to assist with a seamless transition,” Johnson said in the statement. Johnson previously served as chancellor of the State University of New York system from 2017 to 2020. Ad keywords:  administrators executive Editorial Tags: 

I am serving in my 13th year as the president of Central College in Pella, Iowa—my 40th year in higher education. While I certainly have presidential colleagues who have equaled or exceeded my years of leadership service, I have become increasingly concerned by the number of public and private institutions that have appointed as many as four presidents during the dozen years I have been in this role. My intent is not to argue that all college and university presidential appointments could or should be long-term. My concern is that the accelerating turnover rate across the postsecondary landscape is only breeding more turnover. When an institution becomes accustomed to frequent presidential transitions, commitment to sustained leadership erodes. Breaking that cycle requires a concerted effort. As I survey the landscape, I see institutions with sustained presidential leadership for 10 or more years tangibly benefiting from the capacity to undertake and succeed with long-term, larg

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma There are movies that help define a generation.  For the Baby Boomers, these included The Graduate, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces , and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde (“They're young... they're in love... and they kill people”).   For Gen X, there was The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Mean Girls, and The Matrix .  For the Millennials, there were the especially sordid coming of age films tales Kids, Thirteen, Slacker, Fight Club, and Reality Bites . What are the movies that define today’s undergraduates?  The titles might be less familiar to you, but these films share a common theme, the torturous path toward coming of age:  Frances Ha, Hunger Games, Real Women Have Curves, and Twilight. Less now perhaps than in the past, movies are never mere entertainment.   These pictures  reflect the moment when they are made, shape the way the young view and understand society, and help young people define their identity.   I can’t help but look at this

Now that the dust has settled and the drama of midterm elections has come and gone, I have some thoughts on the Stanford University–hosted conference on academic freedom held earlier this month , from my perspective as the only dean on the program and as a scholar whose political affiliations are not wholly aligned with the generally right-libertarian positions of the conference organizers. I will be a better dean for having attended and participated in the conference, hosted by the Classical Liberalism Initiative of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The stated goal of the conference was identifying ways “to restore academic freedom, open inquiry and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture and restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish.” I’m grateful to the organizers for including an administrator, as it is our job to adjudicate, manage, resolve, turn the heat down on or stand firm on issues of academic freedom as well as

Blog:  Learning Innovation Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World by Rana Foroohar Published in October of 2022. Higher education is not ignored in Foroohar’s Homecoming . Thankfully (I guess), the problems of universities are diagnosed as symptoms of neoliberalism, not their cause. With all the bad press that elite education is getting, perhaps we should be grateful. Or maybe not. It is hard to read Homecoming through higher ed eyes and feel all too optimistic about the future of our industry. If Foroohar, a business reporter for the Financial Times, is correct, then the world is rapidly moving towards an era of deglobalization. Reading Bob Ubell’s piece in EdSurge about the potential drop in Chinese students studying in the U.S., an influx that accounts for over $15 billion per year in revenues for American colleges and universities, is a reminder of how dependent higher education is on globalism. My favorite line from Bob’s article is, “Over the