Higher Education

SeattlePI.com has a piece on Foster Care to College, a program that, as the name suggests, “help[s] students in foster care pursue and prepare for post-secondary education.” About 25,000 young people across the country “age out” of foster care each year. Without permanent homes or support from family members, they’re at a higher risk for […]

This will be helpful to residents of the Show Me State: Tuition and academic fees will be frozen for the second straight year at Missouri’s public four-year colleges and universities, Gov. Jay Nixon announced Tuesday. Nixon said he will have to reduce higher education spending by 5.2 percent, or $42 million, for the next fiscal […]

Carlin Romano has some strong words for academic philosophy: Philosophy, as the intellectual enterprise that in its noblest form inspects all areas of life and questions each practice’s fundamental concepts and presumptions, should regularly look at all human activities broad and persistent enough not to be aberrations or idiosyncrasies. (The latter can be reserved for […]

Young people these days are really into zombies. It probably has something to do with some of the great zombie movies and video games released in recent years. But it’s also getting old—the hipsters have taken it too far with their endless zombie parties and zombie parades. Still, though, given the popularity of our undead […]

Inside Higher Ed highlights what looks to be an important new book: Despite best intentions, today’s first-generation college students and their professors “misunderstand and ultimately fail one another” in the classroom, according to a new scholarly work on community college pedagogy. The College Fear Factor, published last month by Harvard University Press, is based upon […]

Adding a new topic to the conversation about American colleges and their quality and cost, an article last week in the Toronto Star introduces another option: some Americans are just opting out of the whole process. In the last ten years the number of Americans seeking higher education in Canada has tripled. Experts predict some […]

You’ll often hear that the United States should take certain cues from how other countries handle education. Here’s a counterexample: This Thursday was one of the most stressful days of the year in South Korea: Nearly 700,000 high school students took the national college entrance exam. The test, which is given once a year, largely […]

The New York Times has a good writeup on the hand-wringing going on in New York, where some are questioning the transition of the SUNY system’s four major research universities (Buffalo, Stony Brook, Albany, and Binghamton) to Division I athletics: [W]ith the university system facing a proposed $90 million cut in state financing, some are […]

From Inside Higher Ed: A new study suggests that students in coeducational housing are much more likely to engage in binge drinking than are students who live in all-male or all-female housing. The study, appearing today in the Journal of American College Health, is based on data on more than 500 students at five colleges […]

If you haven’t read it yet, you should check out Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column on Tererai Trent, who went from being an “an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe ” with one year of elementary school to the recipient of a Ph.D from Western Michigan University. She was able to pull off this miracle […]