The Journal

October 26, 2021

Thirteen New England colleges and universities have signed on to NEBHE's new North Star Collective (NSC), a multi-institutional collaborative to boost Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) early-career faculty at New England colleges and universities. Meanwhile, NEBHE was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Hildreth Stewart Charitable Foundation to support the development and implementatio...

March 23, 2021

How these forces intersect at a community hospital focused on the underserved ... A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual healthcare delivery system. Questions of effic...

March 10, 2021

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black...

March 2, 2021

In the following Practitioner Perspective, Andrew McKinney, OER coordinator at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Amanda Coolidge, director of Open Education at BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada, share the development of an adaptable matrix to help faculty include OER (Open Educational Resources) in their tenure and promotion portfolios. A critical part of sustaining OER in higher...

February 23, 2021

I love being a Black woman. I am awed by how powerful Black woman are and how unspeakably overlooked we have been because of it—consider Stacey Abrams and Keisha Lance Bottoms. Whether you agree with their politics or not, they have shown us that leading humans to and through change requires emergent thinking, creativity leaps and a loving ability to envision a more democratized future. They...

February 12, 2021

Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost reven...

February 10, 2021

Climate change is real and accelerating. It requires an urgent response that focuses all the strategies and tactics necessary to stabilize the Earth’s temperature regime. The objective to guide research, development and implementation is straightforward: Achieve an all-electric economy. Simply put, all sectors of energy use—agriculture, transportation, industrial, residential, business, etc...

February 9, 2021

In an era of rising authoritarianism, civic education and political literacy, especially for future voters, is key ... American democracy just survived a near-death experience during the slow-motion coup that was the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. It culminated in his rejecting his electoral loss and pressuring officials and political allies to back his claims that the election was ...

January 27, 2021

As COVID-19 cases continue to surge nationwide, the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines cannot come soon enough. Although higher education institutions (HEIs) are not at the top of the priority list to receive scarce early doses of the vaccine, colleges and universities should prepare for how they will handle vaccination on their campuses. In general, both public and private HEIs may mandate that ...

January 22, 2021

In the final days of 2020, Congress gave the country a long-overdue Christmas present with the passage of a new COVID-19 relief bill. Known as the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA), the bill is a whopping 5,500 pages long. But for higher education institutions, the real action starts on Page 1872 with the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (known as HEERF...

January 21, 2021

Jan. 6, 2021 marked a day in American history that no one imagined happening: a modern-day civil war riot. The attack on the U.S. Capitol has left many people angry, worried and confused ... The virulent attack by the president of the U.S. and his congressional enablers, especially Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, on our recent election and election process represents more than just an at...

January 16, 2021

Something inside me keeps saying: I told you something like this would happen. After 50 years studying opportunity for higher education, I am somewhat comfortable (and very uncomfortable too) saying the issues I have sought to address and warned about underlie the current political chaos. Our failures to address them (and I include higher education centrally in "our") have boiled over: 1) Incom...

January 12, 2021

In the past few months, a plethora of reports have documented the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global business, and these are generally not something to be happy about. As expected, the international education sector has not been spared. Because of border closures and stringent travel protocols implemented by many countries, international enrollment numbers have plummeted considerably. Th...

January 6, 2021

In the following Q&A, NEBHE’s Fellow for Open Education Lindsey Gumb talks with Hannah Davidson, accessibility specialist at Plymouth State University and member of NEBHE’s OER (Open Educational Resources) Advisory Board, about redefining accessibility in Open Education. Gumb: You’ve spoken about reconsidering the definition of “access” in Open Education. Can you elaborate on ...

December 9, 2020

Faculty diversity. In the early 1990s, NEBHE, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) collaborated to develop the first Compact for Faculty Diversity. Formally launched in 1994, with support from the Ford Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, the compact focused on five key strategies: motivating states and universities to inc...

November 30, 2020

In October 2019, NEBHE called together a group of economists and higher education leaders for a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss the future of higher education (Preparing for Another Recession?). No one suspected that just months later, a global pandemic would turn the world upside down. Today, the same challenges highlighted at the meeting persist. The pandemic has only am...

November 24, 2020

Sadly, the number of COVID-19 cases across the globe is rising. And while vaccines are in the offing, we may have many weeks between now and their availability, time in which more individuals can become infected and too many will die. In absolute terms, the numbers are staggering in the U.S. and around the world. It is against this background that we should be concerned about superspreader even...

November 16, 2020

America is undergoing a reckoning as the pain, suffering and setbacks caused by years of systemic racism is coming into full view. This heightened awareness around racism, sparked by death and injustice, must result in the development of real pathways to eliminate systemic racism, or it will be a lost opportunity for our generation to do our part in—to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr...

November 9, 2020

The majority of college students were largely disappointed by remote learning this past spring, with many reporting a strong preference for in-person instruction. Bearing in mind the low expectations that many students carried into online courses this fall, what advice can we give to help them succeed in this final month? As colleges across New England and the country continue to announce spring p...

October 21, 2020

The NEJHE beat is semi-locked down, but not out. A little of what we’ve been following … Counting heads. New enrollment figures show higher education reeling under the weight of COVID-19 and a faltering economy on top of preexisting challenges such as worries that college may not be worth the price. A month into the fall 2020 semester, undergraduate enrollment nationally was down 4% from la...

October 13, 2020

In the following Q&A, NEBHE’s Fellow for Open Education Lindsey Gumb takes the pulse of Open Education in Rhode Island with two key leaders in the field: Dragan Gill, who is a Rhode Island College reference librarian and co-chair of the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative, and Daniela Fairchild, who is director of the Rhode Island Office of Innovation. In September 2016, Rhode I...

October 6, 2020

Today's schools are preparing children, starting at an early age, for future educational and career opportunities that will help them succeed. With strict standards that must be met, measured in part by testing, it's not unusual for both time and funding to be shifted away from arts education to achieve this goal. While this might seem like a reasonable reaction at first, it overlooks an import...

October 6, 2020

Takeaways from NEBHE's Legislative Advisory Committee ... The economic fallout of the layoffs and business closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc for New England workers—especially those who were already facing a structurally vulnerable workforce and employment system before the pandemic. What can state governments do to stimulate job creation and make New England’s econ...

September 21, 2020

The shift to online learning has challenged instructors to create courses that are as engaging online as they are in person. As many faculty prepare for online learning again this fall, open educational resources (OER) can be part of the solution to help students stay safe and be successful. OER are free and openly licensed online teaching and learning materials that support instructors and stu...

September 15, 2020

This essay is a sequel to “The Human Dimensions of Enrollment Management,” published in The New England Journal of Higher Education on June 30, 2020. In that article, my unusual focus (as a trained theoretical physicist) was on integrity, not science, as the single most important factor in enrollment management success. Early in my supervision of enrollment management (from a faculty position ...

September 11, 2020

Gracing the back wall of my office at the University of Vermont is an antique wooden desk that’s more than 150 years old. While it’s an undeniably handsome piece of 19th century craftsmanship, it serves much more than a decorative purpose. As the desk of Vermont Sen. Justin Morrill, the author of the Morrill Act of 1862 establishing the country’s first land-grant universities, it is m...

September 9, 2020

College and university leaders are fighting the battle of their lives to maximize their institutions’ financial wellbeing. With COVID-19 further weakening institutions’ financial positions, are there any hidden sources of savings still to be had? The answer, often, is yes—even for the many institutions who have already made substantial cuts. It is possible that 15% to 20% of expense...

September 8, 2020

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.” Her words are excellent guideposts as New England colleges and universities navigate the unknowns of educating students during COVID-19. Despite the precautions that institutions are taking, on-campus teaching and research are not totally risk-free. Neither, of course, is life itself...

September 1, 2020

The brand of a college or university is more than its logo or tagline. It's an accumulation of experiences for students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members. Marketing is part of it, but every time someone sets foot on your campus, they are walking into your brand. This fall, fewer students will be on campuses and they may be there with less frequency. COVID-19 won’t last forever...

August 24, 2020

For the past several decades, student engagement has been an increasingly popular subject of research in higher education. A raft of studies, surveys and op-eds have put engagement at the center of the national narrative around student success—and at the top of the priority list for institutions seeking to support an increasingly diverse generation of learners. All that research suggests that in...

August 18, 2020

With the growing number of colleges moving to online learning, I have been asked: Can online learning incorporate trauma-responsive strategies? The short answer is yes. Before turning to specific pedagogical approaches, it is worth reiterating why trauma-responsiveness is so critical to learning at this moment. Pre-pandemic and before the current racial tensions and economic uncertainty, we wer...

August 18, 2020

This op-ed was written by NEBHE President and CEO Michael K. Thomas in conjunction with leaders and representatives of public and private institutions in all six New England states, including: Mark E. Ojakian, president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities; Jennifer Widness, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges; Dannel P. Malloy, chancellor of the Universit...

August 10, 2020

Typical lists of core competencies for undergraduates feature written communication, critical thinking and information literacy, among others, but merely presume, leaving unstated, the bedrock importance of reading skills. Lifelong learning, a dedication to which is part of practically all mission or aspirational statements, includes the ongoing practice and continued appreciation of those core sk...

August 3, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the labor market, with more than 40 million Americans who have filed for unemployment. Even as some states have attempted to reopen their economies, allowing 4 million people to head back to work, the unemployment rate still hovers around 16%. And we’re still in the early innings of recovery—perhaps even just batting practice. The recovery ...

July 27, 2020

As many higher education institutions in New England grapple with how to safely reopen in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the physical setting of campuses becomes paramount. Indeed, NEJHE recently published a piece on the advantages of small rural campuses in the age of social distancing. Here, Leonard Yui, an associate professor of architecture at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I....

July 20, 2020

The first formal changes to Title IX’s implementing regulations in 45 years are here, and they are significant. The federal statute, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal financial assistance, had its earliest impacts on intercollegiate athletics. But since the late 1990s, it has also been interpreted to prohibit sexual harassment in education. It is this a...

July 13, 2020

A view from Mount Holyoke on why practical, flexible new models are needed for liberal arts colleges ... Students choose small liberal arts colleges for the learning that unfolds when they are deeply immersed in intellectual collaboration with faculty and with one another. The photos that festoon our promotional materials aren’t mere marketing—we spend a lot of time with one another in clos...

July 6, 2020

About a year ago, I attended a meeting at the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) focused on reducing the cost of learning materials for college students in our region. I have been pleased since then to work with colleagues across the New England states on NEBHE’s Open Education Advisory Committee that is looking into how best to support institutions and faculty as they replace high-co...

June 30, 2020

I want to discuss the human dimensions of what I have too often treated (thinking with my instincts as a theoretical physicist) as a scientific methods problem. Experience has taught me that the human forces of a problem are often more important in determining how we meet challenges in an educational institution than the technical aspects. Indeed, management of offices that relate to such function...

June 23, 2020

Pre-pandemic, a good number of us lamented the demise of small colleges. Let’s define these here as non-elite colleges with enrollment of fewer than 1,500 full-time undergraduate students. For the most part, these institutions have few graduate programs, a handful at most. Some of these colleges have closed; some have merged; some have partnered. Whatever the structure, it feels to me still l...

June 16, 2020

Discussions of the problematic future of higher education were already an exploding industry before COVID-19, producing more to be read than anyone could possibly keep up with. Their main audience was academic administrators and a few faculty, worrying where their institutions and careers were headed, and wanting guidance in strategic decision-making—helping to identify not only where they actua...

June 9, 2020

This is a uniquely defining moment in American history. In our collective lifetime, few of us have seen or could possibly imagine anything approaching the events we are witnessing on the streets of Boston, across New England, and in states and countries across the globe. What began as low-simmering protests in Minnesota has metastasized and sparked massive demonstrations, public unrest, civil diso...

June 2, 2020

The rising cost of college textbooks has been well-documented over the past few years. Reports indicate that textbook prices have risen by over 800%—three times the inflation rate over the past 50 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A study from the Florida Virtual Campus documented the academic impact that textbook costs had on student success. The study detailed that 47...

May 26, 2020

2020 will forever be remembered as the year of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. This year, the term “social distancing” became part of our vocabulary, and virtual proms and online commencement ceremonies became commonplace. According to Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of HIS Markit Forecast Summary of May 2020, on the economic front, 2...

May 14, 2020

Whether and how campuses will reopen in fall 2020 has emerged as the key story in higher education. On Wednesday, Trump administration officials spoke via teleconference with higher education leaders on how to get students back to campus this fall. During a pandemic, we need to recognize that the risk assessment and risk tolerance among individuals and organizations varies dramatically. Those d...

May 12, 2020

Friday May 8 saw the release of the most disastrous monthly jobs report in American economic history. In its monthly Employment Situation released last Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported: Payroll employment levels declined by 20.5 million between mid-March when the COVID-19 lockdowns began in earnest and mid-April—a decline that is more than two orders of magnitude greater...

May 12, 2020

The emphasis on humanities has swung like a pendulum through the years, particularly in the world of higher education. Many perceive it as a discipline of the elite that attempts to connect us to distant places from times long ago that are mythical, historical or hypothetical, and somehow more important than today. Simply stated, humanities has the connotative power to scare people away from i...

May 6, 2020

In the following Q&A, NEBHE’s Fellow for Open Education Lindsey Gumb asks Heather Miceli, an adjunct professor at Roger Williams University (RWU) and Johnson & Wales University (JWU), about her integration of OER-enabled pedagogy in her general education science course, which has helped push the narrative of Open Educational Resources (OER) beyond cost savings to include more engaged and...

May 4, 2020

The opening of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities in fall 2020 will present a challenge due to the absence of a vaccine for COVID-19. Healthcare professionals and politicians have been warning us to get used to a new normal based on COVID-19 being with us for quite some time until an effective vaccine is introduced. In the meantime, all governments can do is slow the pace of infection t...

April 28, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused elected officials to shut down large segments of the U.S. economy, within 30 days of President Donald Trump’s National Emergency Proclamation in mid-March, putting more than 26 million American payroll workers out of work and shuttering countless small businesses, thereby shutting down the self-employment option upon which workers frequently rely in times of econ...

April 21, 2020

Karen Gross is an author, educator and advisor on diverse issues along the educational pipeline. Her current research focuses on student success and the impact of trauma on learning, psychosocial development and health. Sadly, the issues on which she focuses have taken center stage with the coronavirus pandemic and the literally thousands of colleges (and schools) closing their brick-and-mortar ca...

April 20, 2020

A few items from the quarantine … Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs ado...

April 14, 2020

Residential college and university campuses across New England abruptly closed their doors last month during the COVID-19 outbreak, and while some schools were in session and students were asked to vacate, many others were on spring break and students were asked not to return. In both situations, students found themselves at home or in new environments where they waited to see how their education ...

April 7, 2020

As COVID-19 rapidly changes the economic landscape throughout the country, higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing new, constantly evolving challenges. To address these challenges, federal and state governments are quickly drafting laws and regulations that are impacting colleges and universities, and their employees. Wage and hour challenges As HEIs grapple with COVID-19 fallout, in...

March 10, 2020

Last November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the administration could rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), with the fate of over 650,000 DACA recipients in the balance. While a decision is expected by June 2020, colleges and universities—including New England institutions—can begin preparing now. As of September 2019, New England is home to more than 10...

March 9, 2020

The number of articles on the impact of the coronavirus on higher education is growing by the minute. That’s understandable and necessary. The spread of this virus (which happens easily in a campus setting) raises critical questions about what educational institutions can and should do in light of the now spreading COVID-19 virus. And the raised issues are remarkably varied and call for all thos...

February 11, 2020

“Accountability” is one of the buzzwords of contemporary U.S. higher education. At times, it’s deployed primarily to strike a pose: We’re tough, we mean business. At other times, when this noun conveys not only muscularity but a real commitment to substantive results, its use is often imprecise. This imprecision has consequences and poses a danger. The concept of accountability, deploye...

February 3, 2020

A recent report released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that only 29% of public schools surveyed had a full-time or part-time counselor who is solely focused on college admission counseling, compared with 48% of private schools. Furthermore, public school counselors across the U.S. in the 2016-17 school year were responsible for an average of 455 students each�...

January 28, 2020

“Traditionally, New England has been at the forefront of the leading innovations in education and I am hopeful we will give birth to some exciting new models again that will deliver value to learners and meet the needs of our economy.” Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift became president of the education innovation organization LearnLaunch in July 2019. In 1998, Swift was elected lieute...

January 27, 2020

Some news and thoughts from the NEJHE beat … ICE-y conditions. MIT recently alerted its staff that federal immigration officials would be checking the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars in the sciences, and urged them to cooperate. ... Meanwhile, an Iranian student, returning to study at Northeastern University, was detained at Boston’s Logan Internat...

January 21, 2020

This question probably seems like a lead-in for a funny non-sequitur, but bear with me for a moment. The American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), where I currently serve as interim president, was founded in 1991, soon after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, originally as a branch campus of the University of Maine. Like several other international institutions, AUBG is accredited by the Ne...

January 7, 2020

In late September 2019, I joined NEBHE as its Open Education Fellow to help build upon the grassroots efforts that have been underway for years in the Northeast aiming to lessen the burden that textbook costs place on higher education students and their families. Like so many of my colleagues doing this work day in and day out, I’m passionate about breaking down this very real barrier to student...

December 17, 2019

All signs indicate that high school graduation rates will continue to drop due to low birth rates, leading to a potential higher education metldown that is likely to affect all academic institutions, big and small, in the years after 2024. What steps do colleges and universities need to take to survive? The answer lies in subscribing to the law of survival of the fittest and in increasing marke...

December 17, 2019

Higher education is awash with challenges. While young people today need college more than ever, college attendance across the country has dropped in each of the last eight years, including 300,000 fewer students last year alone. This is happening at a time when almost all new well-paying jobs require postsecondary training and study. As enrollment declines threaten the survival of more tha...

December 3, 2019

NEBHE convenes leaders on the economy and the future of higher education ... Times are already complex for higher education. In Massachusetts, 18 higher education institutions (HEIs) have closed or merged in the past five years. In Vermont, College of St. Joseph, Green Mountain College and Southern Vermont College all held their final graduation ceremonies in the spring. What would happen if a ...

November 17, 2019

In a matter of seconds, a student at a high school in Santa Clarita, California, injured and killed a handful of his fellow students and then shot himself. He died shortly thereafter. We read about such incidents and lament their happening. We see television footage and peruse articles and social media postings. We mourn for the students injured and killed and worry about their families and friend...

November 12, 2019

Unemployment for college graduates is at its lowest point in over a decade at just 2.1%, compared with 3.7% for those with a high school diploma, according to October 2019 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But a familiar tale of frustration simmers below the surface of these seemingly positive numbers. College graduates report difficulties in finding jobs that correspond to their level ...

November 5, 2019

Every higher education institution should have an employee handbook designed to meet its standards for employee conduct and ensure compliance with applicable employment laws. A well-crafted handbook will support the success of an institution’s goals, save administrative time and reduce the risk of legal claims and liability. Handbooks provide clear expectations for an institution and its empl...

November 5, 2019

In just over a year, Massachusetts public colleges and universities have galvanized a statewide movement to adopt more comprehensive use of Open Educational Resources (OER). How did state and campus leaders achieve such momentum? By way of background, OER includes teaching, learning and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that reside in the public domain or have been relea...

October 15, 2019

What does it mean to re-envision teacher education? This is the question that the faculty at the newly named Lunder School of Education at Thomas College have been asking and exploring. More than a quixotic pursuit, the purpose of this inquiry has been to re-design what we think of as classroom space, to re-construct an educator preparation curriculum, and to model both the distinct art and distin...

September 30, 2019

In recent weeks, presidential candidates have pledged billions of dollars to bring broadband and internet access to rural America. Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and other Democratic hopefuls correctly realize that a lack of high-speed internet and other attendant technologies has profoundly affected rural economies. That’s a good start: Poor infrastructure derails job creati...

September 24, 2019

“It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean.” —President John F. Kennedy, Sept. 14, 1962, Newport, R.I. Half a century after President Kennedy made those remarks, our collective future as a ...

September 17, 2019

Today, questions around diversity and inclusion are in the front of our collective consciousness wherever we live in the world. This month, British Member of Parliament, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi delivered impassioned remarks about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s inflammatory rhetoric on religious dress. It was immediately preceded by the collapse of the Italian far-right populist, anti-migrant ...

September 16, 2019

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Nelson what lessons today's leaders could learn from his latest book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency (Lexington Books, ...

September 9, 2019

As students throughout New England head back to school this fall, tens of thousands of them have a head start on a bright future through a Children’s Savings Account (CSA). These investments in children’s future postsecondary education are offered in cities and states throughout the region—and beyond—and all share a goal of boosting college-going. CSAs are long-term savings or investme...

August 28, 2019

The New England Board of Higher Education recently honored Hartford Promise and the Rhode Island Promise Scholarship with 2019 New England Higher Education Excellence Awards. And NEJHE has been paying close attention to innovations—and challenges—facing such "free college" programs. In June, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) lauded NEBHE delegate and Connecticut state Rep. Gregg ...

August 27, 2019

With all the discussion about what best prepares students for work and life, two candidates are interdisciplinary thinking and international awareness. This summer, exactly 30 years after I graduated from college, my favorite professor at Bates College retired, which led me to think about my own early experiences with these ways of thinking and being. To prepare for Steve Kemper’s retirem...

August 21, 2019

"Regardless of disciplinary area, problem-solving requires us to ask questions, to be curious and open-minded, to think critically and creatively, incorporate a variety of viewpoints and work in partnership with others." In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Mary K. Grant, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, about the institu...

July 30, 2019

Three years ago, I graduated with an associate degree in liberal arts from Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Haverhill, Mass. Although I was one of over a thousand students to graduate that day, my situation was a little different than those of my peers. You see, I am a full-time faculty member at NECC with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. I had decided the year before to go undercover by...

July 23, 2019

"Students need to get involved in changing systems that underrepresent and disempower most groups of Americans." Nancy Thomas is director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Thomas about her insights on higher education, citizen engagement an...

July 8, 2019

"The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies." Michelle Weise is senior vice president for workforce strategies and chief innovation officer at Strada Education Network. Weise is a higher education expert who specializes in innovation and connections between higher education and the workforce. She built and led Sandb...

June 26, 2019

A few tidbits from the editor after a long wet spring ... Unvites. I recently enjoyed a fascinating panel discussion on Protesting the Podium: Campus Disinvitations sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The panelists were former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, Middlebury College professor Matthew J. Dickinson and Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth. T...

June 11, 2019

A shared challenge for our higher education institutions and employers is the large number of students graduating high school unprepared for success in college and the workforce. It leads to lower-than-acceptable college completion rates, particularly for our most disadvantaged youth, and a broken workforce pipeline that threatens economic growth and opportunity. The lack of skilled workers to ...

June 5, 2019

Our Twitter content allows us to bring readers a broader base of resources—a larger canvas, in a sense—than NEJHE articles alone. We urge you to see us as parts of a whole. Every NEJHE item automatically posts to Twitter, but we also use Twitter to disseminate interesting news or opinion pieces from elsewhere. These tweets are often juxtaposed with something NEBHE has worked on in the past an...

May 28, 2019

The goals of higher education—engaging the hearts and minds of our next generation, advancing novel and pragmatic solutions to the most pressing local and global problems—call for great passion and skill. That’s not the whole formula, though. Diversity performs its own powerful role. College faculties that represent a diversity of expertise, ideas and perspectives help create the kind of ...

May 21, 2019

The federally financed GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program) was organized two decades ago with the purpose of increasing high school completion and college enrollment among low-income students. The College Crusade of Rhode Island’s GEAR UP program was designed as a long-term effort to buttress student success by providing various kinds of educational and soci...

May 14, 2019

Nonprofit institutions with large endowments have been facing challenges from various stakeholders contesting the management of their investment portfolios. While these challenges are most commonly associated with institutions of higher education, pension funds and private foundations will increasingly face similar challenges regarding how the management of their endowments affects socially import...

May 7, 2019

I was born in Lawrence, Mass., the first son of first-generation, working-class Italian-American parents—my mother, a nurse, and my dad, a shoe cutter in the old Everett Mills. The Everett Mills are across the street from the Holy Rosary Church. In that church, I walked barefooted down the aisle when I was 7 in an unsuccessful attempt to barter God for the sight back in my left eye, its cornea b...

April 23, 2019

As an unprecedented number of colleges and universities close their doors forever while others struggle to survive, a deep pool of prospective students—and the key to accessing them—is hiding in plain sight. Students from rural America attend college at lower rates (59%) than their urban (62%) and suburban (67%) counterparts and comprise only 29% of all students ages 18-24 enrolled in highe...

April 16, 2019

Food insecurity—defined by the nationally respected Wisconsin HOPE Lab as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or the ability to acquire such foods in a socially acceptable manner—is a troubling trend on college campuses across the country, including in New England. For example: A 2016 survey by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education...

April 9, 2019

The news is filled with stories about the admissions scandals at elite colleges and universities. And recently, some of the wrongdoers have pled guilty and await punishment. Apparently, prosecutors are seeking jail time. Apart from jail time, I have already suggested approaches to punishment that involve fines that go into a cy pres fund to be redistributed to small non-elite colleges and their st...

April 2, 2019

College completion matters, especially from the perspective of equity. Who finishes, how long it takes them, how much they benefit economically and how their citizenship benefits local communities all matter. This is especially true of knowledge-driven, innovation economies in New England. For Massachusetts—a state that ranks third highest in the nation for cost of living—a local educated w...

March 25, 2019

During my 40-plus years working in higher education I have witnessed a remarkable transformation in a wide range of industries—telecommunications, computing, transportation, media, publishing, manufacturing and retailing, to name a few. In almost every case these transformations have resulted in an improved product and/or service that is more responsive to consumer needs, more efficient and effe...

March 19, 2019

Across New England, the days are starting to get longer, everyone is hoping spring weather is just around the corner, and each state’s legislative session is firmly underway. While it’s still relatively early in the current sessions, at NEBHE we’re taking a first look at the major issues and trends we see emerging in the region’s legislatures related to higher education and workforce de...

February 27, 2019

Editor's Note: New England and the nation have long suffered from an underrepresentation of women and people of color in higher elected offices. In the 2018 midterms, that began to change. Below, Carolyn Morwick, director of government and community relations at NEBHE and former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures, takes a state-by-state look at New England elections and s...

February 27, 2019

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University estimated 31% turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds voting in the fall midterm elections—the highest youth vote in the past quarter century. NEBHE, meanwhile, has been fortunate to work with three 2018 NEBHE policy interns, all of whom are graduate students at Harvard Graduate School of Education­—and...

February 27, 2019

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont delivered a two-year budget plan of $43.1 billion to lawmakers, emphasizing that the state’s crushing fixed costs relative to its pension funds must be addressed. To accomplish this, he proposed restructuring, refinancing the systems’ payments and slowing the rate of increase in the teachers’ pension fund and the state employee pension fund, both of ...

February 19, 2019

Significant demographic changes to college enrollment projected over the next decade mean colleges and universities need to find new ways to drive down costs as they reconfigure their approach to attracting students and generating new revenue. Drawing students from the traditional, now-dwindling applicant pool who are not keen on loading up on loan debt is one of higher education’s growing chall...

February 6, 2019

A review of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, by Cathy N. Davidson (New York, Basic Books, 2017); a summary of the recent announcements of a major restructuring of MIT, and a synthesis of other relevant developments. It is increasingly obvious that we are living in one of the greatest ages of paradigm-shifts in Western history, compa...

January 18, 2019

New England faces a concerning dip in its higher education enrollment, due in significant part to declines in the region’s birth and high school graduation rates that are both projected to continue through 2029. Despite these trends, New England’s postsecondary institutions continue to attract a large number of international students to the region, according to the 2018 Open Doors report relea...