The Journal

September 9, 2013

We need to find the teachable moments within the higher education financing and repayment process ... American Student Assistance has a unique window onto students during some very important milestones in their formative financial years. Our nonprofit interacts with students from the time they’re choosing a college, to applying for financial aid and loans, to starting a first job, getting tha...

September 3, 2013

Shifting demography, rising operating expenses, plummeting state and federal support, intensified competition, broken financial models … these are just a few of the complex challenges facing New England higher education institutions. Given these tensions, who would be surprised if college presidents in the region weren’t occasionally plagued by sleepless nights, hounded by anxious trustees, or...

August 27, 2013

An expert on the college presidency weighs on on challenges facing presidents at Dartmouth and NYU ... Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? A...

August 25, 2013

Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It; Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Gerald B. Kauvar, and E. Grady Bogue; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2013. Most books on the college presidency are either autobiographies or prescriptions for success. We avoid autopsies, diagnoses of leadership collapses and college president resignations/terminations. Usually no one want...

August 20, 2013

Assessing what someone has learned from work and life experience to determine if it's worth college credit When Massachusetts Higher Education Commissioner Richard M. Freeland met in June with representatives from Boston businesses and the local community, four-year colleges, community colleges and the workforce system, he described the Vision Project, an initiative through the Massachusetts De...

August 12, 2013

At age 18, Suffolk University sophomore Marc-Daniel Paul seems destined for success. A Brockton High graduate who experienced homelessness as a teen, Paul was chosen as a Bank of America Student Leader and published his first book, Breathing Ink: The Heart of Poetry, during his senior year in high school. As an intern in the office of state Sen. Mark C. Montigny (D-New Bedford) this summer, Paul w...

August 9, 2013

We live in a knowledge-driven global society. The world has closely knitted economic, social and cultural relations that offer greater entrepreneurial and professional opportunities than ever before. Since meritocracy is considered the basis for success, institutions of higher education like to invest in high-impact practices and programs that raise the quality of academic experiences for students...

July 31, 2013

The classroom lecture/discussion model has become shallow and brackish. It should no longer be the standard. Most educators recognize the value of practical experiential learning and strive to develop assignments that engage students in a meaningful way and help them to deepen their understanding of rote content and derive some meaning from it. In an age where multiple streams of information in...

July 24, 2013

From a higher education perspective, new "Common Core" standards could improve student college-readiness levels, reduce institutional remediation rates and close education gaps in and between states. By 2014-15, many K-12 education systems should be able to adopt new state assessments after working to implement new state standards for student learning in English Language Arts and Mathematics. M...

July 22, 2013

Massive Open Online Courses (“MOOCs”) are free online courses offered by institutions of higher education to individuals across the world, without any admissions criteria. Through web-based courses hosted by MOOC platforms such as Coursera or edX, student-participants learn by accessing media, including documents, pictures and uploaded lectures on the course website. While MOOCs may m...

July 16, 2013

Engaged learning—the type that happens outside textbooks and beyond the four walls of the classroom—moves beyond right and wrong answers to grappling with the uncertainties and contradictions of a complex world. My iPhone backs up to the “cloud.” GoogleDocs is all about “cloud computing.” And Facebook, well, forget the clouds; it’s as ubiquitous as the sky. But learning? Really...

July 9, 2013

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President ...

June 21, 2013

New England is aging ... but gracefully? Last week, the Census Bureau reported that three New England states are the oldest in the U.S. in median age: Maine (43.5 years), Vermont (42.3 years) and New Hampshire (42 years). The other states in the region are old too: Connecticut (40.5 years); Rhode Island (39.8 years) and Massachusetts (39.3 years), compared with a national median age of 37.4 yea...

June 17, 2013

NEJHE's New Directions for Higher Education examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future ...

June 10, 2013

“When both of the partners meet our standards for excellence in teaching and research, and where they can both make contributions to the curriculum, it’s a great way to both recruit and retain. ... It also brings us the greater richness of what two people bring.”—Cristle Collins Judd, Dean for Academic Affairs, Bowdoin College Though Dean Judd is referring to faculty couples, she could be...

June 3, 2013

For the past 30 years, the student debt issue has been slowly simmering. Government loans quietly edged out grants as the primary form of financial aid, while college tuitions continued their rise. All the while, we piled debt on to students without adequately preparing them to manage it. Now, student debt has come to a boil. An astonishingly high 30% of the 37 million Americans with student lo...

June 1, 2013

Southern Vermont College's recent first-year seminar, From the Shoes of Our Ancestors, was a collaborative effort with the nearby Bennington Museum and Lincoln High School in Yonkers, N.Y. The students traced their roots by recording oral histories, documenting them through genealogical research, which included vital records searches and online investigations, and illustrating findings in famil...

May 28, 2013

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Anthony Bryk, president of t...

May 21, 2013

As this year began, NEJHE published the thoughtful concerns of Lasell College admissions official Christopher M. Gray about how colleges would need to address applicants who have experienced a traumatic and life-changing event such as 9/11 or the Sandy Hook mass murders. Now such events have visited Boston and so will traumatized applicants. Two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday, ...

May 17, 2013

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days and are being offered as a potential way to shorten the degree-attainment process and thereby reduce costs. With escalating tuition at public and private institutions and shrinking median household income, the energy around MOOCs is fueled by the question often asked by students, parents and policymakers: Can a meaningful higher educa...

May 13, 2013

The idea of “doing good while doing well” is hardly new. But the Y Generation’s response to it is different. They are literally taking on a youth revolution that extends from one part of the world to the other, while changing the conversation around social good and entrepreneurship. My colleague Ahmad Ashkar, founder and CEO of the Hult Prize, one of the world’s leading pl...

May 6, 2013

Higher education officials have long been familiar with the concept of “summer melt,” where students who have paid a deposit to attend one college or university instead matriculate at a different institution, usually presumed to be of comparable quality. While melt may be a concern for individual institutions as they try to predict their fall enrollments, historically it has not been viewed as...

April 29, 2013

NEJHE’s New Directions for Higher Education series examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The convergence of forces driving change in higher education is transforming the academic enterprise—reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is and what the value of higher education is. On...

April 23, 2013

Much has been written about the failure of “developmental education” in mathematics. Failure has not been our experience at Worcester State University. In response to concerns about both the placement rate into developmental math courses and the failure rate in those courses, we made substantial changes in our placement program and in our course delivery. We have decreased by 50% the n...

April 19, 2013

NEBHE and the Davis Foundation have chosen to postpone all events and activities related to the April 22 Summit on Cost in Higher Education. We realize that the impact of these tragic events reverberates well beyond the Greater Boston area, throughout New England and across each one of your campuses. We recognize that your institutions—including students, faculty and staff—have been d...

April 8, 2013

More than three-quarters of administrators, faculty and staff at Jesuit colleges agree or strongly agree that “admitting, enrolling, and supporting undocumented students fits with the mission of the institution.” And yet 40% recently said there were no known programs or outreach to undocumented students of which they were aware. There is then an obvious disconnect between a theoretical...

March 25, 2013

NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever It will be truly ironic if the most impersonal technology of all ends up saving the most personal kind of teaching and learning in higher education. I speak about the dramatic rise of online learning and MOOCs. Everyone, it seems, is talking about and questioning the relevance and “value proposition” of higher education. From Thomas Frie...

March 22, 2013

The case for greater transparency in grading practices in the first yearVermont’s Landmark College has been exclusively serving students with Learning Disabilities since 1985 when it opened its doors for a dyslexic population of college-ready students. Our mission now also includes those with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and those on the autism spectrum. Landmark serves a specifi...

March 18, 2013

NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever MOOCs claim to make education accessible to everyone, but institutions offering MOOCs have yet to define best practices for accessible design. For many, universal design efforts end when course video material has been captioned. Captioning is important, but the idea that you can just caption course video and call a MOOC accessible belongs on the ...

March 11, 2013

Many students begin higher education unprepared for college-level work in mathematics and must take non-credit developmental courses. Furthermore, many are math-phobic and avoid courses, majors and careers that involve quantitative work. Yet science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are among the few job-growth areas in the U.S. Many companies are lobbying the federal governme...

March 4, 2013

Even as the economy appears to have turned a corner, high unemployment persists. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the national unemployment rate teetered at 7.9% in January 2013, and New England’s was 7.3% in December 2012. Strangely, as millions nationwide struggle to find work, there are millions of jobs that remain unfilled. The BLS reports that on the last business day o...

February 28, 2013

It is now a commonplace to assert that education institutions have some responsibility to contribute to the effort to remake our world so civilization will be sustainable into the future. A history of this idea would capture the many programs of environmental research and teaching that have taken place at universities and colleges, going back centuries, but would certainly also note the founding i...

February 26, 2013

NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed ForeverDuring any given semester at a liberal arts college like Wellesley, students may experience what will prove to be a transformational moment in their lives. A pre-med student from El Paso might come to Wellesley and publish research with her biochemistry professor. She might carry on impassioned debates beyond her political science seminar and into ...

February 24, 2013

Immigration reform is gathering steam. In late January, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators announced an agreement on principles for immigration reform, that may include paths for undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship. Based on earlier immigration reform proposals, these pathways to “earning” citizenship will likely include earning a postsecondary degree after a high school diploma or eq...

February 17, 2013

For every institution of higher education, the safety and protection of its campus community is of primary importance. Recent events have shown an increase in campus crime, assaults and even a tragic loss of life.Apps such as Ping4alerts! allow campuses to send hyperlocal smartphone alerts related to public safety, school closings, local events, power outages, traffic and weather advisories, and d...

February 6, 2013

While schools wrestled with how to build a new athletic facility in the middle of a recession, Tufts University’s Athletics and Operations Departments worked with a Massachusetts-based developer called Stanmar Inc. to devise a creative solution to designing, building and financing a new sports and fitness center in just under 24 months.In an education environment that is experiencing rising ...

January 29, 2013

Introducing NEBHE's new Trends & Indicators ... It should go without saying that data is tricky (or is it are tricky?).Take the issue of student aid as one example. Some states have annual budgets; some have biennial. Some states report all kinds of aid in one place; others leave it to observers to patch together the hodgepodge of merit and need-based programs from the state’s gener...

January 23, 2013

When MIT approached Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) to participate in edX, the new Harvard/MIT massive open online course (MOOC) initiative, we reacted with both interest and skepticism. What did MIT have in mind for Bunker Hill Community College? How would edX “transform the way that community college students learn” as edX President Anant Agarwal claimed, when he discussed the l...

January 21, 2013

National report looks at impact of college spending on athletics and academics For some small colleges, just the sight of the school's branded team bus traveling to road games can nail a marketing extra point. And television deals bring big bucks to major football programs. But for the most part, spending on college athletics drains money from campuses still bruised by recession and, as faculty...

January 15, 2013

Those that believe a higher education degree is becoming increasingly superfluous make reference to the fact that 19 of the top 100 chief executives in the Fortune 500 lack college degrees. In consideration of that, a recent U.S. News analysis of the Fortune 500 CEOs reports that many of those CEOs who hold academic degrees choose not to mention their degree as among their achievements in their c...

January 8, 2013

The New Hampshire Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs has come a long way since the inception of the state’s first Club in Manchester more than 100 years ago. Today, there are Boys & Girls Clubs of America organizations in New Hampshire–Salem, Derry, Portsmouth Naval and Nashua serving the southern part of the state; Manchester, Concord, Souhegan Valley, and the Lakes Region serving...

December 29, 2012

NEBHE publishes new Policy Snapshot: State Student Grant Aid in New England In the 2010-11 academic year, New England states appropriated more than $181 million for state grant aid—collectively about 15% more than they did in 2006-07. Each state's aid performance varied dramatically during this time, with Connecticut awarding 51% more grant aid ($21.5million) and New Hampshire awarding 20% ...

December 20, 2012

Today, students can be categorized in many different ways. Domestic, international, first generation and stealth are all terms used frequently in higher education. Through the application process to college, students may also be categorized as a “legacy,” having a learning challenge or even down to their demographic background. As our society and world changes with time, is there a new categor...

December 18, 2012

Nearly 50 years after the landmark legislation aimed to open higher education to all Americans, colleges and students face a new set of threats ... The Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) was signed into law on Nov. 8, 1965 to strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance for students in postsecondary education. During reauthorization...

December 10, 2012

A number of economists, policymakers, elected officials and employers cite a “skills gap” as the reason the nation is not putting more people back to work. The problem, they reason, is that too many people have the wrong skills for today’s jobs, and colleges and universities are not doing enough to prepare people with the right skills.The idea of a skills gap is tempting to buy i...

December 4, 2012

While other states are experiencing difficult budget decisions, only New Hampshire has completely de-funded student aid Today’s global economy requires a highly skilled labor force that is prepared to compete on the world stage. Studies from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Brookings Institution and the Conference Board have all identified building and maintaining a...

November 30, 2012

An education dean reflects on MOOCs … I am not a machine. This makes my college students happy. Though, to be honest, they assume as much since I walk into the classroom, make some small talk and launch into my lecture. After a few minutes, I may stop, ask for questions, prompt some discussion and perhaps tell a few bad jokes. Which should prove once and for all that I am human and fallibl...

November 28, 2012

Announcing the 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities! The 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities, produced by NEBHE in association with Boston magazine, lists key data for each college, such as: admissions application deadlines and acceptance rates; faculty-student ratio; enrollment totals and breakdowns for part-time, commuting, female, international and minority stude...

November 20, 2012

A recent report by the College Board might be an indicator of how fast the sands of higher education are shifting. The prices that most people actually pay for college, which had remained stable for several years, are on the rise again, as tuition and other cost increases outpace financial aid awards.In its latest annual survey, the College Board reports that after rising swiftly since the 1980s, ...

November 13, 2012

The Northeast United States just experienced one of the region’s worst natural disasters. Fortunately, because of the confluence of modern computing power and scientific computing methods, weather forecasting models predicted Sandy’s very complicated trajectory and development with a precision that would not have been possible even a decade ago. Many lives were saved as a result of the...

November 6, 2012

Updated November 2012New England’s traditional public and private nonprofit colleges and universities conferred more than 201,000 degrees at all levels in 2010—or more than 6% of the U.S. total, compared with the region's less than 5% of the U.S. population. However, those traditional public and private nonprofit colleges make up an ever-smaller portion of the U.S. total, and the U.S. ...

October 26, 2012

In the days since NEBHE convened hundreds of educators and opinion leaders in Boston for the University Unbound conference, we've received a surge of reactions including this one from George McCully, founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy. NEBHE has begun focusing the attention of New England institutions on the MOOC movement, which will affect them all. Already, within months of their pub...

October 24, 2012

Innovators and entrepreneurs are using technologies to make freely available the things for which universities charge significant money. MOOCs ... free online courses ... lecture podcasts ... low-cost off-the-shelf general education courses ... online tutorials ... digital collections of open learning resources ... open badges ... all are disrupting higher education's hold on knowledge, instructio...

October 15, 2012

Veterans play a critical role in the U.S. economy. For many returning veterans, education is the first step to successfully reentering civilian life and the workforce. Since the inception of the first GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act) in 1944, higher education has been responding to the needs of military students. There were over 555,000 veteran and active duty beneficiaries of the Pos...

October 3, 2012

Why is remedial or developmental education such a hot issue? Partly because it costs time and money and casts doubt on the elementary and secondary education systems that we assume will prepare students for college. The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) explored solutions to the problem at a recent forum in Kennebunkport, Maine, called “Ready for Real: Innovative Strategies for Im...

September 25, 2012

Click here for videos of BIF-8 storytellers! The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) held its eighth annual collaborative innovation summit on Sept. 19 and 20 in Providence, and the key, as always, was the art of storytelling. No themes, said summit facilitator and BIF founder and “chief catalyst” Saul Kaplan. You decide which connections you can make, he told the 400-plus attendees. Granted...

September 10, 2012

The debate about the need for change in America’s K-12 education system has been raging for decades. Teachers, parents, administrators and government leaders alike have been grappling with how to transform a system that has been failing too many students for too long, according to a recent Center for Education Policy study. Until recently, the higher education system, on the other hand, has been...

September 4, 2012

The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. Indeed, that number is not far from the total of all the students enrolled there since the 19th century. MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,...

August 27, 2012

Universities typically emerge as gatekeepers of the professions, by wresting control over the training and certification that is required. The process generally begins outside academe—with apprenticeships and voluntary associations—and evolves toward a new norm of academic credit and degrees. Faculty then become the experts who determine the body of knowledge budding professionals need...

August 24, 2012

Writing center workers are agents of change whose practices might reverse the resegregation and new racism occurring in our country. As leaders in the academy who advance a pedagogy of hope, writing center workers model a practice for bringing about a lasting and abundant multicultural community. Starting with the writing center at the University of Iowa in the first half of the last century, t...

August 19, 2012

Updated August 2012The enigmatic term "college readiness" is increasingly used in education and policy environments across the country. While school-university partnerships, school-community initiatives and state and federal legislation have shown promise in preparing students for college study, a common definition of the term remains elusive, and many students are still underprepared for college-...

August 14, 2012

"Your students come here for four years and leave."For some time, this had been a common perception among many Rhode Islanders regarding to the state's independent colleges and universities. But that's changing.The state’s housing bubble had burst in 2006, leading to interest in developing less volatile economic sectors that would provide the stable high-end services jobs. By 2008, Rhode Isl...

July 30, 2012

If you won the lottery tomorrow, how would you spend your time? Being a good social scientist, Jack Cheng, a former UMass Boston art historian, said he would go to Walmart, the new Peoria, and ask that question. “Most of them, after they buy a house, after they buy a car ... would go to the movies, they would read books, they would listen to music,” Cheng said. “They’d sit around cafes ...

July 19, 2012

Editor's Note: NEJHE devotes special attention in 2012 to the changing roles of land-grant institutions on this 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. Here, Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, proposes a new kind of research university ... In the 2000s, American manufacturing suffered its worst decade since at least World War II...

July 12, 2012

Editor's Note: NEJHE devotes special attention in 2012 to the changing roles of land-grant institutions on this 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. Here is University of New Hampshire President Mark W. Huddleston on the current state of land-grant support ... As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the land-grant college system, I wonder what U.S. Sen. Justin Smith Mo...

July 9, 2012

Updated July 2012New England colleges and universities enrolled nearly 59,000 foreign students in 2011—more than three times as many as they did in 1980, according to data from the New York City-based Institute of International Education.New England campuses attract 8.1% of all foreign students who enrolled in the United States.Figure INT 1: Foreign Enrollment at New England Colleges and Un...

July 6, 2012

Perspectives from Stephen J. Nelson, who recently authored his fourth book about college presidents, Decades of Chaos and Revolution: Showdowns for College Presidents. Nelson is associate professor of Educational Leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. NEJHE published his thoughts on two previous occasions: Success and Fai...

July 2, 2012

With Boston serving as a hub of both educational and medical excellence, it’s no wonder that New England has a high reputation to uphold in both of these areas. However, Boston and the rest of the region lack a specific degree program that is putting New England below the radars of potential midwives.

June 25, 2012

The New England states continue to experience slow growth and slow recovery of the jobs lost in the 2008 to 2009 recession. The main reason for this is the continued weakness in global and U.S. economic conditions. The U.S. and New England economies continue to be affected by the weak European economy and sovereign debt crisis and by weakness in domestic and regional housing markets.The forecast f...

June 18, 2012

Club members receiving homework help in Burlington, Vt. Boys & Girls Clubs of America count 4,000 community-based clubs serving more than 4 million young people through membership and community outreach. They provide a safe place to spend time during non-school hours and the summer as an alternative to the streets or being home alone—a place to play, have fun and learn. Boys & ...

June 11, 2012

In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to provide all its citizens access to a free public education. Over the next 66 years, every other state made the same guarantee. Based on a factory-model classroom and inspired in part by the approach Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843, it seemed to adequately prepare American youth for the 20th century industrialized economy.Massachusetts may again b...

June 4, 2012

Higher education is at a crossroads, not only in the U.S. but also globally. This challenge is prompting an immigrant union, on the centennial anniversary of the “Bread and Roses” strike at Lawrence Mills, to once again take up the labor movement’s historic role of speaking for the common good and the broad interests of working people. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 61...

May 29, 2012

Polls Show: Castleton Making a DifferenceDuring the past 11 years as president at Castleton, I have suggested to all our incoming classes and current students what they need to remember: Their mission is to make a difference in their college and our wider community before they go out to make a difference in the world.We have another new initiative at Castleton, a dream in the making over the past ...

May 21, 2012

Photo: Presidents who signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) seen gathered in 2007. (Courtesy of Second Nature.) Preparedness. Opportunity. Innovation. These words capture the essence of higher education’s critical role in creating a healthy, just and sustainable society. Leaders in higher education are standing up to the greatest challenge o...

May 14, 2012

Only a generation ago, universities like Northeastern and Boston University had campuses strategically sprinkled throughout eastern Massachusetts. Lesley University offered graduate education programs across the U.S. BU had a contract with the U.S. Army to deliver master’s programs on military bases throughout Europe. Mega-high-tech companies, like Digital Equipment Corp., volunteered their ...

May 3, 2012

Updated May 2012 ...The six-state New England region's population grew by a sluggish 3.8% between 2000 and 2010—while the nation's as a whole grew by 9.7%, according to U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 population figures released in December.Among other highlights:• United Van Lines, the nation’s largest household goods mover, classified four of the six New England states as &ldquo...

April 30, 2012

Knowledge is humanity’s first and final frontier. From the Edenic exodus to flights beyond earth, our mythic narratives reveal that going where no one has gone before to learn what no one has known before drives us like no other quest.That quest, for many millennium largely driven by spiritual needs, has become core to economic and social progress. Historian Steven Johnson credits the exchan...

April 20, 2012

No sooner has the Net Price Calculator wave crashed ashore, the next wave of college-choice transparency in the form of third-party data aggregators is threatening to engulf us. A Net Value Calculator can help us recapture the high ground. Since last October, Net Price Calculators (NPCs) have become a fact of life for American colleges and universities. Some are doing the bare minimum to co...

April 16, 2012

On April 3, NEBHE convened hundreds of New England opinion leaders at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss "Locally and Regionally Engaged: New England Colleges and Universities as Drivers of Innovation, Workforce and Economic Development." NEBHE Program Coordinator (and videographer) Erica Pritchard and NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney caught up with keynote speaker Babson Coll...

April 9, 2012

Updated April 2012 ... New England public schools were expected to award more than 147,000 high school diplomas in 2008-09. Fully 78% of New England 9th-graders graduate from high school in the "normal" four years time, compared with 70% nationally. Nearly a dozen foreign countries outperform the U.S. in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with a high school credential. Nationally, Latino yo...

April 9, 2012

On April 3, NEBHE convened hundreds of New England opinion leaders at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss "Locally and Regionally Engaged: New England Colleges and Universities as Drivers of Innovation, Workforce and Economic Development." NEBHE Program Coordinator (and videographer) Erica Pritchard and NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney caught up with keynote speaker Gov. Peter Shum...

April 3, 2012

2012 is a year of interest and consequence to all of New England higher education. ...This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first Morrill Land Grant Act, named after the great Vermont senator, Justin Morrill, who was instrumental in its creation and passage. Not only is the region’s higher education community reminded of its great tradition and leadership, it is compelled by the...

March 27, 2012

Why students should play a designer role in the creation of new (and better!) school experiences. Choosing a school is only the first step in planning an academic career. After making a selection, students must match interests and passions with an academic program and make important decisions about which courses to take and when to take them. Yet many students struggle with these choices and ha...

March 12, 2012

Earlier this year, NEBHE President Michael K. Thomas and I sat down with higher education consultant Jack Maguire to talk about the problem of social and economic inequality—an increasingly prominent topic in national discussions of education and other matters. Educated as a physicist, Maguire had been watching the skies when we visited to see how recent solar storms at the time affected the ...

March 6, 2012

Anyone who fixates on graduation rates has little understanding not only of the rich mission and value of our community colleges, but also how deeply flawed and inadequate those rates are as a principal assessment tool for the performance of community colleges.Graduation rate calculations apply to a small fraction of our entire student population (about 15%). That is because this national measure ...

February 28, 2012

Demographics in American higher education are changing dramatically. A recent study by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) reveals that 11.3 million people ages 16 to 26 (one in four) are first- and second-generation immigrants. Moreover, the report continues, between 1995 and 2010, immigrant-origin youth accounted for half of all growth in the nation’s population of young people overall. This ...

February 17, 2012

Our longstanding interest in the ways colleges and universities enrich their communities and the region will be on full display at NEBHE's April 3 conference on "Locally and Regionally Engaged: New England Colleges and Universities as Drivers of Innovation, Workforce and Economic Development." It promises to be a fascinating gathering focused not only on economic impacts such as building a competi...

February 15, 2012

President Obama's proposed FY 2013 budget would encourage community college partnerships with employers, target student aid for colleges that restrain tuition prices, and increase overall spending on U.S. Education Department programs by 2.5% to nearly $70 billion. That would be the largest percentage increase for any domestic department in the president's proposed federal budget for FY 2013, whi...

February 6, 2012

While many colleges and universities are trying to adapt to the forces affecting higher education today, a recent move by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology is about to cause a seismic shift.The prototype version of MITx is scheduled for launch in spring 2012. MITx is an outgrowth of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which began in 2002. Building upon the inventory of nearly 2,100 MIT c...

February 1, 2012

Updated February 2012 ... New England's public and private two-year and four-year colleges continue to be more expensive than the U.S. averages. The region continues to hold the dubious distinction of America’s lowest state appropriations for higher education and highest tuitions and fees for public colleges and universities. Recent data from the annual Grapevine survey by the Illinois St...

January 27, 2012

In Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent 2012 State of the Commonwealth address, he reported that 240,000 people were still looking for work in Massachusetts – and there were nearly 120,000 job openings. Business leaders have told the governor that job applicants don’t have the skills required. One of the actions Patrick called for in response was for better alignment between...

January 23, 2012

When I first started as interim director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) based at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I was given three studies that broadly identified specific needs and disparities of Native people in the region. These studies looked at demographic data provided by the U.S. Census, tribes and surveys of regional tribes and Native American non...

January 16, 2012

Sometimes when passing through a classroom building, I glance in at a class in session and try to gauge by students’ faces whether the instructor has them engaged or not. Through their facial expressions, you can see whether they are caught up in the class or struggling not to drift away in their thoughts or electronic devices. Faculty often think of their job as transmitting knowledge, from...

January 9, 2012

Maybe the classroom is where we should seek the transformation we need in higher education ... For several years now, many of us have been agonizing over the sorry state of American higher education—indeed, of our entire educational system—and for good reason: Once the U.S. had the highest college completion rates in the world, we now rank 12th among 25-35 year-olds in developed coun...

January 3, 2012

Maine has been focusing on the importance of postsecondary training. As the Maine Department of Education’s Pre-K-16 Task Force noted: “To guarantee a more promising future for Maine youth and to ensure economic vitality in our state, we need to dramatically increase the number of citizens with either an associate or a baccalaureate degree.” Maine’s Skowhegan Area High School (SAHS) and...

December 21, 2011

Updated December 2011 ... Since NEBHE began publishing tables and charts exploring “Trends & Indicators” in New England higher education more than a half-century ago, few figures have grabbed as much attention as college enrollment data. These local, state, regional and national data go beyond simple headcounts of students going to college to tell the stories of New England's chang...

December 12, 2011

Recently, a former administrator at a Boston law school admitted that he used a school computer to embezzle more than $173,000. As the former controller, he accessed the school’s accounting system, creating false checks, which he deposited into his personal bank account. As part of his scheme, the former controller used the signature stamps of other employees to sign the checks without their app...

December 5, 2011

For over a decade, educators, government representatives, entrepreneurs, social scientists, economists and journalists have espoused a constant drumbeat on the critically important skills and habits of mind that students will need to possess not just to survive, but also thrive in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world. Each commentator, in his or her own way has underscored the need to p...

November 28, 2011

U.S. universities have had century-long success in absorbing existing professions into their curricula—by making academe their gatekeeper. These professions often started with apprenticeships and short training courses leading to a certification examination—and were then elevated and “academized” into a comprehensive body of knowledge, fueled by evidence-based scholarship, ...

November 21, 2011

Driven by external pressure for increased accountability and internal pressure for improved learning outcomes, colleges across the country have been developing and refining assessment systems for several decades. In some cases, assessment results have significant positive impact, for example, when used to enhance teaching and learning or as a lever for organizational change. In other cases, the re...