Top Higher Education Policy Issues For 2013

Top 10 Higher Education State Policy Issues for 2013

With states’ legislative sessions getting underway, the AASCU State Relations and Policy staff presents here its 6th annual briefing on the top 10 higher education state policy issues most likely to affect public higher education across the 50 states in 2013. This briefing is informed by an environmental scan of the economic, political and policy landscape surrounding public higher education, as well as a review of recent state policy activities and trends. Some issues are perennial in nature, while others reflect attention to near-term circumstances.
Authored by the AASCU State Relations and Policy Analysis Team

10 iphone apps for college search

Martina Keyhell : Guest blogger

Here’s the link to the article: (http://www.becomeananny.org/blog/10-iphone-apps-to-help-manage-your-college-search/ ). You can also go to (Becomeananny.org) and check it out there since I always feature my most recent articles on the homepage.

USA Ed Department College Remediation Figures Can Be Misleading

The study below understates the need for remediation because it includes only those who took remedial courses , not the number that need remediation. A variety of studies calculate remediation at over 60% of community college students and 25%  of 4 year college students. Many of these students do not take remedial courses before they drop out, or postpone taking them , and then never finish their program of studies.. So read the study below with great caution.

A National Center for Education Statistics report sheds light on incoming college students who are taking remedial classes and how the landscape has changed in the past decade. The percentage of freshman who had to take remedial classes dropped from 1999-2000 to 2007-2008 from 26.3% to 20.4%. The report found lower percentages of white students taking remedial classes compared to black and Hispanic students. (Education Week, premium article access compliments of edweek.org, 01/04/13)

Human Resources In Broad Access Higher Education: More Reseach Needed

  Author/s:

Susanna Loeb, Eric Taylor, Agustina Paglayan, Stanford University

Broad-access higher education institutions play a large and growing role in American human capital development, yet research describing how these institutions function and identifying the key elements of institutional effectiveness is sparse. Research focused on elementary and secondary education consistently demonstrates the significance of human resources – particularly teachers and school leaders – in educational production. Successfully recruiting, retaining, assigning, and developing effective instructors requires understanding the instructors themselves, and the administrators who both manage personnel practices and can have direct influence on student outcomes outside the classroom. The importance of these educators for student learning and educational attainment is particularly large when we restrict attention to inputs that institutions and policy makers can use as levers for change. Yet, like most topics discussed in this series, very little of the research on educators is set in higher education institutions and even less in broad-access higher education institutions. Given this lack of information on higher education personnel, the goal of this paper is to identify lines of research related to instructors and managers that are likely to be productive both for understanding the effectiveness of broad-access institutions and for identifying useful avenues for improvement.

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• The Changing Ecology of Higher Education

Investors See Profits For On Line Postsecondary

INVESTORS LOVE ONLINE EDUCATION
Higher education is one of the hottest growing sectors in Silicon Valley, and with good reason. The college premium is enormous. College-educated men have seen their wages increase since the 1960s even as wages for men with some to no college education have dropped. College grads face much lower unemployment rates than other educational groups. The gains among advanced degree holders are even larger. So, unsurprisingly, demand for higher education is increasing. But despite being a great investment, the upfront cost to college in terms of tuition is as high as ever, with real costs increasing by a third over the 2000s. So companies like Minerva, Coursera, and Udemy that promise high-quality courses delivered online are attracting a lot of investor attention. The article is in The Washington Post.

Grade Inflation Exposed By Historical Study

Grading in American Colleges and Universities
by Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy : For Teachers College Record on line
Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technol ogy.

Who Is The Average Online Student

THE ONLINE STUDENT
The average student pursuing a postsecondary credential completely online is a white, 33-year-old woman with a full-time job that pays around $65,000 per year, according to a new survey sponsored by two companies involved in online consulting. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

Grade 8 Committment To Student Financial Aid Helps Students Enroll in College

An earlier and simpler Pell Grant application has the potential to increase college enrollment by youth from poor families by helping to reduce their uncertainty about whether college is affordable, a study by La Follette School faculty affiliate Sara Goldrick-Rab and doctoral student Robert Kelchen finds.

Despite decades of public and private investment in financial aid, 30 percent of children born to families in the lowest 20 percent of the income distribution can expect to enroll in college, compared to 80 percent from the top 20 percent. Part of the reason for the college enrollment gap is financial — students who perceive the cost of college as being unaffordable never think about attending college.

“Right now, students do not learn about their financial aid package until 12th grade, but most students who qualify for a full Pell Grant already demonstrate their qualifications in eighth grade,” says Kelchen, an educational policy studies student.

Using national, longitudinal data, Kelchen and Goldrick-Rab examine the effectiveness of a commitment to provide the neediest students with full Pell Grants when they are in eighth grade. They find that such a program is likely to increase college enrollment among students from low-income families and that the benefits to the federal government through increased tax revenue are likely to exceed the additional Pell Grant expenditures by about $600 million per year.

“If the children in low-income families know in eighth grade they will have financial resources through Pell Grants, they can plan and prepare for college,” Goldrick-Rab says. “Our analysis suggests such a commitment by the federal government is cost-effective.”

http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/news/Fall_2012/Study_shows_promise_of_early_commitment_Pell_program.html
 

Middle School Students Who Get Off College Track, Cannot Get Back On

A new study from ACT focuses on the extent to which students who are academically far-off-track for college can catch up within four years. Researchers examined multiple cohorts of eighth-grade students whose EXPLORE (a test administered by ACT) scores were more than one standard deviation below benchmark scores associated with being on-track. Ten percent or fewer students who were far-off-track in the eighth grade attained ACT College Readiness Benchmarks by 12th grade. A separate analysis using state test scores for students in grade four and their EXPLORE scores in grade eight obtained similar results. For both fourth and eighth grade cohorts, the overall percentage of students catching up was lower in high-poverty schools. Even at more successful high-poverty high schools, fewer than 20 percent of far-off-track eighth graders attained College Readiness Benchmarks by 12th grade. These results indicate policymakers must emphasize prevention over remediation. Prevention strategies should be conceived more broadly — for example, giving every student access to a content- and vocabulary-rich curriculum in the early years, or implementing programs and strategies that improve student attendance and academic behaviors. Efforts to close academic preparation gaps should begin as early as possible, be more intensive, and take as long as necessary. Based on the study’s results, policymakers should not assume that rapid catching up is possible if only educators try harder.
See the report: http://www.act.org/research-policy/policy-publication

Rote Learning Is Counterproductive

Guest blogger:George Pappas

The ability of a child to learn when inspired cannot be beaten. Of course, one can teach a young person by rote but, but this by definition is counterproductive.

rote, noun.

1: the use of memory usually with little intelligence

<learn by rote>

2: mechanical or unthinking routine or repetition

<a joyless sense of order, rote, and commercial hustle Ñ L.L. King>

adjective.

1: learned or memorised by rote

2: mechanical

Though much emphasis has been placed on this way of learning in the past, choosing to teach in a way – only useful for passing tests and completing exams does little for the overall education of a child.

A love of learning is something that should be impressed at a young age. It is a facility that will enable a child to get through more difficult areas of study, simply because they’re enjoying the process. A child’s curiosity is a wonderful thing to behold – tapping into their need to know why some things are whilst others are not will provide the corner stone for their educational careers.

It is always good idea to create connections between what is learnt in the classroom and discoveries being made outside.

Be they present day or historical, reminding a child that the information they are learning was once absorbed by practitioners that went on to discover and create will provide context for their own areas of study.

Not simply learning for learning’s sake…

Science teachers are very lucky in this regard, in that the benefits of scientific knowledge are clear. The industry’s importance cannot be denied. Many of the leaps and bounds being made in technology, for example can be directly traced back to scientific research.

Ed balls is the UK’s current Secretary of State for Schools, recently questioned in regard to how best to enhance the interest of youth, he said:

“Science is one of our country’s great strengths and the jobs of the future are increasingly going to be hi-tech and science based. That’s why we need all young people getting excited, doing experiments and learning about science in primary schools and going on to study science in more depth at secondary school… Experiments teach children practical methods and skills and also how to test hypotheses, but they are also fun and challenging and make learning come alive.”

The benefits of experimenting in the classroom are unmistakeable the world over and it doesn’t have to be limited to the classroom either…

Together with your charge, you can create and follow step-by-step plans – planting and monitoring seeds for example. By using trial and error, whilst making notes about your collective discoveries – you can teach the children about the importance of research.

Play and explore

There are so many great toys that can be purchased to bring learning to life. Here are some examples:

1. The Telescope

The Telescope is a great place to begin this list. We’re thinking about encouraging children to consider the possibilities learning about Science will open up. What better instrument could there be for doing this, than one that allows the viewer to observe objects from a distance. As well as introducing ideas about astronomy – you will be able to remind your class that a whole world of knowledge is available to them, no matter how remote it may seem.

2. The Microscope

They’ll have so much fun setting their telescope up and taking it apart again at the end of every session. Many microscopes also come with books designed to advance learning and further understanding of the unit as a research tool.

3. Chemistry Set

Before they advance to high school, you can introduce chemistry as more than a concept. By allowing them to play with chemistry sets, you’ll be able to introduce the theatre of science. There are models to suit all age-groups and levels of understanding.

By allowing young people to utilise toys, gadgets and gizmos to aid learning – you’ll be providing them with a sense of ownership over their learning – reinforcing their potential to discover and create.

Author Bio

George Papas regularly contributes to leading scientific publications around the web. You can read his contributions on sites like Jeffrey Epstein and collegepuzzle.standard.