FOR STUDENT SUCCESS, STOP DEBATING AND START IMPROVING
Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education , and she includes a good list of reforms that have some empirical support. Pennington headed Gates higher education grant , and this is a useful summary of her conclusions after spending a lot of money.

Recommendations For New College Majors

A blog that has interesting content, created some college majors that do not exist now. These are worth considering, but I am not sure what type of general education would  precede these suggestions.   (http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2012/04/05/12-college-majors-we-hope-to-see-soon/

Education Departments New Plan To Measure Student Success

   To provide more complete information on student persistence and completion, the Education Department released an action plan today that takes steps to augment its current measures of student success in postsecondary education.  Graduation rate reporting required for institutions of higher education will be broadened to include part-time and other students who have previously attended postsecondary education.

Current law excludes a substantial portion of the student population by only requiring that schools track graduation rates for full-time, first-time students. The additional reporting would supplement this existing requirement.

“Not all students take a linear path in their pursuit of higher education,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “Many students work full-time and are balancing family obligations while also attending school. These new outcome measures will accurately demonstrate how postsecondary schools are preparing students for success in different ways.”

Entitled “Action Plan for Improving Measures of Postsecondary Success,” the plan responds to the final report of the Committee on Measures of Student Success (CMSS).  The committee was created under the Higher Education Opportunity Act  to help two-year degree granting institutions comply with the law’s disclosure requirements, and to develop alternate measures of student success that are comparable to completion and graduation rates.   The 15-member committee, appointed by Secretary Duncan in June of 2010, held five public meetings in 13 months and made several recommendations that are incorporated in the action plan. One key recommendation adopted by the Department is that broader measures of student success be implemented for four-year as well as two-year institutions.

College Choice For Students With Moderate Achievement

Postsecondary Access
This policy brief from MDRC describes an intervention program called the College Match Program, which targets a population that has been overlooked by many other college success initiatives: moderately to high-achieving students who are prepared for college but need advice and support to choose college wisely.

Lack Of Job Growth For Graduate Degree Holders

Guest Blogger: Rhonda Campbell

Even in an improving economy college graduate degree holders may face job growth challenges. Reasons for the job shortages facing some graduate students are as varied as the types of advanced degrees students earn.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) reports that nearly 86 percent of the Master of Business Management (MBA) graduates from the Class of 2011 responding to a recent survey said they were employed. This represents a two percent drop from the 88 percent employment rate experienced by MBA graduates from the Class of 2010. Furthermore, of the 86 percent of employed 2011 graduates, about 12 percent returned to work for previous employers after they earned advanced business degrees.Two industries that didn’t experience decline in job growth were science and engineering. In fact, the National Science Foundation states in Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 report that, “While both the total and S&E employment experienced smaller growth rates in the 2000s compared to the 1990s, the trend of higher growth rates in S&E occupations relative to other jobs continues, even through the recent economic downturn.” The report continued, “S&E occupational employment has grown from 2.6% of the workforce in 1983 to 4.8% of all employment in 2010.”

College Majors Impact Job Growth for Graduate Students

Additionally, Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job outlook handbooks show that subjects graduate students major in play a role in the amount of job opportunities students receive after they leave college. By researching job outlook handbooks and career fields, students can discover which industries, markets and jobs are expected to experience growth over the next several years.

Another factor creating a lack of job growth for 2012 graduate degree holders involves the large numbers of previous graduate students who continue to search for employment as the economy slowly recovers. As Carl Van Horn, a public policy professor at Rutgers University is reported in the September 7, 2011 Huffington Post “Jobless College Graduates Struggle Under Ongoing Recession” article as saying, “You have another class of graduates that are facing not only a difficult labor market but competition from the previous three, four and five years of young graduates also clamoring to find their way into the labor market.”

Other factors that can cause lack of job opportunities for graduate degree holders include poorly written job resumes and cover letters, ineffective job interviewing skills, lack of professional networking and/or poor networking skills. Graduate students who do not work with their college career counselors to get hired into internships or work study programs before they earn advanced degrees may also experience a lack of job opportunities.

Fortunately, the Council of Graduate Schools reported in its March 16, 2012 “Data Sources: Strong Employment Growth Expected for Graduate Degree Recipients” article that the job outlook for students holding advanced degrees is looking up. The report states, that according to BLS’ projections, “the number of jobs typically requiring a doctorate or a professional degree for entry is projected to increase by 20 percent between 2010 and 2020, and the number typically requiring a master’s degree for entry is expected to grow by 22 percent.” Of course, if previous graduates do not find jobs soon, projected available jobs may fill up quickly, competition for top paying jobs being intense.

About the Author: Rhonda Campbell is a content writer for College.com.  Rhonda enjoys writing about education topics for both accredited online colleges and campus based universities.Sources:

Huffington Post: Jobless College Graduates Struggle Under Ongoing Recession, September 7, 2011

DCJobs.com Jobs: 10 Reasons College Graduates Can’t Find a Job

National Science Foundation: Science and Engineering Indicators 2012

Council of Graduate Schools: Data Sources, Strong Employment Growth Expected for Graduate Degree Recipients

US News and World Report: Job Outlook Improving for Class of 2012

Bloomberg Businessweek: The MBAs Value? Debatable

What to Do If Accepted, Rejected Or Waitlisted At Colleges

Community College Students Can Take New Statistics Courses Rather Than Algebra

by Sue Frey/EdSource Extra
Some California colleges are helping struggling math students complete all the math they need in a single yearlong course, instead of requiring them to take the usual sequence of courses that can take years to complete and that many never finish.

First offered during the current academic year, the course is called Statway — short for Statistics Pathway — and is aimed at students who are not ready for college-level math. So far, five community colleges and three CSU campuses are participating in this national initiative, which is being developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, located in the foothills above Stanford University. Statway wraps the usual two-course sequence of elementary and intermediate algebra into a year-long statistics course. The Statway project is part of a $13 million initiative that has attracted support from a number of foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Community college students majoring in the humanities or social sciences must pass intermediate algebra to earn an associate degree and a college-level math course — typically statistics — for transfer credit to California State University. The Statway course satisfies both those requirements and, for many CSU students, will also be the only course they will need to meet the math requirement for a B.A. degree. The course is tackling what has become a major obstacle for many students: getting stuck in the standard course progression from elementary algebra to intermediate algebra to a college-level course, such as statistics. An EdSource analysis of data from the state’s 112 community colleges found that only 55 percent of students who enrolled in a math course that they could apply toward an associate degree or use to transfer passed it during the fall 2010 term. (more)

When $63,000 per College Student Is Not Enough

By Watson
Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy
Institute/EPI International

An article in today’s The
Chronicle of Higher Education, “Hey, Students, Your Education Costs More Than You Might Think,”
discusses how Hamilton College’s cost per student is over $63,000.

Hamilton College is a private liberal arts college based in
Clinton, New York that serves 1,812 students with a cost of attendance of about
$54,000. Hamilton has an endowment of exceeding $600 million, with a 27 percent
acceptance rate and average SAT scores in the lower 700s. They have a four-year
graduation rate of 84 percent and placed 17th on the US News and World Report
top liberal arts schools, number 24 on the high school counselor rankings, and,
get this, number 20 on the “best value schools.” Really.

In addition, 70 percent of the students are White, with only 5
percent Black and 5 percent Hispanic. Take away the 7 percent Asians and the 5
percent “international” students, and realistically you have a university with
1:10 diversity ratio (I don’t count Asians in this demographic). One Hamilton
student wrote on the collegeprowler.com website: “We’re pretty white.” As well,
only 12 percent of Hamilton students receive a Pell grant, meaning “poor,” in
the federal sense.

READ MORE….

Our New Papers On Broad Access Postsecondary Education

I have been  working with several Stanford faculty and students to better understand the nature, operations, effectiveness, context, policy, politics, and organizational behavior of all froms of broad access postseondary -from beauty colleges to minimally selective  universities. We have commissioned papers from scholars and practitioners all over the USA. Below are some links to our progress to date with Gates Foundation funds.

More info here:           http://cepa.stanford.edu/ecology

Papers that we have commissioned from the project  are headed to an edited volume.  We have some modest funds to support a
convening of the authors sometime in 2012 to revise the papers and integrate the volume.

Papers are here:       http://cepa.stanford.edu/ecology/conference-papers

Graduation Rate Increases Signifcantly After 4 Years

Approximately 58 percent of full-time, first-time students attending 4-year institutions in 2004 who were seeking a bachelor’s or equivalent degree completed a bachelor’s or equivalent degree within 6 years at the institution where they began their studies. The percentage of full-time, first-time students attending 4-year institutions in 2004 who were seeking a bachelor’s or equivalent degree who graduated in 4 years was higher at nonprofit institutions (52 percent) than at public (31 percent) or for-profit institutions (20 percent). Graduation rates of full-time, first-time students in 2006 increased from 23 percent to 37 percent at 2-year institutions and from 45 percent to 70 percent at less-than-2-year institutions when the time students were tracked was extended from within 100 percent of normal time to program completion within 200 percent of normal time.

Source: IES National Center for Educational Statistics: Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2010; Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2010; and Graduation Rates, Selected Cohorts, 2002–07. Compiled By Scott Swail.