Reminder News - Tolland High School grads urged to improve the world (June 28, 2011) - Tolland High School's June 27 commencement exercises featured Manchester Community College associate professor and author Lucy Anne Hurston, who encouraged the graduates to always think for themselves...

Inside Higher Ed - Costlier Community Colleges (June 30, 2011) - Amid the seemingly ever-present complaints from politicians and others about how fast tuitions are rising, it's not uncommon for higher education officials to cite community colleges as the exception. But that's getting harder and harder to do, especially given the relatively slow progress state officials are making in helping students transfer from two-year to four-year institutions, a new report asserts...

New England Board of Higher Ed - Number of HS Grads Dropping in NE States (June 29, 2011) - The number of new high school graduates will plunge in the New England states between now and 2020, according to a new report by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS)...

Inside Higher Ed - View from Across the Bargaining Table (June 28, 2011) - At many gatherings of faculty members, particularly those of the part-time variety, adjunct instructors argue that they're on the defensive, fighting for minimal rights and their share of declining resources -- and fighting off indignities -- as the low men and women on the totem pole of higher education...

Inside Higher Ed - Translating Success (June 27, 2011) - Many foreign language departments at four-year institutions have been threatened or eliminated in the past few years as administrators look to trim academic budgets. And language offerings are limited at many community colleges, which may offer Spanish and not much else...

Inside Higher Ed - Cars Not Welcome Here (June 27, 2011) - What with virtually every college's stated commitment to sustainability and (perhaps not unrelated) parking crisis, reducing the number of students who bring cars to campus is desirable to many. So colleges encourage carpooling, offer Zip Car short-term rentals, and promote bicycle use...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - U.S. Will Need Another 20 Million Workers With Some College Education, Report Says  (June 26, 2011) - The nation has been producing too few college-educated workers since 1980 and will need an additional 20 million workers with at least some postsecondary education over the next 15 years to meet future economic requirements and to reduce income inequality, says a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Educators Push Efforts to Get More Latino Men Into College (June 26, 2011) - Latino men are "vanishing" from the higher-education pipeline, a trend that could spell serious trouble given current demographic trends...

Diverse Issues in Higher Ed - HBCU Leaders Say They Should Share Their Campus Success Stories (June 24, 2011) - HBCUs routinely get denigrated and their academic performance often gets unfairly judged, but that's largely because leaders at the institutions have done a poor job of sharing their success stories with the public and the press...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Obama Calls on University Research to Help Create Manufacturing Jobs (June 24, 2011) - With the nation's economic concerns mounting, President Obama is again turning to its research universities for help...

CT Mirror - Facing uncertainty in state funding, UConn cuts its budget  (June 23, 2011) - Faced with continued uncertainty over its funding from the state, the University of Connecticut Thursday approved a $20 million reduction in its budget for next year--the first cut in more than two decades...

PR WEB - Parents Play a Role In Student Quest for College (June 28, 2011) - How involved should a parent be in the college planning process? According to a study by The College Board and Art & Science Group, the majority of students want their parents more involved in their search for colleges and college cost considerations...

Paraphrase - Wilma Howe: 2011 Rebecca F. Ganci, RP Memorial Scholarship Winner (June 2011) - The Scholarship Committee is very pleased to announce that at the CCPA Annual Meeting on May 19, 2011, Wilma Howe, a paralegal student from Manchester Community College, was presented with the 2011 Rebecca F. Ganci, RP Memorial Scholarship...

Hartford Courant - Connecticut On Newsweek's List of Best 500 High Schools (June 29, 2011) - Among what Newsweek says are the top 500 high schools in the country, Connecticut has a dozen on the list. The ranking looks at graduation, college matriculation, AP tests and AP courses offered and scores on tests such as the SAT...

Education News - Was 2011 the "Year of School Choice" in America? (June 29, 2011) - The folks at Ed Is Watching.org make the case for dubbing 2011 the "Year of School" choice with all the noteworthy legislation passed in its favor...

Hartford Courant - Malloy To Legislature: Let Me Cut Budget, Privatize Services, Lower Tax Credit (June 30, 2011) - Gov. Dannel P. Malloy plotted a controversial escape route from fiscal hell Wednesday, calling for passage of legislation to privatize state services, let him make unilateral line-item cuts, decrease the earned income tax credit and freeze controversial "longevity payments'' for state employees...

CT Mirror - Malloy recommends nearly 5,500 layoffs, $54M cut in town aid (June 28, 2011) - Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has recommended nearly 5,500 state employee layoffs, elimination of 1,000 other vacant positions and a $54 million cut in municipal aid to help offset the unrealized savings from the failed union concession deal...

CT Mirror - Malloy: With union deal dead, legislature may have to force change (June 28, 2011) - Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said today he will explore legislative options to curtail what he called state government's unsustainable, long-term health and pension costs, but he refused to say if he will seek a curb on collective-bargaining rights for state employees...

CT Mirror - Last two unions reject a deal already dead (June 26, 2011) - A final, negative footnote to the failed effort to ratify the state employees' concession deal: two more unions rejected the tentative agreement in voting tallied Sunday, leaving a final vote of 11 unions in favor and four opposed...

Time Moneyland - Why You Should Still Go to College (June 30, 2011) - Over the past year or so, the idea of going to college has been under attack. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has been encouraging people to skip college, and my buddy James Altucher has been making the media rounds touting the idea of skipping college...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Showing, Not Telling: Prezi & Omeka (June 29, 2011) -Many archivists spend their professional lives working in basements preparing diaries, letters, and photographs for use by students and faculty. Indeed, arrangement and description of such materials represents the bulk of my work as an archivist, but I also spend time in classrooms teaching students how to discover and evaluate all kinds of information...

Inside Higher Ed - Plagiarism, Process, and the Point (June 29, 2011) - This exchange from The New Inquiry has been wending its way around the intertubes of late. (Thanks to @colinized on twitter for flagging it for me.) It's a dialogue between "Teach," an adjunct professor of philosophy, and "Cheat," a term-paper-writer-for-hire. It's surprisingly thoughtful in its consideration of the motivations behind plagiarism and the ways that faculty deal with it...

Inside Higher Ed - Yes, College is Worth It (June 26, 2011) A quick thought experiment: if you were offered your tuition back -- minus any financial aid -- in return for surrendering your bachelor's degree -- and any graduate degrees thereafter -- would you take it? Just to make things interesting, let's say that along with returning the credentials, you also have to surrender any intellectual strength you built in college, along with any jobs that required college (and/or higher) degrees and the money you made in them. In return, you would get the money you would have made and experience you would have gained with the jobs you could have had right out of high school...