The Daily Campus - Farming for a change (September 7, 2011) - The Lutz Children's Museum is holding its 9th-annual Farm Day...The Lutz Children's Museum looks for volunteers and interns to help at its functions all year. Faiella said, recently, the museum has been focusing on recruiting college students from the surrounding area so they can work with children, gain team-building experience and give back to the community. The museum has enlisted students from Eastern Connecticut State University, Manchester Community College, Trinity College and Central Connecticut State University to assist at Farm Day...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Technical College in Missouri Starts Drug Screening for All New Students (September 8, 2011) - Linn State Technical College, in central Missouri, has put in place what may be the most far-reaching drug-testing policy at any public college in the nation, the Associated Press reports. All first-year students must comply with the screening requirement, as well as returning students who took a semester or more off...

Inside Higher Ed - No Success on Success Measures (September 8, 2011) - The federal committee charged with recommending ways for the Education Department to better judge student success at community colleges will meet at least once more before approving a final report, despite a draft copy of recommendations issued last week that sketched the broad outlines of the committee's plan...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Education Dept. Miscalculates 'Financial Responsibility' Scores, Private Colleges Say (September 7, 2011) - This month, the U.S. Department of Education will publish the annual financial-responsibility scores of thousands of private colleges. The scores are one of the few publicly available, broad-based indicators of individual institutions' financial health. Or are they...

Community College Times - Flat enrollments for the fall (September 6, 2011) - After record-high increases over the last few years, community colleges are seeing enrollments return to more normal rates of increase, and a growing number of colleges are even reporting declines...

Inside Higher Ed - An 'Instructor Like Me' (September 6, 2011) - Nonwhite students at community colleges are more likely to stay in classes and to earn higher grades if they have instructors of their race or ethnicity, according to a study released Monday by the National Bureau for Economic Research. But the same is true for white students, meaning that hiring more minority instructors may result in decreased performance by white students...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - With Cheating Only a Click Away, Professors Reduce the Incentive (September 4, 2011) - As soon as the handheld gadgets called "clickers" hit the University of Colorado at Boulder, Douglas Duncan saw cheating. The astronomy instructor and director of the Fiske Planetarium was observing a colleague's physics class in 2002, when the university introduced the electronic devices that students use to respond to in-class questions. He glanced at the first row and saw a student with four clickers spread out before him. It turned out that only one was his-the rest belonged to his sleeping roommates...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Program Reviews Can Produce 'Death Spirals' or Happy Endings (September 4, 2011) - Melvin C. Platt, chair of the art department at the University of Missouri at Columbia, learned last fall that the master-of-fine-arts program was one of 69 at his institution and 586 in the state that were identified for possible elimination. He had about three months to persuade state officials that his program should continue to exist...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Gerontology Programs Get Creative to Extend Their Own Life Spans (September 4, 2011) - Surfboards and Ferrari convertibles aren't images that students typically associate with aging, but they fit right in at the University of Southern California's Davis School of Gerontology.At a time when many gerontology programs are struggling to survive, the nation's first such school is thriving with a message aimed at winning over young people who might find the idea of studying old people a little depressing...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Antipoverty Group Works With Community Colleges to Graduate More Students (September 4, 2011) - Mercy Arenas sits with a student in her cramped office on the North Campus of Miami Dade College. The student, Rose Zephir, 23, a soft-spoken Haitian immigrant, has come for help...Ms. Arenas is not a financial-aid officer but a project coordinator for the campus's branch of Single Stop USA, a New York-based nonprofit whose mission is to fight poverty...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - For Illegal-Immigrant Students, New Policy on Deportations Offers Limited Relief (September 1, 2011) - When President Obama announced last month that his administration would take steps to suspend the deportation of immigrants who pose little risk to society, many college students celebrated...

CT Mirror - Report shows young workers, minorities hit hardest by recession job losses (September 1, 2011) - While Connecticut lost over 119,000 jobs during the Great Recession, its impact was not borne evenly as young workers and ethnic minorities suffered disproportionately high unemployment rates, according to a new labor report issued Thursday by a New Haven-based public policy research group...

Boston.com - A shift in state college grants (September 06, 2011) - Funds to reward schools on student achievement...Governor Deval Patrick is expected to announce today that for the first time in decades, Massachusetts is awarding some money to public colleges and universities based on their plans to boost academic performance, rather than on how many students they enroll...

Inside Higher Ed - Grant Recipients and Race (September 6, 2011) - Every so often, the issue of financial aid awarded on the basis of students' race flares. Lawsuits crop up challenging a state's or institution's ability to consider students' race in handing out grants, or a white student (or a group of such students) announces the creation of a fund for scholarships reserved for white students, on the grounds that grant money flows disproportionately to members of minority groups...

New England Journal of Higher Ed - Bootstraps: Federal Trio Programs, if Funded, Could Help Close Income Gap (September 5, 2011) - I realized how poor my family was when I was a high school senior. While filling out a financial aid form to go to college...The good news is that since 1964, our government has had two successful programs that have helped Americans from low-income and first-generation college backgrounds...

Norwich Bulletin - Thompson woman named Westview Health Care employee of month (August 27, 2011) - Louise Taylor, of Thompson, has been named the August employee of the month at Westview Health Care Center. Taylor has worked at Westview since February 2005. She is the assistant therapeutic recreation director, which means she helps run resident /patient recreational programs that residents can choose themselves...

West Hartford News - NEW OFFICERS (August 24, 2011) - WHPD welcomes two new officers: Officer Parlos is a resident of East Windsor. He served four years of active duty in the United States Marine Corp where he achieved the rank of corporal and has served two combat tours in Iraq. He is currently working toward his criminal justice degree at Manchester Community College...

CT Mirror - Education reform group presents proposals to state board (September 7, 2011) - A group of business and philanthropic leaders presented their education reform proposals to the state Board of Education Wednesday, pitching changes to teacher certification requirements, preparation programs and evaluations to help close Connecticut's dramatic achievement gap...

CT Mirror - New education commissioner tackles a different challenge (September 7, 2011) - After helping rebuild Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks and heading economic development efforts in Newark, N.J., a confident Stefan Pryor came to Connecticut Wednesday to tackle another daunting challenge.Gov. Dannel P. Malloy introduced Pryor as the man to lead the effort to close the state's worst-in-the-nation public school achievement gap separating the poor from the well-to-do...

CT Mirror - Charter school founder to be named education commissioner (September 6, 2011) - One of the founders of an acclaimed Connecticut charter school who later led the redevelopment effort in Lower Manhattan after the attacks of 9/11 will be named Connecticut's next commissioner of education...

CT Mirror - Concession deal lacks emergency safeguards if economy slumps (September 2, 2011) - While talk of a double-dip recession arose again Friday amid gloomy national job numbers, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's administration remained optimistic new union concessions will keep labor costs affordable--even though the package lacks an out-clause to cope with fiscal emergencies...

Inside Higher Ed - Presentations I'd Like to See (September 7, 2011) - The AACC and League for Innovation conferences have both issued their calls for proposals for their Spring conferences. The conferences feature people from community colleges across the country, and at their best, they highlight useful discoveries and/or experiments...a list of presentations I'd like to see...

Eric Stoller's blog - Higher Education + Groupon: Shiny and New...or a Legitimate Strategy (September 6, 2011) - National Louis University on Tuesday will offer a Groupon for a graduate-level introduction to teaching course, officials said. With the Groupon, prospective students can save nearly 60 percent on tuition for the single, three-credit course and earn credit toward a graduate degree...

Inside Higher Ed - 12 Ways to Survive 2011-12 (September 6, 2011) - Earlier this summer the U.S. government faced default and had its credit rating downgraded, convincing almost everyone that we have been living beyond our means - everyone, that is, except many educators. Even those who have been furloughed or had programs cut and workload increased typically blame the economy, the legislature or a political party. This article is about none of that. It's about the system....

Community College Times - New federal regs affect how colleges market themselves (September 2, 2011) - The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 has been the source of much consternation on the part of college and university leaders... While earlier versions of the law-known previously as the Higher Education Act-largely dealt with issues pertaining to student financial aid, the 2008 version contains many provisions that have a direct impact on the activities of community college communications and marketing professionals and their colleagues in admissions recruitment...

Inside Higher Ed - Academically on Course (September 2, 2011) - Has public higher education outlived its usefulness -- like cassette tapes and typewriters? Are our students "academically adrift," our institutions shams? Who benefits from this tale? Policy-makers and government officials are regarding public higher education as an industry that needs to operate on cheap labor in order to manufacture products...

Inside Higher Ed - Status Anxiety (September 1, 2011) - Earlier this week I had a pair of meetings right on top of each other that made for a hell of a contrast. The first involved a discussion of academic programs that haven't been achieving the results they should. When I suggested that years of sustained underperformance constituted a pretty good case for trying something different, I was upbraided by a long-tenured professor who was Shocked and Appalled that I would dare to suggest that the program was anything less than perfect...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Measuring Faculty Productivity: Let's Get It Right (August 28, 2011) - I have been following with considerable interest the recent controversies at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M over the collection of data purportedly measuring faculty productivity. That's because I was, for almost 20 years, director of the National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity at the University of Delaware, the tool of choice for collection of detailed data on faculty teaching loads, instructional costs, and externally financed scholarly activity...