Journal Inquirer - SOCCER: MCC reaches national finals (November 3, 2011) - The Manchester Community College men's soccer team is headed to the Division III national championships. MCC upset top-ranked Bunker Hill Community College in the Region XXI final 2-0 Wednesday at Eastern Connecticut State University...

Inside Higher Ed - Occupation Fatigue (November 17, 2011) - Move over Berkeley and Harvard; Seattle Central Community College has become an increasingly high-profile and tense campus home for the Occupy movement...

Inside Higher Ed - Slow Train to the Future (November 17, 2011) -Tablets are in, computer labs are out, and the cloud is the new hard drive -- these are the interwoven threads upon which college students are hoisting themselves into the future of campus computing. So say technology futurists, those whisperers who strive to interpret for the rest of us the inscrutable "digital natives" who now roam undergraduate campuses...

Inside Higher Ed - They Won't Back Down (November 16, 2011) - Tuesday, as police were shutting down the New York City headquarters of the protesters who sparked the now-global "Occupy" movement, on the other side of the country, thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley came out with a vengeance after some were beaten during a confrontation with campus police last week, in which 39 were arrested as officers tried to block a campsite from forming...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Penn State Scandal Prompts Colleges, and States, to Review Policies on Reporting Crime (November 15, 2011) - In the wake of the scandal over child sex-abuse allegations at Pennsylvania State University, colleges across the country are reviewing their policies regarding what their employees are required to do when they witness or receive information about suspected abuse of children. Some state lawmakers, too, are proposing stricter requirements for reporting crime...

CT Mirror - UConn heads for funding cliff for research (November 15, 2011) - Researchers at the University of Connecticut have recently learned how to create grass that is immune from many weather conditions. UConn scientists have also determined that feeding chickens cinnamon and oregano helps curb the persistence of salmonella. What they haven't found is an increase in research dollars, as funding for research is on the decline -- by about 10 percent in the last two years...

Community College Times - Tech ed offers opportunities to connect with jobs (November 15, 2011) - Career and technical education (CTE) programs may be the way to boost high school graduation rates and put students on a college and career pathway, according to panelists at an American Youth Policy Forum discussion this week...

Inside Higher Ed- Missing Elements (November 15, 2011) - When it comes to getting students into college (and prepared to succeed there), school counselors have a unique vantage point -- seeing firsthand the factors that hinder their students from moving forward. A national survey of counselors, being released today by the College Board, finds that these counselors generally think their schools are not succeeding in the areas that the counselors believe are most important to promote student advancement...

New England Journal of Higher Education - LGBTQA: Big Letters on Campus (November 14, 2011) - For most Americans, biological sex and gender are one and the same. Infants usually fit neatly into one of two categories: A newborn is either a boy or a girl. Boys, according to stereotype, are adorned in blue, girls in pink. In short order, most boys and girls will grow up amid social pressures to behave in a manner that aligns culturally with their anatomy. They will play with gendered toys, compete on gendered athletic teams, and, for many of those lucky enough to pursue residential postsecondary education, live in gendered housing...

American Association of Community Colleges - Free Resources to SEED Your College's Green Initiatives (November 14, 2011) - AACC's Sustainability Education and Economic Development (SEED) Center has three new resources...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Career Colleges Are Accused of Job-Placement Fraud (November 13, 2011) - Hollywood is a town built on illusions, and the Los Angeles Recording School sits at its center, a stone's throw from the big-name studios its graduates dream of working for. The for-profit college, which has trained thousands of students to be recording engineers, says it placed more than 70 percent of its recent graduates in jobs related to their degrees. But a new class-action lawsuit says those numbers are a fantasy designed to dupe prospective students and its accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education and Training...

Inside Higher Ed- Fighting Against Furloughs (November 11, 2011) - When faculty members walked off their jobs at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale about two weeks ago, one of the key sticking points was an impasse on how to treat furloughs...

CT Mirror - Consultants offer UConn plan to cut spending, raise revenues (November 10, 2011) - Consultants gave University of Connecticut officials the results of their $4 million study of the school's operations Thursday: a plan to improve UConn's finances through a combination of personnel reductions, spending efficiencies and revenue increases...

Hartford Business Journal - Part-time students bump up CT enrollment (November 10, 2011 ) Enrollment at Connecticut's independent colleges and universities - led by an increase in part-time attendees - has pushed the state's overall count of students to a new high for the 10th consecutive year, according to state higher ed officials...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - 7 Community Colleges Open an Online Doorway to Better Grades and Graduation Rates (November 6, 2011) - There are two things Clint McElroy knows about community-college students: A huge number of them don't stay in school. And many of them-who are often the first in their families to go to college, and who must juggle work and parenting-don't understand how to balance all those demands while studying at the college level...

Inside Higher Ed- Erroneous Pell Grant Payments in 2011 Total $1 Billion (November 16, 2011) - The federal government paid out $1 billion in improper Pell Grant payments in 2011, but the proportion of all payments that were erroneous fell to 2.7 percent -- below the government's target of 3.3 percent and the lowest level since at least 2005, the White House announced Tuesday...

Inside Higher Ed - Invisible Spending on Financial Aid (November 16, 2011) - One federal effort to make college more affordable cost almost $15 billion in 2009. Almost half of its benefits went to families making more than $75,000 per year. Yet as potential budget cuts hover over many financial aid programs, this one is left unmentioned...

Hartford Courant - Hartford Teens' Action Movie Screens At Real Art Ways (November 10, 2011) - In the fall of 2010, a teacher at Pathways to Technology High School in Windsor introduced one of his students, Mustafa Mamedov, to a younger student, Paul Stamper. Mustafa wanted to be an actor. Stamper liked editing and directing movies. The teacher thought they might be able to cook up something together. The result of that introduction, the action movie "Never Forgetful," ...Mamedov is now a student at Manchester Community College, as is the film's leading lady, Sabina Mamedova...

CT Mirror - Lessons in what works: the school Pryor helped build (November 17, 2011) - State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor returned Wednesday to the charter school he founded years ago with a message: Barriers are preventing more of these great schools from opening or expanding. He promised to change that...

CT Mirror - Teachers say they should write their own professional standards (November 15, 2011) - No one can evaluate a teacher's performance in the classroom quite like another teacher, educators, union members and administrators testified at a public hearing Monday night. The Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, wants state legislators to remove the State Department of Education's (SDE) authority to set professional standards for teachers. Rather, CEA proposes an autonomous panel led by educators to determine those standards for themselves, something a number of states already do...

CT Mirror - New commissioner looks for schools that are succeeding (November 14, 2011 ) - When unionized teachers in Meriden's public schools needed more time to examine student test data, they voluntarily added extra classroom time to their schedules to make room for regular weekly data review meetings. That simple solution, the result of informal talks between the union president and school superintendent, was cited Monday by the state's top education official as one of the reasons for the success of Thomas Hooker School...

CT Mirror - Education panel considers competitive funding grants (November 14, 2011) - The best way to turn around the state's low-performing public schools may be to use money to reward reform, according to top state officials, including the new education commissioner. The officials point at President Obama's playbook -- and his Race to the Top grants -- as their model...

CT Mirror - Blumenthal discusses 'Pathways Back to Work' bill (November 14, 2011) - U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal Monday announced his Pathways Back to Work Act -- one that seeks to address unemployment by borrowing pieces of President Obama's larger jobs bill. "The major task ahead is making sure that we fill jobs that exist and create new ones so we can put Connecticut back to work and put America back to work," he said, addressing students, professors and work force development experts at Gateway Community College...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Colleges Fear Tough Budget News From Congressional Supercommittee (November 13, 2011) - Optimists see scenarios in the coming days under which the secretive supercommittee of lawmakers on Capitol Hill spares higher education from the deep cuts needed to shrink the federal budget deficit...

Diverse Issues in Higher Education - Sexual Violence on College Campuses (November 16, 2011) - The recent shocking and horrific revelations that have emerged from the atrocious saga at Penn State University involving the schools former assistant coach Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky have sent shockwaves throughout the world of college sports and higher education in general...

Inside Higher Ed - Subscriptions and Attrition (November 15, 2011) - What if college got cheaper as you went along? Because I am a Big Giant Nerd, I've been reviewing literature on financial aid programs in various states. Most of them are either need-based or merit-based, and they tend to fall victim to the predictable pathologies of either genre. The need-based ones can't keep up with real need, and they're hard to sell politically. The merit-based ones are easy to sell politically, but they tend to flow disproportionately to the most affluent. Worse, both tend to fall behind rising costs over time...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Drawing's Got Talent (November 14, 2011) - For every college class of 20 or so beginning-drawing students, one or two show up with extraordinary drawing talent. I'm talking about students with a ready ability to see and draw shape, to see and draw in proportion, to draw to scale, to draw the symmetry of things, to sense visual balance, to place objects on a picture plane in an interesting way, and to use a sensitive touch in their mark and line...

Community College Times - Championing green job development (November 9, 2011) - As the national and global economies shift to respond to energy, resource and climate challenges worldwide, North Carolina is getting ready to lead. According to a 2009 Pew report, clean-energy job growth outpaced overall job growth in North Carolina by nearly 9 percent between 1998 and 2007. (Clean-energy job growth also outpaced ordinary job growth on a national level.) Some community colleges in the area-representing the front lines in future workforce development-started to shape their training programs to fit the green economy a long time ago. In doing so, they set a laudable example for the rest of the country...

Inside Higher Ed - Academic Advising (November 8, 2011) - Quick, what's the most vexing aspect of academic advising at a community college?

a. turnover of students and adjunct faculty

b. the range of preferences that different transfer-destination schools have for electives

c. the confusion of advising with scheduling

d. shifting and/or inchoate student preferences

e. all of the above

Yup, it's e. And it makes a conceptually-simple process maddeningly difficult...