The Pulse : A Digest of Higher Ed News for the MCC Community
MCC in the News | Higher Ed | Finance | Student Success | K-12 | Government & Politics |  Opinion

September 6, 2012

MCC in the News

Hartford Courant - Rae Strickland, Professor At MCC, Receives Outstanding Woman Of The Year Award (September 5, 2012) - Rae Strickland, professor of English at Manchester Community College, recently received the 2012 Outstanding Woman of the Year Award from the MCC Women's Caucus...

Hartford Courant - Smaller Venues Offer Variety (September 2, 2012) - Fall into the arts...Manchester Community College continues its series of screenings of top-drawer foreign films on Friday, Sept. 21, with "The Artist," the silent film sensation from last year about a movie idol on the skids...

Hartford Courant - Garden Events, Tours, Art And Craft Show And A Lecture (August 31, 2012) - ...Manchester Community College and the Manchester Historical Society, MCC professor Chris Paulin will provide commentary. This tour visits Cheney Hall, the former silk mills, the South Manchester Railroad, the Loom exhibit at the former Cheney machine shop, neighborhoods of worker housing, and the Old Manchester Museum...

Reminder News - Upcoming class prepares adults for college-level classes (August 30, 2012) - Many adults never had the benefit of higher education and lack the foundation in English or math to try...The teachers and tutors are composed of Manchester Adult Education teachers and adjunct professors from Manchester Community College...

Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed - Can Do for Community Colleges (September 6, 2012) - In the spotlight more than ever before, community colleges are increasingly being asked to do more with less -- facing greater pressure to produce more college graduates at the same time that state funding is being reduced...

Inside Higher Ed - Rejecting 'Early Action'  (September 5, 2012) - Nearly three-fourths of colleges with "early action" programs -- in which students have an earlier application deadline and find out earlier than other applicants if they have been admitted -- saw an increase in such applications in 2011...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Bulk-Purchasing E-Textbook Experiment Expands to More Colleges (September 5, 2012) - An experimental business model for delivering e-textbooks is expanding, with some adjustments, to 26 colleges and universities this fall...

Community College Times - Rural Colleges Push Use Of Classroom Technology (September 5, 2012) - Two years ago, the technology staff at Northeast Community College in Nebraska was a bit like "the man behind the curtain," said Derek Bierman, the college's interim vice president of technology services...

Inside Higher Ed - Hour by Hour (September 5, 2012) - A philanthropist, one of America's wealthiest men, was worried about faculty pensions. The solution he successfully pushed, with the largesse of his foundation, led to the creation of the credit hour, which has become higher education's de facto standard unit of measuring academic work...

New England Journal of Higher Ed - Pardon the Disruption ... Innovation Changes How We Think About Higher Education (September 4, 2012) - The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university...

Inside Higher Ed - Pay for Performance (September 4, 2012) - In April, a union representing part-time adult education instructors at the City Colleges of Chicago agreed to a contract that based raises in part on student performance -- a highly unusual arrangement in faculty collective bargaining...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Campuses Turn to Remote Call Centers to Handle Flood of Calls (September 3, 2012) - Adrienne T. Martin knows the ins and outs of Troy University. What happens if a new student can't make it to orientation? Ms. Martin has the answer. She can reset e-mail passwords, rattle off how much students can borrow for each year of college, and let hopeful applicants know when to expect those admissions decisions...

Inside Higher Ed - Lost HOPE (August 31, 2012) - If you're a student in the South with a state lottery-funded scholarship, and you want to retain said scholarship, being a black male from a low-income family with low ACT scores and grade point averages is "essentially the recipe for disaster," says one researcher whose new study also found that when it comes to race alone...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Graduates of For-Profits and Community Colleges Fare About the Same in Earnings Study (August 27, 2012) - Students who earn an associate degree at a for-profit institution see similar increases in their earnings to those of students who go to a community college, according to the preliminary results of a working paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research...

Finance Finance

Inside Higher Ed - Pell Grants in the Spotlight (September 5, 2012) - As the Democratic National Convention officially opened here Tuesday night, President Obama's actions over the past four years on higher education -- especially the Pell Grant -- were front and center...

Student Success

Reminder News - 'Grease' is the Word for Auditioners (August 30, 2012) - Fresh off the success of the summer production... Robert Kelly - a 2011 graduate from GHS and student at Manchester Community College - was hoping for a certain role...

K-12 News

Hartford Business Journal - Greater Hartford Planning $334M In Magnet School Construction (September 3, 2012) - The Capitol Region Education Council is planning seven magnet school construction projects totaling $334 million over the next three years, which should help boost the struggling education segment of the Connecticut construction industry...

CT Mirror - Nine School Districts to Apply for Race to the Top Federal Money (August 31, 2012) - Having watched the state strike out in its three attempts to land federal Race to the Top money to reform schools in Connecticut, officials at eight urban districts and the state's technical high school system have decided to try their luck in the fourth round...

Government & Politics

Inside Higher Ed - Will College Students Show Up? (September 6, 2012) - The Democratic party faithful gathered here for their convention are, as is the custom, focusing on the positive: speaker after speaker has praised President Obama's legislative victories and his administration's policies from the past four years...

OpinionOpinion

Inside Higher Ed - Don't Forget Self-Interest... (September 5, 2012) - As regular readers know, I've carried on a bit of a crusade against the credit hour for a while now. The credit hour is a time-based measure that essentially forces colleges to measure outputs entirely in terms of inputs, thereby defeating any productivity gain...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Online Learning: More Than MOOC's (September 3, 2012) - It was never a dream of mine to become the sort of professor who teaches online. I'm willing to bet that most starry-eyed Ph.D. candidates-when they can stomach thoughts of their uncertain academic futures-imagine themselves captivating a lecture hall of hundreds...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Before You Jump on the Bandwagon (September 3, 2012) - We are only starting to imagine the possible effects that massive open online courses and other innovative technologies will have on traditional higher education-but the immediate response has a disconcerting air of panic...

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