Reports & Articles 

01/20/2015: Community Colleges Buck the Trend of Shrinking Humanities, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Ticker - The academy has previously reported on the value of humanities programs, funding for them, and how they are doing over all. This year, for the first time, the academy is posting data on trends in humanities degrees at community colleges, and the results there brighten what is otherwise a gloomy picture.

01/19/2015: Judge Weighs In on CCSF, by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed - The tide appears to have turned in favor of supporters of City College of San Francisco in their long feud with the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

01/19/2015: Checkered Recovery Continues, by Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed - Most states increased higher education spending last year but half still spend less on college-related programs than they did five years ago, according to a report released today.

01/19/2015: Support Our Students, by David Brooks, The New York Times - The tuition piece of the Obama proposal is Human Capital 1.0. Human Capital 2.0 is designed to help people not just enroll but to complete school and thrive. Congress should take the proposal, scrap it and rededicate the money toward programs that will actually boost completion, that will surround colleges, students and their families with supporting structures.

01/17/2015: Helping the Poor in Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge, by Susan Dynarski, The New York Times, The Upshot - There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children less prepared than their kindergarten classmates.

01/14/2015: What's In A Number?, by Suzanne Pekow, American RadioWorks - Our guest this week has a message for high school seniors and their parents who are poring over the latest college rankings lists: Put 'em down. Alexander McCormick, director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) says there's almost no correlation between the ranking of a school and the factors that go into a good college experience.

01/14/2015: Educational Entrepreneur Wants to Clean Up Online College-Search Business, by Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Administration - John Katzman, a prominent education-industry entrepreneur and the founder of an education-search company called Noodle, says it's time "to clean up the education marketplace" involving online search.

01/13/2015: As California Goes..., by Brian Fleming, Eduventures, Wake-Up Call - Daily headlines of struggling colleges and universities have almost become commonplace. It is hard to turn a blind eye to the situation unfolding in California. All of higher ed should pay close attention to how it unfolds in years to come.

01/09/2015: FCC Commissioner to Tech Industry: It's Time to Reinvent Textbooks, Teaching, by Jason Shueh, Center for DIgital Education - "In the rest of the world, we have an infinite array of digital tools to change our civic and commercial lives. Yet somehow we've put up some barriers at the school doors," Rosenworcel said. "It's time we started inviting them in and wrestling with them and doing some good things."

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Reports & Articles

01/11/2015: eLearning As Good As Traditional Training for Health Professionals, by Imperial College London, EurekAlert! Science News - A review commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and carried out by Imperial College London researchers concludes that eLearning is likely to be as effective as traditional methods for training health professionals.

01/11/2015: The Future of Online Learning, Financial Times, Ltd, Management - In the first of an occasional series featuring two experts debating a hot topic for students, Anant Agarwal and Chip Paucek, chief executives of online learning providers edX and 2U respectively, share their predictions for business education in 2020.

01/2015: Can Online Learning Bend the Higher Education Cost Curve?, by David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz and Noam Yuchtman, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings - Researchers examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, they show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective public institutions. Colleges with a higher share of online students charge lower tuition prices.

To view our entire Online Education section, click here.

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Reports & Articles

01/18/2015: Hard Work and Effort Enables Everyone to Attend College, Students Told, by Eileen Adams, Sun Journal, Oxford Hills - Many students reach their senior year of high school and still don't know what they want to do next. It's for that reason, said Bob Stuart from the College Readiness and Aspirations Program, that helping youngsters learn about college as early as third grade is important.

01/09/2015: A 'Sizable Decrease' In Those Passing The GED, NPR, NPR Ed - One year after the launch of a major overhaul of the GED exam - the first since 2002 - the high school equivalency program has seen a sharp drop in the number of people who took and passed the test, according to local and state educators and the organization that runs it. In addition, at least 16 states have begun offering or plan to offer new, alternative tests.

To view our entire College Readiness section, click here.

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Reports & Articles

01/20/2015: Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success, Hart Research Associates - From November 3 to 11, 2014, Hart Research Associates conducted an online survey on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities among 400 employers whose organizations have at least 25 employees and report that 25% or more of their new hires hold either an associate degree from a two-year college or a bachelor's degree from a four-year college.

01/12/2015: Higher Education, Wages, and Polarization, by Rob Valletta, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) - In recent years, labor demand and job growth have been relatively rapid in the high-skill non-routine cognitive and low-skill non-routine manual categories, with the middle-skill routine jobs experiencing downward pressure.

01/01/2015: New Year, New Job? Read This First, The Wall Street Journal - Here's a surprising truth about the job market, circa 2015: For the first time in a while, workers have the upper hand.

To view our entire Workforce Development section, click here.