Reports & Articles 

08/05/2015: A College System Measures How Low-Paying Degrees Serve the Public Good, by Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Administration - While higher-education officials often tout the salary bonus conferred by a bachelor's degree, for instance, many of those same officials worry about over relying on wages as the only way to demonstrate the value of a college education.

07/28/2015: Blackboard Owners Reportedly Seeking $3B Sale, by Roger Riddell, Education Dive - According to a report from Reuters, Blackboard majority owner Providence Equity Partners LLC is considering selling the ed tech company for up to $3 billion, including debt.

07/27/2015: Guest Opinion: Community Colleges Have Key Role in Idaho, Nation's Future, by Kay M. McClenney, Idaho Statesman - the national pattern of educational attainment leading to higher earnings does not appear to hold in Idaho. Data indicate that Idaho's economy relies disproportionately on low-paying industries and that employees in relatively high-wage jobs tend to be less educated and to earn lower wages than their national peers.

07/27/2015: Fact Sheet: Focusing Higher Education on Student Success, U.S. Department of Education - America's students and families need, and the nation's economic strength will depend on, a higher education system that helps all students succeed. That starts with making college more affordable but goes much further - to focus on whether students are actually graduating in a timely way with a meaningful degree that sets them up for future success.

07/23/2015: Some Places Are Already Providing Free Community College. You Just Haven't Heard About It., by Tyler Kingkade, HuffPost, College - Delaware's Student Excellence Equals Degree scholarship program provides free community college in that state. However, because the SEED program is referred to as a scholarship rather than an entitlement, it's received less attention than Tennessee and Oregon's free community college programs, Delaware officials say. In fact, the SEED scholarship is both -- it's guaranteed to any student who meets the requirements.

07/22/2015: State Auditors Find "Minor" Improprieties At Twelve Community Colleges, by Kathleen Megan, Hartford Courant - A state audit of the state's 12 community colleges has revealed a wide range of "minor" improprieties from contracts that weren't properly signed before work began, to a lack of time sheets for part-time lecturers, to the over-payment of an employee at one college.

07/22/2015: The New Frontier for Advanced Placement: Online AP Lessons, for Free, by Nick Anderson, The Washington Post - A new sequence of lessons for high school Advanced Placement courses in calculus, physics and macroeconomics went live on a free Web site founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The lessons, developed by Davidson College for the site called edX, represent a new step in the evolution of ties between the popular AP college-level program and the "massive open online courses" known as MOOCs.

07/20/2015: Health Care and Higher Ed, by Kellie Woodhouse, Inside Higher Ed - In an era of increasing scrutiny and growing financial difficulty, health care and higher education face many of the same challenges: disruption, rising prices, consumer criticism, decreasing public funds and an increasing need for collaborations and mergers.

07/13/2015: Why We Need to Keep the "Community" in Community Colleges, by Anna Clark, Next City - By assuming a name that has the ring of a traditional four-year school, community colleges are playing into the stereotype that they are less valuable than their counterparts. They give credence to the second-class stigma. "I'm not sure at what point 'community college' was branded a dirty term," a columnist at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, wrote recently in the school paper, "but I've found myself red in the face when someone asked me where I go to school. In a room full of university students."

07/13/2015: Learning a Foreign Language A 'Must' in Europe, Not So In America, by Kat Devlin, PewResearchCenter, FactTank - While the U.S. does not have a national requirement for students to learn a foreign language in school, the typical European pupil must study multiple languages in the classroom before becoming a teen.

07/12/2015: Plan to Allow Community Colleges to Offer 4-year Nursing Degrees Resurfaces, by Lindsay VanHulle, Crain's Detroit Business - Lawmakers in Michigan have renewed an effort to allow community colleges to award bachelor's degrees in nursing - a move that could change the way nursing education is delivered in the state as industry preferences evolve to favor nurses with more advanced training. The state's 28 community colleges support the idea as a natural extension of their mission. But four-year public universities oppose the measure, arguing the change would undermine existing agreements between community colleges and traditional four-year programs.

07/07/2015: Aspen Ideas Fest, 2015, by Jamie Merisotis, Lumina Foundation - Competency-based education articulates what a degree should mean based around the learning rather than the number of earned credits. Lumina President Jamie Merisotis discusses affordability, equity, student debt, and new learning models in the tutorial session "Should College Be Free?" at the Aspen Ideas Festival 2015.

06/29/2015: What's Wrong with Going To a Community College? How Two-year Colleges Can Be Better Than Four-year Universities., by Jeffrey J. Selingo, The Washington Post - It's unfortunate that community colleges suffer from such a negative stereotype because so many people who end up going to a four-year college-and usually end up dropping out-would be much better off starting or even finishing at a two-year college.  

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Reports & Articles

07/27/2015: Linfield College Adds Online Wine Certificates, by Leila Meyer, Campus Technology - Linfield College Online and Continuing Education in Oregon has introduced two new online certificate programs: Wine Marketing and Wine Management.

07/20/2015: Cheating, Student Authentication and Proctoring in Online Programs, by Dennis Berkey and Jay Halfond, New England Board of Higher Education - This pitch is more than incredibly crass. It is really just outright pimping of hired poseurs to online students willing to "pay for performance." With the massive growth of online education, such parasitic companies have sprung up like weeds, presenting a serious threat to program integrity.

05/26/2015: Online Learning: What Next?, by Lucie Lapovsky, Forbes - On-line learning today provides a quality alternative to on-the-ground courses. It offers students greater flexibility as to time and place as most courses are offered asynchronously, meaning students can take them at any time of the day or night. Most chief academic officers at colleges and universities were very skeptical of online learning when it was in its infancy, today, according to a recent survey, more than 70% of them now believe it is critical to their long-term strategy.

To view our entire Online Education section, click here.

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Reports & Articles

07/27/2015: Black Students Lagging in College Readiness Despite Taking Prep Courses, by Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Diverse - Officials at ACT say the statistics-based on national ACT data and a new report titled "The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2014: African American Students"-suggest that African-American students are being subjected to less rigorous instruction than that of their peers who perform better on the ACT.

To view our entire College Readiness section, click here.

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Reports & Articles

07/28/2015: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change, by Steve Lohr, The New York Times - a 26-year-old math major, took a three-month course in computer programming and data analysis. As a waiter, he made $20,000 a year. His starting salary last year as a data scientist at a web start-up here was more than $100,000.

07/23/2015: The Path Least Taken II - Preparing Non-college Goers for Success, by Jim Hull, Center for Public Education (CPE) - In this second study of the series, we explore various job-related and social outcomes of the non-college goers by age 26, and relate these to the preparation they had in school in order to gain insights into what defines "career readiness" for high school graduates.

07/22/2015: Preparing the Next Generation of Manufacturers Through Community Colleges (Part 1), by Liz Sablich, Brookings, The Brown Center Chalkboard - A diverse and distinguished panel of experts joined Brookings Vice President Darrell West to discuss the future of the manufacturing labor force development. Despite their varying backgrounds and specific areas of expertise, the panelists often echoed one another in identifying priority policies and practices that should guide the future of workforce development, training, and education in the United States.  

To view our entire Workforce Development section, click here.