05/10/2016: Defending the Humanities, by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed - In his talk, Burns repeatedly said the humanities - by helping us understand such a broad range of different topics and perspectives - in fact promote unity through understanding. But he freely admitted that the denigrators of the humanities don't see it that way.

05/05/2016: Adviser Dispels 3 Myths on Choosing a School, by Kenya Downs, PBS Newshour - High school seniors are applying to more colleges than ever. But despite being accepted into a first-choice college or university, many students are opting not to enroll for various reasons, including financial constraints. The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, released its annual American Freshman survey, which includes the following statistics on how high school seniors are choosing their colleges.

05/05/2016: The State of U.S. Colleges - The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Downgraded, by Timothy W. Martin  and Heather Gillers, The Wall Street Journal - The downgrades also serve as further evidence of a U.S. higher education system that has become increasingly bifurcated. Many schools are struggling with their bottom line as national enrollment falls, many Americans question the value of a college degree and state funding for many public institutions is drying up. Elite institutions, meanwhile, enjoy record levels of popularity with student applications and alumni donations.

05/03/2016: How Colleges Can Again Be Levelers of Society Fixes, by Tina Rosenberg, The New York Times - Most highly rated colleges say they seek qualified low-income students. But a vast majority enroll very few. At the most competitive colleges, only 17 percent of students are poor enough to receive the federal education stipends known as Pell Grants. That's just one percentage point higher than in 2000.

05/03/2016: Student Centricity and Two-Year Colleges: Focus on Students Demands Better Recognition, by Regina Smick-Attisano, The EvoLLLution - In this interview, Regina Smick-Attisano shares her thoughts on the work two-year colleges put into delivering a student-centric experience and discusses what needs to happen for this work to be more widely recognized.

05/03/2016: The Dividing Line Between Haves and Have-nots in Home Ownership: Education, Not Student Debt, by Susan M. Dynarski, Brookings, Economic Studies - The striking gap in homeownership is not between college-educated people who did and did not borrow, but between those with and without a college education.

05/02/2016: How College Students Are Sleeping ... Or Not, by Anya Kamenetz, NPR Ed - Sleep has a big impact on learning. And not just when you do it in class. Sleep deprivation affects memory, cognition and motivation, and the effects are compounded when it's long-term. For those reasons, there's been lots of interest in the education world in studying the sleep habits of children and adolescents. But until now, most sleep studies have been limited to short-term surveys with small numbers of participants. That's changing with the advent of wearable activity trackers.

05/01/2016: Prediction: No Commencement Speaker Will Mention This - The Huge 'Gender College Degree Gap' Favoring Women, by Mark J. Perry, American Enterprise Institute - Over the next decade, the gender disparity for college degrees is expected to increase according to Department of Education forecasts, so that by 2025, women will earn 147 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances in favor of women for associate's degrees (170 women for every 100 men) and master's degrees (145 women for every 100 men).

05/2016: A Critical Need For Practical Leadership Skills, by George R. Boggs, League for Innovation - While there has been a great deal of research about leadership in general, there has not been much focus on the practical issues that community college leaders face - often on a daily basis - and the impact that their responses can have. Leaders need to understand the different points of view that constituents bring to issues and how these issues can best be dealt with - and how an improper response can create significant problems for an institution and its leadership.

04/27/2015: Our Students Need Bread and Roses, by Terry O'Banion, EducauseReview - In the monograph, liberal education is education that is designed to help us live a richer and fuller life. General education is a subset of liberal education, and both terms are used interchangeably. Roses is a metaphor for liberal and general education. Workforce education, on the other hand, is education that is designed to help us prepare for a job and a career. Career and technical education (CTE) is used as a current and widely accepted term for workforce education, and both terms are used interchangeably. Bread is the metaphor used for workforce education.