Early in the twentieth century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to create a pension system for the nation's college professors. The introduction of this pension system proved an ingenious educational reform. At the time, American higher education was a largely ill-defined…

The author writes that for too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door. In examining what can be done, he recognizes the centrality of the classroom to student success.

Eighteen months after soundly criticizing a new Harvard general education that proposed to abandon the concept of a structured general education, substituting a minimum distribution requirement under which students could choose a few courses from hundreds offered by the faculty, the writer applauds the shift, encouraged by interim president Derek…

Noting that it is easy, especially for those inside higher education, to take it for granted, the writer notes that none of his grandparents had the opportunity to go to college, let alone graduate. Among parents, aunts and uncles, a single bachelor's degree was earned. It was the next two generations, benefited by the GI Bill, the subsequent…

This paper, highlights the forthcoming book "Educating for Democracy." The book articulates the conditions under which political teaching and learning in college is and is not legitimate, making the case that education for political development can and should be conducted in a manner that is consistent with the core values of higher education…

In early January 2004, in connection with its centennial, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching began a 30-month appraisal of relations between influential philanthropic foundations and educational institutions (both K-12 and higher education) with the goal of strengthening those relations. The authors, both co-directors of the…

The writers call for foundations and educational institutions to build their programs around the goal of increasing educational capital through more open and accountable forms of education grant-making and educational activity. Recognizing that education needs philanthropic foundations to enliven imagination, spur improvements and test solutions;…

There is an increasingly popular view of government to shift costs of education formerly borne at the national level to the states, and the states, in turn to shift costs and risks to individuals that has created a "perfect storm" of economic and political trends. The idea of privatizing a portion of Social Security and the continuing press for…

The writer describes a site visit to the teaching hospital of a major American medical school, part of the Carnegie Foundation's ten-year program of research on how lawyers, engineers, clergy, school teachers, nurses, and physicians are taught and how they learn. Of particular note to Schulman was an exercise known as "M&M" (Morbidity and…

The writer calls attention to the many traps associated with one of the most frequent uses of assessment: the technical difficulties of measuring changes in learning over time. Noting that psychometricians don't like "change" or "difference" scores in statistical analyses because they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures…

The writer comments on the need for more thoughtful ways to introduce undergraduate students to the world of work. Students want to know how to connect their values and goals, their intellectual passions and capacities, the myriad of learning experiences in which they engage during college, and the work of their lives. They are, however,…

The authors comment on incentive systems that impede serious scholarly work on teaching and learning. The hallmark of academic freedom is the opportunity it affords faculty members to pursue innovative or unconventional scholarship. Over the past decade or so, teaching initiatives in higher education are gaining visibility, innovation is on the…