One of the major developments in financing undergraduate education in the United States in the past 20 years has been the introduction of broad-based merit-aid programs by state governments. The typical program waives tuition and fees at public colleges and universities for state residents who have attained a respectable grade-point average…

Although for-profit colleges and universities have had a long history in the United States, they have garnered significant attention only in the last decade. In the early 20th century, career colleges existed primarily in urban areas to provide training for specific trades or professions--plumbing, restaurant management, art and design,…

Across the nation and for a very long time, campuses and students have been plagued by drug and alcohol abuse. And it seems that many of our efforts to address that abuse, while necessary, have been woefully insufficient to the task. This article describes the nature and significance of the problem, examines current strategies for addressing it,…

Offering some relief from a raft of reports about declining education attainment and increasing college costs, Anya Kamenetz celebrates Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) for boosting higher education productivity, access, and affordability ("Change," September/October 2011). According to Kamenetz, PLA is transforming higher education by leveraging…

In the May/June issue of "Change", US Undersecretary of Education Martha J. Kanter described President Barack Obama's plan for recapturing the position of the best-educated country in the world by 2020. She spelled out the formula for meeting the President's ambitious goal: increasing postsecondary access, improving the quality of a college…

In this article, the author addresses questions about the future of faculty unions, business models, and the academy by providing some current and historical context regarding the causes of and conflicts about faculty unions. He also reviews trends in college and university management over the past three decades, using California, Ohio, and…

Although associate professors comprise only about 20 percent of all full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions, the rank is important because it is the primary pipeline from which institutional leaders emerge. In this article, the authors describe the results of a campus-wide needs assessment at the University of North…

In this article, the author shares his experience with Burent Arel, an established composer of orchestral, chamber, and classical electronic music. At first, the author found the music of the 20th century deeply disturbing. Yet, Professor Arel converted him and his skepticism into evangelical fervor. Finally understanding the role of the artist in…

Although many of the recommendations in "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education" (the Spellings Commission report) have still to be implemented, policy makers' insistence that American colleges and universities measure student learning outcomes in a way that permits comparisons seems unlikely to go away. Nor does the…

Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners share a sincere interest in improving the human condition. Academics may be tempted to fault irrationality, ideology, or ignorance for the failure of research to inform policy and practice more powerfully, but policy makers and practitioners want academics to tell them "what works" in order to find a…

Research-intensive universities enjoy--or suffer--a paradoxical reputation: They are thought to be dedicated to both cutting-edge research and to the preservation of the canon. They are seen as broad and diverse communities of scholars with a vibrant collective intellectual life, yet also as silos of disciplinary entrenchment. Most significantly,…

Nationwide, pass rates of developmental education students barely reach 60 percent, cutting short the promise of higher education for too many students. The authors believe that a national pass rate of 80 percent or better is possible; indeed, it is a national imperative. In this article, the authors describe an ongoing project that aims to…

The publication of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's influential new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," the findings of which were summarized in an article by the same authors in the March/April "Change," has caused a national furor centering around their multi-institutional findings that the general impact of college…

Throughout the 1990's, many people saw information technology as a silver bullet that could solve many of higher education's problems, among them the need to improve learning outcomes and control the ever-upward trajectory of higher education costs. The term "silver bullet" connotes a direct and effortless solution to a problem. Unsurprisingly,…

This essay contends that America's economic and social prosperity depends on nurturing and improving graduate programs, and that both universities and policy makers need to act in some very specific ways to secure future success. It first looks at the relationship between graduate training and prosperity, next considers the vulnerabilities in…