Technology's march into the college classroom continues. Generations of college and university faculty have both embraced and resisted instructional technologies such as the book, the mimeograph, the overhead projector, and hand-held calculators. Now college and university faculty are greeting the 21st century's signature…

With many baby boomers preparing to retire, higher education is facing an anticipated shortage of academic administrators. Compounding this challenge, many mid-career faculty are reluctant to fill these important positions, concerned that academic leadership is incompatible with work-life balance, that it detracts from their commitments to…

The authors of this article describe the effect that cost-cutting policies have had on community college student outcomes and how this has weakened the capacity of those colleges to produce returns to students and taxpayers. Many colleges are instituting reforms to help more students graduate with useful credentials. While these lower the cost per…

This article describes efforts in Massachusetts and the Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC) to develop a statewide system for learning outcomes assessment that does not rely on standardized testing and that is designed to transcend the traditional tensions and boundaries between campus-based formative and…

College and university lawyers must be prepared to address legal matters that range from the kinds one might expect to those that are unanticipated, even unbelievable. It's all in a day's work--and there's no such thing as a typical day in the life of a higher education attorney. The complex legal and regulatory issues facing…

With the cost of higher education steadily increasing, many people are wondering what, if anything, students are learning on college campuses. In this environment, colleges are facing pressure to make information about what their students learn available to a range of stakeholders, including students and their parents, policymakers, and the…

This article reviews the path of funding higher education in Hungary, where funding cuts have resulted in understaffing, escalating tuition, growing student debt, and declining enrollment. Graduation rates are low, government policies favor vocational disciplines, and the system of preparation and access gives preference to students from wealthier…

The most recent research on college-student learning in the US by respected scholars such as Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Ernest Pascarella suggests that the nation's means of ensuring academic standards in US colleges and universities are not working effectively. Like US K-12 education and health care, the US higher education system is…

In this article the authors argue that states need a new way to oversee the delivery of postsecondary distance education across state borders. They assert that the current process is too spotty to assure consistent consumer protection and too cumbersome and expensive for institutions. Because education is not specified in the US Constitution as a…

The concern about the United States' education attainment levels as compared with those of other countries, and the consequences of this poor showing, were given visibility by the inclusion of international statistics in the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education publication, "Measuring Up 2008." That concern was…

This article describes the Program on the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV), a unique experiment in undergraduate education. This project challenged a group of 88 colleges and universities affiliated with a variety of Christian denominations, from Orthodox and Roman Catholic to Evangelical Protestant and Quaker, to think anew about what…

Given the increasing expectation that students should bear most of the college-cost burden, loans have been the largest form of financial aid since 1982, a shift that has been particularly hard on needy students. Loan-aversion has contributed to the access problem for these students, while facilitating more privileged students' ability to…

According to these authors, special effort is required to diversify the professional perspectives and experiences of graduate students from highly selective private institutions, who may be seen as having less commitment to teaching than their counterparts from public institutions and little experience of students with a wide range of backgrounds,…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as the answer to educational access and pilloried as failures, yet, according to this author, both claims are overstated and frequently obscure the real value of these courses: the knowledge gained about student behavior, about the possibilities of technology-assisted instruction, and about…

This article defines the term "under matching" as the behavior in which mostly less-affluent, highly qualified high school graduates choose not to enroll at an institution that matches their qualifications--behavior which threatens their chances of earning a degree. The supporting research--rigorous, compelling, and…