Before long, microfinance was, if not a household word, at least a popular term among economists and aid workers denoting a strategy of trying to improve the circumstances of disadvantaged populations by making loans as small as $25 to support microenterprise. At the same time, globalization, diversification and civic engagement were gaining…

One of the most significant and important challenges facing any president of a Catholic college or university is maintaining and enhancing the religious identity and mission of the institution in the midst of the pluralism that exists on every Catholic campus in the United States. Catholic colleges and universities are at an important crossroad, a…

Since the founding of Framingham Normal School in 1839 as the first state-supported school in the United States for training teachers, Massachusetts state colleges have evolved in response to the changing needs of the regions they serve. The Massachusetts state Legislature and Gov. Deval Patrick are now considering whether to move from the…

In "Pushing Plastic," ("The New England Journal of Higher Education", Summer 2007), John Humphrey notes that many college administrators justify their credit card solicitations by suggesting that credit card access will help students learn to manage their own finances. Instead, credit card debt will teach thousands of students a lesson they will…

There is a growing gap between Maine high school graduates' "college intentions" and their actual college enrollment, according to a recent study by the Senator George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute. A follow-up to a similar study the institute conducted five years ago, the new research is based on enrollment data from colleges and…

Educators, economists and policymakers agree that raising the level of achievement for more learners is important. Studies of global workforce competitiveness regularly point toward the goal of nearly everyone achieving skills and knowledge commensurate with at least two years of higher education. According to this author, educators have…

Southeastern Massachusetts is home to six public institutions of higher education. In 2003, at the invitation of Bridgewater President Dana Mohler-Faria, five of them joined together to form a regional collaborative called CONNECT. (The original members were Bridgewater State College, Bristol, Cape Cod and Massasoit community colleges, and the…

This author states that "college access marketing" efforts aimed at increasing college attendance and success have been slow to incorporate new techniques such as "buzz marketing," "viral marketing," "product seeding," and "guerrilla marketing." Yet for a "connected generation" of potential college students, these kinds of strategies could be…

The growing demographic diversity of the under-graduate student body in American postsecondary education has been well documented over an extended period of time. One result of this increased diversity is the substantial number of "first-generation" college students from families where neither parent had more than a high-school education. For…

The recent legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education illustrate that moral arguments, such as that affirmative action compensates for past wrongs, no longer justify it. So proponents of affirmative action have changed strategies and now use social science to prove the necessity of affirmative action. This article situates the…

Continuing a decade-long trend, findings from recent annual surveys of first-year college students have documented their participation in community service as high-school seniors at record high levels (Higher Education Research Institute, 1999, 2000, 2001). Eighty-one percent of the 2000 respondents reported volunteering during senior year,…

The cultural landscape of graduate employee life in the research university faces significant change. Ten years ago just a handful of recognized graduate employee unions existed. Today, more than two dozen campuses have recognized unions and another two dozen or so are in the process of organizing graduate student employees. The extant literature…

Over the past four decades higher education institutions have faced increasing complexity related to governance (Berdahl, 1991; Birnbaum, 1988; Kezar, 2000; Leslie & Fretwell, 1996). In particular, institutions now face even greater competing priorities and demands to engage the community, business, and industry; to solve social problems and…

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on a conference of scholars and senior administrators at Harvard discussing "The Future of Religious Colleges" (McMurtrie, 2000). The irony of the meeting's venue is readily apparent. Having been founded by Puritan Christians in 1636 and soon given the motto, Christo et Ecclesiae, the beginning…

"And so a lot of times I felt out of place, because you see all white faces. You know I'm the only fly in the buttermilk, so that took some getting used to ..." These words, shared by a black student during an interview for the present study, poignantly reflect the essence of the experience of being a minority student on a predominately white…