The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for change and innovation in higher education, building on prior calls to rethink college and university commitment and operation. The pandemic has also been a catalyst for change in the current practice of quality assurance through accreditation. All major activities associated with review of institutions…

A "Cone of Uncertainty" has become ubiquitous in hurricane forecasting, encompassing the likeliest possible path that a storm might take as it approaches landfall. These forecasts are crucial because they help government agencies at all levels prepare even in these far-from-certain future conditions. Although individual institutions have…

Rethinking the balance between federal and state responsibilities for supporting colleges and universities and making higher education accessible and affordable for students is important. There is little disagreement about the current education financing system being inadequate. The debate is about the best way to solve the problem. In this…

Calls for instructional innovation in higher education assert that the current system suffers from one or more of the following problems: access constraints that stymie social and economic mobility, spending norms that over time inflate cost relative to value, and student outcomes that fail to adequately encourage citizenship and enhance…

Basic-needs insecurity is not a new hurdle, but one that is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it was only recently that more institutions began identifying basic-needs insecurity--the lack of access to, or ability to pay for, adequate food and shelter--as a significant challenge keeping students from obtaining credentials, such…

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on significant, preexisting, and continuing challenges of the Digital Divide, which threaten the hopes of digital democracy for all students and citizens. In addition to digital equity challenges resurfaced by COVID-19, the pandemic's ripple effects have highlighted societal racial tensions,…

Students, especially marginalized students, struggled to juggle online learning with the financial and personal stresses of COVID-19. No one would have wished for this pandemic to serve as the impetus to finally elevate and amplify students' voices. In addition to the pandemic, the national attention focused on race relations and disparities…

The changes to higher education after widespread vaccination and a "return to normal" will vary greatly from college to college. Just as there was no "one way" to run a university pre-COVID-19, there exists no single template or model to guide the post-COVID-19 university. However now is the time to start figuring out what…

College students who identify as transgender face numerous roadblocks in accessing employment opportunities. With an unemployment rate three times higher than the U.S. average, much of the transgender employment discrimination reveals itself in the process of seeking employment. Research indicates students identifying as transgender feel pressure…

Complete College America (CCA) is partnered with the National Student Clearinghouse in promoting the latter's Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP), a data and reporting tool for tracking student success metrics. The PDP is offered at nominal cost, built for democratized data access, and encompasses transfer data native to Clearinghouse products,…

As several authors in last May/June's issue of "Change" pointed out, more and more students are coming to college with stories that need to be heard but are not being heard--stories of loss, survival, marginalization, resilience, oppression, persistence, trauma, and determined, stubborn love. They enter an environment that is so often…

Understanding the funding requirements of public institutions starts with recognizing them as state assets with capacity to meet state needs, especially those that disproportionately serve underrepresented, low-income, or rural student populations and adult learners. As policy makers wrestle with resource allocation decisions under unfavorable…

Collaboration between colleges of liberal arts and sciences and health professional schools provide fertile ground for undergraduate programs focused on health education, advocacy, and research. Complex collaboration can sometimes challenge disciplinary boundaries and traditional processes, which may need to be updated to maximize student…

With the return to on-campus learning in progress, recalling how higher education responded to the COVID-19 pandemic poses a challenge. Back in March 2020, many university leaders thought returning "to normal" (now a phrase almost as maligned as "unprecedented") was a matter of weeks--not months or years. The short-sighted…

The Bay View Alliance (BVA; https://bayviewalliance.org/) is a network of research universities working together to support and sustain the widespread adoption of instructional methods that lead to better student learning. The BVA's research action cluster on collaborative course transformation sought and received funding from the National Science…