Sometimes the most basic functions of higher education are missed or ignored. Take, for example, the influence of friendships on college students. We all know that friends matter greatly to the college experience. Talk with a college graduate and more often than not, their best friends for life are college friends. People meet their spouses…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
An Ambitious Agenda for Community Colleges
America’s community colleges – and there are about 1,200 of them – educate more than 10 millions people every year. Community colleges serve a myriad of needs, ranging from training to swimming to language to college courses. Most community college students hope to obtain a four-year degree. Unfortunately, less than 40% are successful in earning…
There’s No System In Our Financial Aid System
Sara Goldrick-Rab is a respected professor of education with a rare trait: she is comfortable in the role of public intellectual. Her most recent book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, has generated a good deal of well-deserved interest. It is a data-driven study that argues that the…
Credentials and Credentialing
Higher education performs two critical functions: dissemination of knowledge and information (education), and certification of that knowledge and information (credentialing). We spend the majority of our work in higher education on the first half of that equation. We argue about relevance and value, about teaching and research, and wrestle endlessly about better ways to help…
College Without Security
The Hope Lab at the University of Wisconsin, working with the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds Study, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Single Stop, a national organization focused on helping economically vulnerable students and their families, posted at the end of 2015 a powerful report – Hungry To Learn – on food and…
Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize
Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…
Telling Truths with Numbers
For all of us who work in colleges and universities, we might be doing fine with our students but we have a long way to go when it comes to educating the public. Data is at the very foundation of informed decision-making. Numbers do not lie. But when happens when people do not have data? Their guesses…