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Colleges can reap major benefits from meaningful engagement with faculty, yet many institutions find it difficult to do. In partnership with Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, Public Agenda has developed core principles and promising practices for engaging faculty in changing institutions and closing student achievement gaps. This new Cutting Edge Series paper, "Engaging Adjunct and Full-Time Faculty in Student Success Innovation," builds on our existing work in faculty engagement and is based on fresh research with higher education experts and community college faculty.

"This fall, Harvard will charge students $36,992 for tuition, compared to a bill 34 times less at most community colleges. Don't let the higher sticker price fool you. Community colleges offer teaching instruction comparable to their four-year counterparts but won't saddle graduates with long term debt in the process."

It's that time of year...when the college acceptance letters are in and those first tuition checks will soon be going out. As college costs continue to sky-rocket, a new report finds that student loan debt has now topped credit card debt for the first time.

"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum. But their challenge isn't fundamentally one of money: online tutorials don't have to be expensive to be effective, as the open-to-all Khan Academy has shown. The much greater challenge for traditional universities and colleges is changing their teaching traditions. Full-time faculty members must not only assent to the inclusion of online learning in the curriculum, they should lead it."

"Sprint provided students in an online marketing class at Emerson College with 10 smartphones with unlimited wireless access. In exchange, students blogged, tweeted, produced YouTube videos and posted Facebook updates about the launch of Sprint's 4G network in Boston. "We're teaming up with the class again this semester it worked so well," says Sprint spokesman Mark Elliott."

I shared this because I see it as a way for colleges and universities to get "funding" from outside government allocations and tuition. Also blogged about it.

"The students, mostly from China's rapidly expanding middle class, can afford to pay full tuition, a godsend for colleges that have faced sharp budget cuts in recent years. But what seems at first glance a boon for colleges and students alike is, on closer inspection, a tricky fit for both."

In a move that infuriated some students, Chestnut Hill College abruptly terminated the teaching contract of an adjunct professor, saying his 15-year relationship with another man defied Roman Catholic Church teachings.

Can you imagine the number of poor students who got their minds filled up for years by an heretic? Oh, please...

After leading the world in college graduates for decades, the United States has slipped to ninth, and a new initiative Vice President Joe Bidenannounced earlier this week aims to help reverse the trend.

Somewhere out there is an ambitious but frugal high-school graduate who wants to avoid a traditional college path. Maybe she has read Anya Kamenetz's DIY U or one of the other end-higher-education-as-we-know-it manifestoes that have circulated in recent years.

"Despite extensive efforts to better integrate the learning experience during the college years, systemic institutional structures work against such integration--as does only an incipient understanding among educators of the integrative potential of the Web technologies our culture has fully adopted but which educators distrust and even ban."

"Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut today announced a joint pilot program between the University System of Ohio and Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of free and open college textbooks for students worldwide. The program will allow 1,000 Ohio students to receive digital textbooks for free."

With a different kind of analysis, it may indeed be appropriate to conclude that many undergraduates are not benefiting as much as they should from their college experience. But the 45-percent claim is simply not justified by the data and analyses set forth in this particular report.

"Like many graduates, she's now faced with the larger worry of living back at home while also paying down vast amounts of debt. "

"Apparently, as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources-that is, on paying faculty. They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources."

Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety On Cost, Harsher Judgments On How Colleges Are Run

People who believe in academic freedom have got to take these incidents seriously and get active before it's too late. "The perfect case is never going to come along," my old friend the historian Joshua Freeman told me. "Nobody is going to fire their Nobel laureate." Actually, City College almost did that: Ten years after losing his CCNY post, Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He certainly had the last laugh, but others weren't so lucky.

The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts.

"If we were a good university, we wouldn't have a commercial." Reminds me of a huge banner hung over the main road into Louisiana State: "Quality speaks for itself -- LSU: A GREAT UNIVERSITY"

"The study also revealed a significant deviation between student survey results and actual computer-use practices. Students tend to under-report the amount of time they spend on distracting activities in class."

This report builds on and extends Public Agenda's ongoing research on the attitudes of various stakeholder groups toward higher education reform.[1] Here we explore the purpose and promise of more effective engagement of those stakeholders who-at first blush, at least-appear to express the deepest resistance to the productivity agenda: faculty. The report's driving questions are, what does it take to bridge the most pervasive divides in perception between productivity advocates and faculty, and what can be accomplished through deeper, more strategic engagement?[2]