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"How Will Students Communicate? January 6, 2011 Thus spake Zuckerberg: "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg's prognostication was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style. Meanwhile, learning-management platforms - notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions - have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework. All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard medium connecting colleges with their students. If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, institutionally provided student e-mail accounts will probably diminish in popularity over the next few years, campus technologists say, and that could force colleges to rethink the most reliable ways to stay in touch with their students. At the same time, several technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed say that e-mail is unlikely to disappear, if only because it remains the most suitable medium for the sort of official communications routinely sent to students from non-peer, non-professor sources."

"GOP Leader May Try to Block Rules on For-Profit Colleges The soon-to-be head of the House of Representatives education committee told Bloomberg last week that he is looking for ways to block the Obama administration from putting in place new rules aimed at requiring for-profit and other vocational programs to prove they are preparing their graduates for "gainful employment." Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who will head the Committee on Education and Labor when his party takes control of the House in January, told the news service that he would favor that the government put in place an expanded set of disclosures on outcomes for nonprofit and for-profit colleges alike, and that he believed "a pretty broad spectrum" of lawmakers, from both parties, had concerns about the administration's proposed regulations."

"December 12, 2010 Who Are the Undergraduates? From teenagers coddled by helicopter parents to underage drinkers mad for Four Loko, popular depictions of undergraduates often paint them as young adults feeling their way through postadolescence. But-while a cadre of undergraduates certainly does leave home at 18 to live on leafy campuses and party hard-many others are commuters, full-time workers, and parents. Roughly 22 million undergraduates attended college at some point in 2007-8, and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study from that year provides a snapshot of where students are coming from and how they pursue their educations. More than a third of all undergraduates attend part-time, and most are not affluent. That's reflected in where students go to college-more than twice as many undergraduates attend the University of Phoenix's online campus as go to an Ivy League college. You can explore students' demographics for yourself below."

"The Rise of the 'Edupunk' November 5, 2010 NEW YORK -- The "Edupunks" will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention. Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute's 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference. "We're still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don't think that's going to work," said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore. Today's students are "pretty bored with what we do," she added. In a notable acknowledgment of the tail wagging the dog, several panelists alluded here to the possibility that if colleges don't change the way they do business, then students will change the way colleges do business. College leaders don't yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to, said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are not far from the day when a student, finding unsatisfactory reviews of a faculty member on ratemyprofessors.com, will choose to take a class through open courseware online and then ask his home institution to assess him, Milliron said. Colleges need to prepare for that reality, he said. While the concept of a self-educated citizenry circumventing the traditional system of higher education may have sounded far-fetched a decade ago, the fact that the likes of Spilde gave it more than lip service marks something of a shift. Indeed, there was more than a subtle suggestion across hours of sessions Monday that colleges are in for a new world, like it or not, where they may not be the winners."

"'Jaw-Dropping' Data on Black Male Student Achievement The Council of Great City Schools is today releasing what it calls "jaw-dropping" data on the achievement of black male students, The New York Times reported. While the data are primarily about K-12 achievement, they suggest strong links to subsequent gaps noted for black male students in college enrollment levels. The report argues that the achievement gaps start at young ages, noting that while 12 percent of black boys in the fourth grade are proficient in reading, 38 percent of white boys are proficient. In eighth grade, 12 percent of black boys and 44 percent of white boys are proficient in math. According to the report, poverty levels are only part of the equation because poor white boys (defined by eligibility for subsidized school lunches) are doing as well as black boys who do not live in poverty."

"Reframing College Completion October 28, 2010 The bigger and broader the objective, the more diffused the responsibility for achieving it can be. For instance, with a mammoth undertaking like the college completion goal that President Obama and like-minded foundations and associations have laid out for the United States over the next 10-15 years, saying that "the country" needs to increase its college-going rate to 60 percent is so general that it makes both everyone and no one responsible for doing the heavy lifting. To combat that vagueness, policy makers and politicians have tended to break down the job into discrete units, with a focus on states (where various sectors of public higher education can work together, with the guidance of governors and chancellors) and individual colleges (which can be held accountable for their own performance and improvement). But in a pair of reports to be released today, the postsecondary education program at the Center for American Progress -- which takes pride in reframing existing policy discussions -- points out that both of those approaches have inherent problems. Focusing on the states creates difficulties in those metropolitan areas where multiple states intersect, putting up unnecessary barriers (in the form of financial aid, tuition and credit transfer policies) that inhibit the flow of students. And viewing higher education completion through the prism of individual institutions' productivity -- judging them on how many graduates they produce -- ignores the rapidly increasing numbers of students who attend multiple colleges. "[A]n institution's graduation rate is not what we truly care about," three of the center's staff members write. "What matters more is whether a student completes a degree anywhere in the system -- regardless of that student's pattern of mobility." In the two papers, the center offers alternatives -- to complement, not replace, the existing approaches. In "Easy Come, EZ-GO," three research

"December 13, 2010 Higher-Education Groups Lay Out Strategies to Reach Obama's College-Completion Goal By Eric Kelderman President Obama's ambitious goal for the nation to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020 can be reached, says a new report by three higher-education organizations. But getting there, the groups say, will require a commitment to action by federal, state, and institutional leaders, and not just the arcane discussions of process that have so far dominated the response to the 2020 goal. "The collective effort to strengthen higher-education performance has yet to materialize," says the report, "Strengthening College Opportunity and Performance," which was produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability; the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "Over the last year, instead of vigorous debate about strategies for increasing educational attainment," the report says, "we saw technical arguments among a few think tanks and foundations about how goals are set." The groups lay out a series of recommended policies and actions that should be taken to put the country on course to meet President Obama's objective. The federal government, the groups say, needs to define explicit goals for all states and make sure that policies and regulations contribute to meeting goals rather than inhibiting them. For example, the kinds of data that the government collects and reports are not helpful for determining how well states and institutions are really performing in higher education, the report says. States must have a full understanding of how many more degrees colleges should be producing, make sure that the colleges within their borders have clearly defined roles, and overhaul appropriations policies to make sure that institutions that will enroll the most students are getting an adequate amount of money a

The Chronicle of Higher Education Friday, January 7, 2011 January 6, 2011 When Leading a College in Tough Times, Getting Faculty Support Is Crucial By Scott Carlson Palm Springs, Calif. A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?" The punchline: "Change?" But, seriously, many of the colleges represented here are facing challenges that may require some major and even drastic changes. Faculty members, with their reputations for recalcitrance, are often seen as barriers to change. In the session, a scholar of higher education from Harvard University discussed the traits and motivations of the latest generation of faculty members, while two presidents talked about ways they had worked with faculty members to steer their colleges through crises. Cathy A. Trower, research director for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard, argued that the oldest professors-those born as late as 1945, who are called "traditionalists"-have attitudes about their careers that are very different from the youngest academics', like the Millennials'. Traditionalists tend to be loyal to employers, for example, while Gen-Xers are skeptical. Baby boomers are seeking titles and recognition for their work, while Millennial employees are primarily interested in meaningful work. Ms. Trower said that new scholars primarily want the same things that older scholars want, but the world around all of them has changed, with new methods for distributing scholarly work (for example, digitally), longer work hours, a decline among scholarly presses and longer lead times for publication, and greater financial pressures on scholarly work and departments."

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"Measuring College-Teacher Quality January 13, 2011, 10:40 am By Kevin Carey David Glenn's Chronicle article on using course sequence grades to estimate teacher quality in higher education illustrates a crucial flaw in the way education researchers often think about the role of evidence in education practice. The article cites a recent study of Calculus grades in the Air Force Academy. All students there are required to take Calculus I and II. They're randomly assigned to instructors who use the same syllabus. Students all take the same final, which is collectively graded by a pool of instructors. These unusual circumstances control for many external factors that might otherwise complicate an analysis of teacher quality. The researchers found that students taught by permanent faculty got worse grades in Calculus I than students taught by short-term faculty. But the pattern reversed when those students went on to Calculus II-those taught by full-time faculty earned better grades in the more advanced course, suggesting that short-term faculty might have been "teaching to the test" at the expense of deeper conceptual understanding. Students taught by full-time faculty were also more likely to enroll in upper-level math in their junior and senior years. In addition, the study found that student course evaluations were positively correlated with grades in Calculus I but negatively correlated with grades in Calculus II."

'Academically Adrift' January 18, 2011 If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press. The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations -- and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other "higher level" skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging: * 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college. * 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college. * Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later -- but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning. "How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much," write the authors, Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. For many undergraduates, they write, "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent."

January 18, 2011 'Trust Us' Won't Cut It Anymore By Kevin Carey "Trust us." That's the only answer colleges ever provide when asked how much their students learn. Sure, they acknowledge, it's hard for students to find out what material individual courses will cover. So most students choose their courses based on a paragraph in the catalog and whatever secondhand information they can gather. No, there's isn't an independent evaluation process. No standardized tests, no external audits, no publicly available learning evidence of any kind. Yes, there's been grade inflation. A-minus is the new C. Granted, faculty have every incentive to neglect their teaching duties while chasing tenure-if they're lucky enough to be in the chase at all. Meanwhile the steady adjunctification of the professoriate proceeds. Still, "trust us," they say: Everyone who walks across our graduation stage has completed a rigorous course of study. We don't need to systematically evaluate student learning. Indeed, that would violate the academic freedom of our highly trained faculty, each of whom embodies the proud scholarly traditions of this venerable institution. Now we know that those are lies."

"January 30, 2011 'Facebook of Science' Seeks to Reshape Peer Review By Colin Macilwain Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot. "Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed," recalls the scientific publisher. "They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable." Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications-there are now about 200 of them-to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million. Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call "the Facebook of science" and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers."

"January 30, 2011 Scholars Create Influential Journal for About $100 a Year By Jennifer Howard A group of herpetologists-researchers who study reptiles and amphibians-has been quietly demonstrating that it's possible to put together a well-regarded, researcher-run journal with the tiniest of budgets and no help from a publisher. The journal, Herpetological Conservation and Biology, caught my eye as a well-developed example of a movement for grass-roots scholarly publishing that has been rapidly picking up speed. The herpetology publication, founded in 2006, is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal with a budget of about $100 a year. (That money comes out of the editors' pockets.) Unlike most science journals, it charges no author or download fees. It has a submission-to-publication turnaround time measured in weeks or at most a few months. And it has just hit a milestone: The editors learned in December 2010 that HCB will be included in Journal Citation Reports, a service run by the commercial publisher Thomson Reuters that calculates impact factors for journals-a significant measure of importance for many researchers. HCB will receive its first impact rating in 2012 or 2013, and the editors expect the journal to rate highly. That credential will help reassure potential contributors, especially researchers who don't yet have tenure, that publishing an article in HCB will be good for their careers. Judged by the number of visitors to the site, the journal has caught on. In its first year, 2006, it received just over 6,000 unique visitors. In 2010 it received 42,288, according to the editors. Readers from more than 160 countries came to the site. And the number of submissions that are deemed good enough to be sent out for peer-review stage-more than 100 in 2010-has more than doubled since 2006, according to Malcolm L. McCallum, the managing editor. He says HCB's acceptance rate for submissions that make it to peer review is running about 50

"January 13, 2011 Scientists Fault Universities as Favoring Research Over Teaching By Paul Basken The United States' educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines. Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles. "It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system." A group of researchers, led by two biology professors, Diane K. O'Dowd of the University of California at Irvine and Richard M. Losick of Harvard University, made a similar point in a commentary in Science. Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'" they wrote. Those faculty members raise the issue at a time of growing anxiety for universities and their research enterprises. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this month, after party leaders promised during last year's election campaign to cut nondiscretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. That is likely to mean deep budget cuts at the federal science-financing agencies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest nonmilitary provider of research money to universities, could see its budget fall 9 percent below its anticipated 2011 level of $31.3-billion. And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Tho

"January 18, 2011 Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa Drawing on survey responses, transcript data, and results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized test taken by students in their first semester and at the end of their second year), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. Here is an excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), their new book based on those findings. "With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants," Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. "We ask, 'How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?' With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, 'Is it safe to eat here?'" Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described

"January 18, 2011 New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps By David Glenn A book released today makes a damning indictment of the American higher-education system: For many students, it says, four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in their ability to synthesize knowledge and put complex ideas on paper. The stark message from the authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) is that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college (see excerpt). The book is already drawing its share of critics, who say the analysis falls short in its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods. "We didn't know what to expect when we began this study," said Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University who is one of the book's two authors. "We didn't walk into this with any axes to grind. But now that we've seen the data, we're very concerned about American higher education and the extent to which undergraduate learning seems to have been neglected." In the new book, Mr. Arum and his co-author-Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia-report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005. The scholars do not name those 24 institutions, but they say they are geographically and institutionally representative of the full range of American higher education. The sample includes large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and historically black and Hispanic-serving colleges and universities."

"Survey Finds Frustration Among Faculty Leaders at Master's-Level Institutions January 24, 2011, 2:59 pm Faculty Senate leaders at master's-level institutions are more likely than those at doctoral-level universities to report that faculty morale at their institutions is low, according to the newly released results of a survey conducted by Ohio University's Center for Higher Education, in collaboration with the American Association of University Professors. Compared with Faculty Senate leaders at doctoral institutions, whose responses to the center's survey were released in November, those at master's institutions were less likely to report having a good working relationship with their institution's administration, more likely to report that requirements for tenure and promotion are increasing, and more likely to report that there were not enough tenure-track faculty members to support academic programs at their institutions. As is the case at doctoral institutions, the overwhelming majority of Faculty Senate leaders at master's institutions are white, the survey found."

"Documenting the Damage to Cal State Students at California State University at Northridge are being hit by worsening personal economic conditions, higher tuition rates and greater difficulty getting into courses, according to a report, "Squeezed From All Sides," being released today by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 students at Northridge, which like most of the Cal State campuses is ethnically diverse and includes many first generation college students. Among the findings: * Students' families have taken hard hits. More than 10 percent of students reported that at least one parent had lost a job since 2008, and 21 percent reported that at least one parent had lost income or hours of work. * Paying for college has become more difficult. Among students enrolled for at least two years, 57 percent said that paying had become "a little more difficult" and another 28 percent said that it had become "a lot more difficult." * Getting into courses has become more difficult, with 77 percent of students reporting that the inability to get into classes will result in longer time to degree."

"Is Increasing Teaching Loads a Wise Idea? March 24, 2011, 11:00 am By Richard Vedder The Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, faced with a massive looming budget deficit ($8-billion), has come forth with a budget that is, by staid Ohio standards, rather innovative, calling for selling assets (e.g., prisons), radically restructuring nursing home care for the elderly, etc. His higher-education budget amounts, while down from previous years, were not down as much as university presidents feared (unlike in neighboring Pennsylvania, faced with similar budgetary woes, where university operating subsidies are proposed to be reduced over 50 percent). But one proposal is bound to raise a ruckus: The governor has asked that all full-time faculty members teach one more course every two years. This probably means an increase in teaching load that averages roughly 10 percent for full-time faculty, more for senior research-oriented professors. Like most in higher education, I prefer it when legislators and governors say "cut expenses by X percent-by whatever means is best given your academic mission," then when they say "increase teaching loads by X in order to reduce instructional costs in the long run." Even if a teaching load increase is going to be mandated, it is better done at an institutional level-University X must have its existing staff teaching Y percent more courses-than at the level of the individual instructor. That approach allows universities to raise teaching loads a good deal for some, but not at all for persons who are, for example, highly productive researchers who should be spending time in the laboratory rather than the classroom. Also, many faculty are actually paying their own way via federal or other research grants, and besides being foolhardy to increase their teaching loads, it might even violate those grants to take on additional teaching responsibilities. Having said all of that, however, I understand where John Kasich is coming from, a