Higher education
fromPsychology Today
3 days agoShould You Serve on the Board of Your Alma Mater?
Higher education is essential for the U.S. economy and requires significant institutional change to adapt to current challenges.
Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.
Growing up, I struggled to figure out what made sense for me, what made me me. When I joined the drum line and felt that community, everything clicked. It made me a better person. It gave me something to fight for.
Research has shown there is a reading for pleasure crisis among children in the UK, where enjoyment of books has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. Not so here at Christ Church primary, a tiny Church of England school tucked behind the maze of HS2 construction works in Camden, north London, where children fizz with excitement about books.
I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude because it took an inordinate amount of work and uncertainty to get to this point, so now that we're finally here, we can breathe. The new school features large classrooms with plenty of natural light and additional shared spaces for clubs, sports and after-school programs.
We're also spending less time with friends. For years, Americans averaged about 6.5 hours a week with friends. Between 2014 and 2019, that number plunged by 37%, to just 4 hours. The year 2014 coincides with a rise in smartphone users.
I was like, 'What do you mean, I can actually work and take some classes?' I didn't even know there were apprenticeships out there, because I thought it was something of the past. That was my dream-to go into some field of engineering-so it was great to find something like AT&T, which has an apprenticeship program where you can jump into it, which later becomes software engineering.
At the same time, children's development and families' needs do not end when the bell rings or when they enter kindergarten; continuous afterschool programming from early childhood through adolescence is critical. To fully realize the goals of universal childcaresupport working families, advance educational equity, and strengthen the economyNew York City must extend this vision to K12 students and make universal afterschool programming a core part of the solution.
Two Long Island high school juniors are transforming their academic experiences into a mission to help others. Jonah Aloni of St. Anthony's High School and Liel Agajan, a student at Wheatley High School, have founded LIFT - Lead. Inspire. Foster. Thrive., a student-run organization dedicated to ensuring that children struggling in school can receive the academic support they need, regardless of financial circumstances.
Cuts that hurt are obvious: layoffs, program closures, college closures, furloughs, deferred maintenance, pay freezes, travel freezes, etc. It's a well-worn playbook at this point. Most of the moves in this category involve either attacking employee compensation, which causes obvious pain, or putting off necessary investments and living with gradual declines in quality.
Whether it's executive coaching or life coaching, people understand the concept and know that there is value to it in higher ed. However, what's been missing is this foundational research that really explains why coaching works in this context and how you can then leverage it to have the most impact on student success. What does a coach need to know, and at what skill level do they need to operate in order to have the impact on students that we want to see?
This is a striking decision at a moment when public confidence in higher education is eroding. It is also puzzling because rigorous research and evaluation have demonstrated, over and over, the value of the work of centers for teaching and learning, including positive impacts on student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness and faculty development.
This idea was based on the parallel between the pluck and elan that are characteristic of both the early-college students I worked with and that of America's hardest-working founding father. Five years after I wrote the book, I had the opportunity to revisit the field for a revised edition, making it appropriate to ask, after Thomas Jefferson's song in the second act of Hamilton, "What'd I Miss": How has early college/dual enrollment changed over the past half decade?
The survey measured belonging by asking students to rate their agreement with the statement "I feel that I am a part of [school]" on a five-point scale, where 1 means strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree. Students who rated their sense of belonging in their second year one step higher on the five-point scale than they did in their first year-such as moving from neutral to agree-were 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate within four years.
The program introduces Cali, a "human-centered" AI tool designed to enhance-not replace-human support. Cali can converse in more than 140 languages and help students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the California Dream Act Application (CADAA). The tool is expected to reduce errors on the forms and help students stay on track toward enrollment and graduation.
The college admissions process seems more tedious, nebulous and overwhelming than ever ... which is why one college admissions expert is breaking down high school extracurriculars by the numbers. Kate Stone, founder of Kate Stone Prep, says that not all extracurricular activities are created equal. "Anything that thousands of kids are doing is always going to be less helpful for you," Stone tells TODAY.com. It's not that you should completely avoid popular extracurriculars, though. "It just means that you have to bring something creative or differentiated to it," she says. "Do the common activity in an uncommon way." On an Instagram reel that has earned almost 3 million views since it was posted in November, Stone ranks a handful of popular high school activities according to their value on an application for a top tier university. Stone goes into detail about what her rankings meant and gives her top tips for students looking at applying to elite colleges.
I assume that it's intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don't know. The effects are the same either way, and they're devastating to the mission of a university.
For many students, vertical transfer (transfer from an associate's to a bachelor's program) is less a bridge than a maze. Typically, about 80 percent of community college students say they intend to earn a bachelor's degree, yet only about 30 percent ever transfer and roughly 16 percent complete a bachelor's within six years. Yet under these topline numbers, outcomes vary widely. And figuring out which combinations of student actions and background factors matter, and which pathways are most promising, can be a complicated mess.