#student-completion

#student-completion

A recent study on students' intentions to take online courses highlights that performance expectancy, hedonic motivation, and flexibility are the main reasons why students adopt online learning programs. This finding is like what I have seen in the study of student enrollment trends in higher education. If we want to discover the secret of turning student curiosity into a commitment to completing an academic program, we need to understand the motivations for student course enrollment.

Maya Duckworth-Pilkington spent the first two weeks of January buried in her textbooks, studying. Until she submitted her final advanced functions exam, the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts senior didn't realize how much time and effort she was putting into her studies. The pressure is higher than ever to do well, she explained over text message. People aren't sleeping well, eating well or getting leisure time.

"Singlism" is a term coined by psychologist Dr. Bella DePaulo; this is defined as the discrimination and stereotyping of those who are non-married (I prefer this to the term "unmarried"). I'm not a psychologist, but a lot of the assumptions Dr. Tanglen's colleagues made about her "freedom" are an example of singlism. Much of the loneliness the writer felt may have been a result of internalized singlism, which emanates from societal messages from our public discourse (media, business practices, even laws)

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?

Although higher parental education is associated with stronger student outcomes over all, the report found significant variation in completion rates within each parental education category. Among applicants classified as first generation-defined as students whose parents did not complete a bachelor's degree-six-year completion rates range from 58 percent for students whose parents have no college experience to 78 percent for those whose parents both hold an associate degree, a 20-percentage-point gap.

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?

All but 14 of the 45 universities placed under investigation for participating in the PhD Project and allegedly violating civil rights law have agreed to cease partnering with the organization, the Education Department announced Thursday. The Office for Civil Rights launched the investigations last March, arguing that the PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that connects prospective business doctoral candidates from underrepresented backgrounds with academic networks, was "limit[ing] eligibility based on the race of participants."

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.

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.