After a part of his lung was removed to save him from an invasive melanoma, Roger H. Martin, president of Randolph-Macon College, decided to take a sabbatical and return to college as a student. His memoir, Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again, recounts his semester at St. John’s College, a private institution committed to…
Author: David Potash
Ravitch’s World
Diane Ravitch is a force of nature and social media. Relentlessly energetic, this scholar of K-12 education is at the heart of a movement and counter-reformation in our school system. Ravitch’s aim is no less than to reshape the national debate on education. In Reign of Error, Ravitch employs her formidable polemical skills to discuss four…
Degrees of Inequality and the Failed Policyscape of Financial Aid
A consistent theme in American discourse today is that higher education is in crisis. The common refrain is that a college education is not worth the cost, with spiraling tuition costs pricing college out of the reach of middle class Americans and the result neither relevant or able to compensate for student debt. But what…
Making Excellence Visible In Community Colleges
We identify excellence in four-year colleges and universities through well-known markers: exclusive and difficult admissions criteria, a lengthy institutional history with famous alumni, at least one venerable building (usually featuring a clock and a bell), a large library, state-of-the-art science facilities, award-winning faculty who write books, appear in the media, and make discoveries, and a stately…
First Year Reading – Read Anything Good Lately? And Why?
Enter a four-year college today as a first year student and more often than not, you will be asked to participate in a common first year reading. It was not always so. Shared readings have long been part of collegiate intellectual life. Over the past twenty plus years their use, especially in the first year,…
Community Colleges and Baccalaureate Completion – Actionable New Research
One of basic facts of higher education completion is that students who start at community colleges are less likely to graduate from a four-year institution than students who start at a four-year institutions. It is a constant source of concern for all of us who work at the community college level. David P. Monaghan and…
Rating Higher Education – An Update From Higher Learning Commission
If you are looking to energize a room full of college and university presidents, few issues are as effective as President Obama’s plan to develop a rating system of higher education institutions. Complaints come fast and furious. The idea – which speaks to the value of an education – unnerves many educators. At the Higher Learning Commission’s annual…