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,…
Author: David Potash
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…
Calculating Deferred Gratification
How confident are you with economic and career forecasting? Recently I had a fascinating conversation with a smart community college student keen on pursuing a career in health care. The first in her family to attend college and an immigrant to the United States while in high school, she told me that she loves the…
Facing Facts: Student Persistence
The study of higher education is professionalizing. Theories are maturing, research is expanding, and we are steadily learning more about what works, and what doesn’t, when people head off to college. The results are sobering. Knowledge can empower – and also humble. Wesley R. Habley, Jennifer L. Bloom, and Steve Robbins recently collaborated on Increasing Persistence:…
Discomfort and Academic Success
Talking with college students about their academic work is a fascinating leap into the familiar and the unknown. “What is your favorite class and why?” opens up discussions about preference, engagement, challenge, and the strengths and weaknesses of faculty. It reveals a forest of shifting variables. As educators, administrators, and advisors, we recognize the format…
Whose College Unbound?
Adding to the ever-growing library of “higher education is failing” is Jeffery J. Seligno’s College (Un)Bound: the Future of Higher Education and What It Means For Students. An editor at large for the Chronicle of Higher Education, academia’s publication of record, Seligno is a well-respected writer on education issues. Seligno believes that higher education has lost…