Wise Pivots

Accenture, a global professional services company, is one of my college’s most active and generous business partners. We have learned so much from them through meetings, projects, collaboration, and day-to-day interaction. Consistently collegial and extraordinarily professional, the team at Accenture have helped to strengthen us and our students – and we’re not even their clients.…

The Essential Work of Learning and Assessing

What does a student know and how do we know that they know it? This fundamental question in higher education drives learning outcomes assessment, a critical component in providing a quality education. Those that are more removed from the classroom and assessment committees may not to give much consideration to the ongoing demanding work that…

Ways Of Keeping Score

Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, is a prolific author, advisor to governments and organizations, researcher, scholar and influential public intellectual. He’s been called one of the worlds most important business thinkers. In 2015, he took a break from his academic and management…

If Not For Our Idiosyncrasies

Academia is an odd place, sometimes a world unto itself. Higher education’s traditions, titles and ceremonies are unique, and can be obscure and remarkably persistent. Why, after all, do students pay fees to a bursar and move a tassel on a mortar board at graduation? Why do faculty publish or perish? For those of us…

A New Design Build for Higher Education?

Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, is one of higher education’s most influential leaders. ASU has accomplished tremendous improvements under Crow’s tenure, growing enrollment, student successes, and an international profile as a global research institution. It is an institution constantly innovating and many look to ASU for ideas. Crow is a doer, a thinker…

Fail U, Higher Education, and No Retest

Charles Sykes believes that higher education has lost its way and its purpose. He is angry and sees higher ed as a gigantic scam. Sykes assembles as many complaints, criticisms and shortcomings as possible in an unremittingly shrill jeremiad, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education. It paints a extraordinarily dire picture of higher…

Perhaps Not So Fast, Mr. Chips?

Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere is a provocative look at a possible future for higher education. A policy expert and writer, Carey is convinced that the current state of affairs for academia is failing and that wholesale changes are just around the corner. The…