Caring for students will not guarantee success. Ongoing critical attention to students’ histories, experiences and values is essential for institutional effectiveness in higher education. For those of us who work at open access institutions, this means special awareness and sensitivity to issues of money, poverty, and agency. According to the federal government, a working family of…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
The Wrong End of the Equation: Community College Access Effect
Juliet Lilledahl and Mirra Leigh Anson’s Community Colleges and the Access Effect: Why Open Admissions Suppresses Achievement is a puzzling book. The authors, who have direct experience working with developmental education students, argue that tightening admission and financial aid standards at community colleges would improve achievement at all levels. The book is chock full of…
Building a Better Teacher: Many Ways, Many Challenges
A mix of history, journalism, education policy, and social critique, Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher, How Teaching Works (and How To Teach It To Everyone) is a fascinating hodgepodge of a book. It is about the world of teaching, from kindergarten through high school – and it has lessons for higher education. Green, a talented journalist and…
Happy Cities: Hedonic Studies and Engineered Environments
Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery is an outstanding publicist for cities and all things urban. In his recent book, The Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Montgomery extols the benefits of density, mass transit, and mixed used development. He argues that the ultimate aim of cities since ancient Athens has been the transformation personal happiness into concrete forms.…
A Blue Student at a Red College: Unlikely Disciple
The concept behind Unlikely Disciple is simple and powerful: Kevin Roose, a student at liberal Brown University, takes a semester at Christian and conservative Liberty University in Virginia. Inspired by an internship with A. J. Jacobs, editor at Esquire and author of The Year of Living Biblically, Roose’s plan was to learn about the people and culture…
Accreditation: Please Pay Attention! Please. . . .
Ask anyone whose career is not within higher education about accreditation and you will get a blank stare. “It has something to do with quality, right?” is about the best response one can hope for. Public indifference notwithstanding, accreditation is fiercely debated in policy circles. Institutions of higher education spends millions of hours on it. Accreditation…
Retaking the Rudder: An Aspiring Adult’s Chase for Zeroes
Laura Newland is a 2010 alumna of Duke University. In her senior year, she started writing about her experiences seeking Wall Street internships. Shortly after graduation and finding a job outside of finance, she finished the ambitiously titled Chasing Zeroes: The Rise of Student Debt, the Fall of the College Ideal, and One Overachiever’s Misguided…