Many of California’s community colleges are planning to expand their course offerings this summer, according to a news release from the office of the system’s chancellor—a positive trend after years of budget cuts that forced campuses to scale back or even eliminate their summer sessions. The chancellor’s office polled the 112 colleges in the system … Continue reading »
Filed under Community College …
Time Has Come To Measure Quality In New and Different Ways
Access to higher education is increasingly seen as a right. Yet while 90 million adults are without a degree, and our standard of living is falling, barriers are being erected which impede access. The largest obstacle is cost. Four years of tuition can exceed the price of a new home in 2003 ($207,000). Simultaneously, state … Continue reading »
Child Care and STEM Fields Are Called Barriers to Women at 2-Year Colleges
The shortage of affordable child care and the gender stereotypes that discourage women from pursuing careers in mathematics and science are two of the biggest barriers holding women back in community colleges, according to a report released on Thursday by the American Association of University Women. The report, “Women in Community Colleges: Access to Success,” … Continue reading »
Colleges Turn to Technology To Foresee Workforce Needs
A handful of colleges think they’ve found the secret to closing the gap between the types of graduates they’re turning out and the types employers say they need. Spiders. Not the hairy, creepy kind. The colleges are using artificial-intelligence spiders that crawl through search engines and read thousands of online “help wanted” ads to check … Continue reading »
Addressing Workforce Challenges
Everyone wants to be innovative, though few people actually achieve innovation. Frankly, in today’s world of higher education, few institutions are capable of flexibility, much less innovation. The juxtaposition is that our “customers” — the companies which hire our students — are constantly innovating. That is particularly true for companies involved in manufacturing, in which … Continue reading »
Weaving Adjunct Faculty into the 21st Century Community College
While attending the League for Innovations 2013 conference in Dallas, I was chatting with a colleague about collaborative and active learning and the new language of flipped classrooms (i.e., technology-delivered content outside of class time to maximize student engagement with the material, faculty and other students during face-to-face sessions). We were reminiscing about conversations in … Continue reading »
Community-College Accountability Measure Still Holds Policy-Making Potential
A tool being developed “by community colleges, for community colleges” to measure their effectiveness is still not ready, but its proponents hope wider adoption through its testing phase will give it influence in policy making. The sector decries existing metrics, particularly the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as Ipeds, for making community colleges … Continue reading »
Does College Pay? Site Shows Risks, Rewards
Whether college pays — in dollars — depends on where you go and what you study. College Risk Report, a web site created by 29-year-old Jared Moore, asks the collegebound to enter their prospective college or university and their major. It estimates how long it would take to pay off a bachelor’s degree and compares that … Continue reading »
Obama’s Budget Would Increase Pell Grants and Add Incentives on Some Student-Aid Money
In his long-awaited budget for the 2014 fiscal year, released on Wednesday, President Obama asks Congress to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $140, to $5,785, and spend $8-billion on job-training programs at community colleges. The spending plan, which comes roughly three weeks after the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed budgets outlining their … Continue reading »
Better Alumni Outreach Could Help 2-Year Colleges
Four-year colleges have long made a high priority of maintaining relationships with their alumni, who offer a durable source of support for their alma maters. That hasn’t been as much the case at two-year colleges, where even what constitutes an alumnus—someone who earned an associate degree? a guy who took a class once?—varies from institution … Continue reading »
