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Even though the 2012 NAICU Annual Meeting is history, you can continue to benefit and learn from the many presentations and speeches that were offered, and are now available on line.
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Higher Education Reform/Innovation
American Colleges' Missteps Raise Questions About Overseas Partnerships
Chronicle of Higher Education
February 19, 2012Headlines in recent weeks have highlighted the stumbles, and sometimes outright spills, by American colleges seeking to set up degree programs with foreign partners. Taken together, these incidents have renewed concerns about whether, in embarking on ambitious international ventures, American colleges are putting themselves at risk, legally, financially, and reputationally. In their quest for global prestige and, often, dollars, are they rushing abroad without doing their homework?
Harvard challenges students to think big
Boston Globe
February 16, 2012Harvard University's president, Drew Faust, is posing a $100,000 challenge to students, asking them to find ways to solve big global problems. Enterprising undergraduate and graduate Harvard students who are interested in social issues will be eligible for the President's Challenge , a contest to create entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges, the university said yesterday. Harvard joins other universities and colleges that run competitions to promote entrepreneurial enterprise. The President's Challenge is Faust's first effort to create a social entrepreneurship competition at Harvard focused solely on student work.
Colleges looking beyond the lecture
Washington Post
February 16, 2012Lecture classrooms are the big-box retailers of academia, paragons of efficiency. But higher-education leaders increasingly blame the format for high attrition in science and math classes. They say the lecture is a turn-off, higher education at its most passive, leading to frustration and bad grades in highly challenging disciplines. One goal of the reform movement is to break up vast classrooms. But just as important, experts say, is to rethink the way large classes are taught: to improve, if not replace, the lecture model.
Business Leaders See Higher Education as Hampering Economic Growth
Chronicle of Higher Education
February 14, 2012The rising cost of higher education, its indifferent quality, its resistance to change, and its lack of accountability are endangering the nation's prospects for future economic growth, according to a report on the views of business executives that was released today by Public Agenda and the Committee for Economic Development. The report, which draws on focus groups last year with 27 executives in Ohio and Texas, and on telephone interviews with 12 others, echoes the concerns that business leaders have expressed in two other recent reports that cover similar terrain.
MIT Begins Offering Free Online Course With Certificate
Bloomberg News
February 13, 2012Massachusetts Institute of Technology will begin enrollment today for the first course in its enhanced online platform, where students around the world can take classes and get a certificate upon completion. For the past 10 years, MIT has provided documents and lecture notes online for more than 2,000 courses through its OpenCourseWare program to more than 100 million people. Through its new MITx initiative, non-MIT students will, for the first time, have their performance assessed and receive certificates if they show mastery in the subject, the school said.
Higher education redesign needed to boost the economy
University World News, U.K. - Opinion Piece
February 12, 2012Today the US has dropped all the way to 15th in the college attainment level of young adults, based on OECD data. Clearly, the only path out of this deep hole is through a redesign of the higher education system, with a dual focus on increasing capacity while maintaining or improving quality. Part of the solution lies in performance-based funding that rewards institutions not for the number of students they enrol, but for how many of their students succeed. The US must also shift away from a higher education system based on time (the foundation for how credits are awarded) to one based on learning.
Antioch College's free tuition offer attracts 2,500
Dayton, Ohio, Daily News
February 12, 2012Antioch College's offer for free tuition has drawn national attention and enough interest in one day to temporarily crash the school's website. The newly independent college expects to have about 2,500 completed applications for next year's class of 75 by the time the Feb. 15 deadline to apply hits. All those granted admission will get free tuition. But all the publicity has spread some misconceptions about what the college is trying to achieve, said President Mark Roosevelt. "It really is a fellowship," Roosevelt said. "The conditions for receiving it are not only academic capacity, but dedication to see it through."
Why not a right to a college education?
CNN.com "Schools of Thought" Blog - Opinion Piece
February 8, 2012For me, politics is about pushing the borders to create space for even more change in the future. What if, instead of proposing policies geared towards individual middle-class tax-payers that revolved around the assumption that higher education was an individual's responsibility, the president instead proposed policies geared towards embedding higher education as an individual right. What if, instead of getting a tax write-off after you've already paid your son/daughter's tuition, you instead didn't have to worry about education because the government would pay for it?
UC Students Propose Alternative To Tuition Increases
NPR - Morning Edition
February 7, 2012Under the Fix UC proposal, students would pay 5 percent of their income for 20 years following graduation. Fix UC recently presented the idea to the university regents. The idea is that students would have a dependable bill to pay, rather than wrestling with unpredictable tuition increases and rising debt. It's an appealing idea to some, but not a brand new one. Bob Shireman of the nonprofit group California Competes says conservative economist Milton Friedman wrote about similar concepts in the 1950s, saying education should be seen as an investment.
MIT’s New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model, Program’s Leader Says
Chronicle of Higher Education - Interview
February 6, 2012The recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT's new service will work, and what it means for traditional college programs. On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those questions to two leaders of the new project.
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