Everybody's Business

Latino schooling in the U.S. has historically been characterized by high dropout rates and low college completion rates1. According to a national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents cut their education short because of the need to support a family.  read more »

A recent Inside Higher Ed article discusses a new trend in learning—SpacedEd.com—which involves interaction via email and RSS feed.  The research behind SpacedEd, developed by B. Price Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, indicates that students were able to boost their knowledge based on the frequency they encountered the information.

Open source note sharing programs continue to grow in popularity for college courses.  Starting with MIT's OpenCourseWare in 2001, it continues to gain momentun, despite the controversy surrounding it. 

Inside Higher Ed article, Taking Notes Beyond the Classroom, talks about the "questionable factuality,"  the blurred lines between cheating vs.
sharing, and the rights of professors' intellectual property.  read more »

Inside Higher Ed article, Cut Student Services? Think Again, talks about the forthcoming research by Cornell University student, Douglas Webber, and the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, Ronald Ehrenberg, which shows that "graduation and persistence rates are linked to greater expenditures on student services," more so than expenditures on instructional or research.    read more »

As college costs rise, more college students are forced to work now than ever before. Although it is assumed that working more hours gives students less time to study and therefore, gives the students a disadvantage, here are two conflicting studies of this argument.  read more »

A plan to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is on the verge of being revealed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  They are taking three main steps to see this plan into fruition:  read more »

It is more than simply posting the price of tuition and a meal plan to their website.  Colleges all over the nation need to start thinking about the actual cost to attend their institution.  A recent federal requirement mandates that within two years all institutions need to post the net price of attending their school to their website.  read more »

On April 7th, Roseanne Bensley and Eileen Winfree presented a webinar entitlted "Career Exploration and Planning". They presented a plethora of information and tips for helping students find the right career for them.Included was a Question and Answer session.

You can watch the recorded Webinar here.

President Obama continues to respond to questions regarding his goal of "putting the United States atop all countries in college-completion rates by 2020."  As part of this goal, he wants every American to have a year or more of education and reward both 2-year and 4-year colleges that keep the students' cost as low as possible.

To read more, click here.    

The director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, Cole W. Camplese, says that by allowing and encouraging his students to 'tweet' during class adds an "additional layer of communication...[which hopefully] will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls."   read more »