“In most states it is difficult or impossible to calculate accurate graduation rates, track student flows from K-12 education into higher education or from higher education into the workforce, determine the relationship between spending and results, or say anything at all about what students are learning in postsecondary education.” (Lumina Foundation, 2009, p. 5)

 Click here to read the full report 

Lumina Foundation (2009). A stronger nation through higher education: How and why Americans must meet a ‘big goal’ for college attainment. Retrieved from http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/A_stronger_nation_through_higher_education.pdf

I came across an interesting article authored by Daniel Willingham entitled “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?”

This was published in the Summer 2007 edition of American Educator. Here is an excerpt: “Following the release of A Nation at Risk, programs designed to teach students to think critically across the curriculum became extremely popular. By 1990, most states had initiatives designed to encourage educators to teach critical thinking, and one of the most widely used programs, Tactics for Thinking, sold 70,000 teacher guides. But for reasons I’ll explain, the programs were not very effective – and today we still lament students’ lack of critical thinking. After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught?”

Click here to read the full article in PDF format.

A Teaching Experiment Shows Students How to Grasp Big Concepts

See the 11.15.09 Chronicle of Higher Education article by David Glenn.

Here’s an excerpt:

Several years ago, a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.

Their course reinventions are now drawing attention from scholars around the world, and from disciplines far afield from history. Every area of study, the Indiana scholars say, has its own distinctive bottleneck—concepts or tasks that many students never quite grasp. Biology students, for example, have trouble developing accurate mental images of molecules. Many professors are so familiar with these bottleneck concepts that they find them difficult to explain.

 For the past five years, I’ve been advising college students in the areas of career management and employability. Sometimes my role is as a counselor – to establish a connection with a student and an atmosphere of trust, and to listen not only to the presenting issue but to the underlying concerns. My style is very person-centered and I try to let my students (my clients) generate their own solutions and “next-steps” to achieve their goals, while also giving them a reality-check on the current job market.  In all of my meetings with clients, I emphasize the ways they will be evaluated as they embark on their job search. In every session, I try to incorporate a discussion of employability skills – those skills needed for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. Dr. Randall Hansen has outlined these skills nicely on his website, Quintessential Careers.

 Employability skills, by my definition, are distinct from occupational or technical skills. They are not job-specific or industry-specific, and  can generally be divided into three categories: (1) basic academic skills, (2) higher-order thinking skills, and (3) personal qualities. It is these higher-order thinking skills which intrigue me the most. How do our college graduates learn? How do they reason and make decisions? Are they critical thinkers with an ability to solve problems using logic?

 I frequently conduct practice interviews with students, using behavior-based questions such as “Tell me about a time when you used your analytical ability to solve a problem.” Too many of my students struggle to come up with an answer, and it is a cause for concern. My sentiments are shared by many corporate recruiters I have come to know over the past several years, as was emphasized during a recent focus group my team held with Fortune 500 recruiters.

 How are colleges measuring students’ ability to think critically and reason effectively? More to come….

If you have not seen this film make time to watch it. I was able to borrow a copy from my local library…. “At a time when a college education is vital to an individual’s future and our nation’s economic standing in the world, “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk,” a two-hour documentary airing on PBS, explores the simple yet significant question: What happens between admission and graduation? The answer: often not enough.  

You will hear candid insights from teachers, students, and administrators. See more about the film here. It originally aired on PBS in June 2005.

   My Job Search blog has moved to Lifetips.com

You can visit the direct link here: http://jobsearch.lifetips.com/

If you hear of the “Big Six” in Higher Ed, and don’t know what it refers to, this post is for you:

The six major presidential higher education associations in the United States:
American Association of Community Colleges (AACC)
American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)
American Council on Education (ACE)
Association of American Universities (AAU)
Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (A.P.L.U.),  
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU)

You also might be interested in this book: Lobbying for Higher Education: How Colleges and Universities Influence Federal Policy

This books discusses how the major higher education associations (above) try to influence federal policy. The author is Constance Cook. Click here to link to her Amazon.com page.

For your convenience, I’ve provided a Google Books link for you here. It gives a limited preview only.

Currently re-reading Henry Rosovsky’s book The University: An Owner’s Manual for class. This is one of the best. Even better the second time around. Click here to order it on Amazon.com

Rosovsky spent eleven years as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. His writing style is superb. He is engaging, entertaining, and insightful. And a William and Mary alumnus!

How ready are students for college? How do they choose colleges? What are students’ expectations about college? If you are curious about these areas, get to know CIRP, The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Since 1966, CIRP has collected comprehensive data on over 13 million incoming first-year students at over 1900 institutions. It can be used alone or in conjunction with the Your First College Year Survey (YFCY) and the College Senior Survey (CSS) for longitudinal assessment.

In 2009, approximately 700 institutions of higher learning participated in a survey conducted from March through October. Over 400,000 students answer questions related to parental income and education, ethnicity, secondary school achievement and activities, educational and career plans, values, attitudes, beliefs, and self-concept.

Key sections include:

• Established behaviors in high school
• Academic preparedness
• Admissions decisions
• Expectations of college
• Interactions with peers and faculty
• Student values and goals
• Student demographic characteristics
• Concerns about financing college

Participating institutions receive a comprehensive report on their incoming class and national normative data for their type of institution. Information can be used in a variety of areas, including: admissions and recruitment, academic program development, retention, public relations, development, academic program development, and longitudinal research.

c.1378, from O.Fr. (Old French) collége, from L. (Latin) collegium “community, society, guild,” lit. “association of collegae” (see colleague). First meaning any corporate group, the sense of “academic institution” became principal in 19c. through Oxford and Cambridge, where it had been used since 1379. Collegiate is 1514, from M.L. collegiatus “of or having to do with a college.”

See more using the Online Etymology Dictionary at http://www.etymonline.com/

From Wikipedia:  (Latin: collegium) is a term most often used today to denote degree awarding tertiary educational institution. More broadly, it can be the name of any group of colleagues, for example, an electoral college, a College of Arms or the College of Cardinals. Originally, it meant a group of persons living together, under a common set of rules (con- = “together” + leg- = “law” or lego = “I choose”); indeed, some colleges call their members “fellows“. The precise usage of the term varies among the English-speaking countries. In the United States and Ireland, for example, the terms “college” and “university” may be regarded as loosely interchangeable, whereas in the United Kingdom, Australia and other Commonwealth countries, a “college” is usually an institution between school and university level (although constituent schools within universities are also known as “colleges”).