Soon children everywhere will be saying goodbye to their parents and to their communities and the times and the places that made them into the adults they’re on their way to becoming in college. Dr. Susan Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, UT, wrote a book called “Homesickness: An American History.”
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It’s a company with a loyal following to rival almost any brand, and everyone in college admissions is buying it. Slate is the technology of choice that admissions offices use to read applications and manage every interaction that students make with that office, from mailing list subscription to every click on an email to admission notification.

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Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez visited the island of Puerto Rico to see how people were recovering at its most important institution of higher education, the University of Puerto Rico.

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Maria MaistoMaria Maisto is the Executive Director of the New Faculty Majority, an organization fighting to improve working conditions for adjunct and contingent faculty at American institutions of higher ed. The name grew out of the reality that only in recent history has higher ed leaned on adjuncts to the degree that they comprise 75% of the teaching workforce.

They’re members of the “faculty,” at 75% of the teaching labor force in higher education they are the “majority,” and it’s “new” because a combination of factors have only recently made them the unstable majority of the teaching workforce.  Continue reading

genevieve-bell
As a full-time anthropologist at Intel (recruited at a bar in Palo Alto off the faculty at Stanford), Genevieve Bell has a job that makes a lot of us go, “Wow…what’s that?” She sits at the intersection between anthropology and computer science, and as such, a big part of what she does is to help her company  – and by extension us – understand the future to come, and our place as humans in an increasingly technological and data-driven world.  Continue reading

The weirdness created by a lack of obvious, consistent formula determining who gets into selective colleges makes it feel super secretive. Stephanie Shyu and her colleagues at AdmitSee think they’ve come up with a tool that can help cut through some of the static, and it’s rankling some folks in the college counseling world. Continue reading

 

BillDeresciewicz

So what’s the point of college? Bill Deresiewicz wrote the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” which I’ve come to regard as one of the most important books about college available today. The nature of going to college has changed dramatically from its early inception, and economic forces have shifted the conversation away from developing people into better human beings and citizens, to one based on “return on investment.” What’s the point of going to college, anyways? Bill Deriesewicz has some compelling ideas. WARNING: The F-word gets said one time. By me. Sorry.  Continue reading