Living the dream
Students' expectations of college life are formed long before they arrive, but blaming them for a lack of realism isn't the answer. Hannah Fearn reports
Tory promise: more students, more freedom
Shadow Minister says he wants a bold new direction for higher education
Students more satisfied than ever before
Most are happy with teaching, but assessment is still a concern
RAE table will be shaken by use of journal rankings
Panel member says leaders who chose entries on impact factor may be surprised
‘MTV generation learns through fun’
Dull teaching styles risk losing students to online education, US innovator warns
Noddy management
Treat your staff to lashings of 1940s-style good sense and you jolly well won’t go far wrong, advises Enid Blyton devotee Sally Feldman
Grand masters of vinyl
Prog rock devotee Greg Walker takes an affecionate look at an intelligent and gloriously ambitious genre, and asks us to celebrate the era when rock’s dinosaurs roamed the Earth
Book of the week
Tara Brabazon acclaims a monograph of merit: Wendy Griswold’s Regionalism and the Reading Class
A Community College Divided
At Thomas Nelson, a president who outraged faculty elsewhere runs into trouble again — and leaves an institution split over priorities, race and right to dissent. more
In New Orleans, Move-In Day (Again)
As students return to Loyola U. campus after pre-hurricane evacuation, the campus is neat and the mood upbeat, but storm clouds loom (literally). more
Print Journalism Squeeze Hits Campuses
As newspapers across the country face declining revenues, student publications are feeling the brunt, too. more
Different Measures of Community College Outcomes
Six states test new set of performance measures in response to the limitations of the federal graduation rate formula.
EUROPE: Impact of sharp population decline Keith Nuthall
European academics are preparing to gather at a high-level conference to discuss the problems caused to higher education by a sharp decline in the European population. The debates at the European University Association conference come as the latest figures from the European Union statistical agency Eurostat confirm the number of young people in European countries is already shrinking and will get smaller
GLOBAL: Higher education expanding rapidly Diane Spencer
The higher education sector has expanded rapidly worldwide over the past decade, says the latest annual report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Education at a Glance 2008 shows that 37% of school-leavers went to university in 1995 whereas 57% on average now do in the 30 member countries of the OECD. In Australia, Finland, Iceland, Poland and Sweden, three out of four school-leavers go on to a degree course. The 500-page report also shows that public expenditure on higher education has increased but that private investment has risen even more.
GLOBAL: North America far ahead in new rankings Rebecca Warden
North American universities are the clear winners in the latest edition of of The Web Ranking of World Universities, published by the Spanish National Research Council or CSIC's Cybermetrics Lab. The council has US and Canadian universities between them accounting for 123 of the world's top 200 universities. Europe comes in a very poor second with 61 universities while the Asia-Pacific region manages a total of 14. The league table, produced twice yearly since 2004, ranks institutions according to the size and quality of their presence on the internet and its wider impact.
CANADA: Tuition-fee patchwork siphons students Philip Fine
Hundreds of bargain-hunting Canadian students have moved to Newfoundland and Labrador, a province with the lowest tuition fees in the country. The recent student migration is one of the strange things to emerge in a country where individual provincial governments fund university operations, while the federal government is relegated to observing the wild patchwork of varying fees.
UK: Students underestimate debts Diane Spencer
As the British university term is about to begin, new students are being warned not to underestimate how much they are likely to be in debt by the end of their courses. A survey from the National Union of Students reveals that prospective university students are underestimating the basic costs of living such as groceries, household bills and travel by nearly £450 (US$822) a year.
GERMANY: Studying too expensive Mike Gardner
Yet another damning report has been released on social background and studying in Germany. This time the Deutsches Studentenwerk or DSW, the country's student welfare organisation, has drawn attention to the fact that more and more school-leavers in Germany are choosing not to study owing to difficult financial hurdles. Even among the group with top marks in the Abitur higher education admission certificate, parents' income is clearly a decisive factor in career planning.
GERMANY: OECD statistics cause for concern Michael Gardner
German first-year student numbers appear to be stagnating, according to OECD statistics. The country is also performing poorly in terms of graduation figures, says the organisation's Education at a Glance 2008 report released last week. President of the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (HRK - the conference of higher education heads in Germany), Professor Margret Wintermantel, is worried that Germany is increasingly lagging behind other countries and has called for more funding for higher education.
SOUTH KOREA: KAIST conference attracts leading researchers Douglas Rogers*
The big-budget conference circuit with high-profile international speakers hits Korea in October. This year, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), in Daejon, has got in early with a series of activities straddling the weekend, reflecting the dynamic leadership of the President, Dr Suh Nam-Pyo.
Universities Looking More Like Corporate Research Labs steven bell
University “tech transfer” offices have boomed from a couple dozen before the law’s passage to nearly 300 today. University patents have leapt a hundredfold. Professors are stepping away from the lab and lecture hall to navigate the thicket of venture capital, business regulations and commercial competition. None of these are necessarily negative outcomes. The primary concern is that its original intent — to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation — has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities.
Green Buildings And Alternative Energy Will Be Sprouting On Campus steven bell Five years ago, green residence halls or organic dining would have seemed like cutting edge improvements of a campus’ environmental impact, but no longer. The U.S. Green Building Council says 250 campus buildings have received its stamp of approval, a LEED certification, and another 1600 are on the way. Wind and solar power generation is taking off; even high-tech projects like greywater reuse are finding a home on some campuses. As everything from printing labs to public transport gets a greener lift, here are nine projects that stand out.
Studying Student Shopping Behavior...For Their Courses steven bell Most colleges and universities have fairly lenient drop/add policies. Students can drop a course well into the semester, and courses can be added during a short time window at the beginning of the semester or term. During that course add period, some students do course shopping. They sign up for a course, attend the first couple of sessions, then drop the course and replace it with another course. Some students course shop regularly and extensively. Researchers studied course shopping in urban community colleges—nine Los Angeles community college campuses, to be specific. They used data collected as part of a larger study of transfer and retention issues in urban community colleges. The researchers offer a variety of suggestions that might help students make those wise first choices.
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