The College Board is defending its approach to Advanced Placement psychology, including teaching about gay issues, to Florida officials.
The Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation has requested that the College Board audit and potentially modify AP courses relative to the new Florida laws that restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The College Board released a letter Thursday that it sent to Florida:
“[College Board] will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics. Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline.The learning objective within AP Psychology that covers gender and sexual orientation has specifically been raised by some Florida districts relative to these recent regulations. That learning objective must remain a required topic, just as it has been in Florida for many years. As with all AP courses, required topics must be included for a course to be designated as AP.”
“Understanding human sexuality is fundamental to psychology, and an Advanced Placement course that excludes the decades of science studying sexual orientation and gender identity would deprive students of knowledge they will need to succeed in their studies, in high school and beyond,” said Arthur C. Evans Jr., the organization’s CEO. “We applaud the College Board for standing up to the state of Florida and its unconscionable demand to censor an educational curriculum and test that were designed by college faculty and experienced AP teachers who ensure that the course and exam reflect the state of the science and college-level expectations.”
Average annual spending on college course materials fell to a decade low of $285 in the 2022–23 academic year, Student Watch found, according to a press release from the Association of American Publishers.
That marks a 57 percent decline since 2012–13.
“We’ve noticed a really consistent decrease in student course material spending over time,” said Lacey Wallace, research analyst for the National Association of College Stores, which produced the Student Watch report. “As the space shifts to digital, costs do decrease. A lot of inclusive-access programs are digital first.”
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Inclusive access is a course material model designed to deliver to students all relevant course resources—including textbooks and digital materials—at the lowest market rate by the first day of classes.
The AAP cited a similar report from Student Monitor in May, which found that average student spending on course materials had dropped to $333—a 41 percent decrease from a decade ago.
House Republicans’ latest plan to improve the student loan system focuses on helping defaulted borrowers get back on track and adjusting income-driven repayment plans.
North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the Republican who chairs the House education committee, sponsored the Federal Assistance to Initiate Repayment (FAIR) Act along with Utah representative Burgess Owens and Michigan representative Lisa McClain, both Republicans.
The act would create one income-driven repayment plan, prevent excessive interest from accruing for distressed borrowers, end time-based forgiveness, require the department to provide more guidance to loan servicers and allow borrowers in default to enroll in an affordable repayment plan, according to a fact sheet.
“The FAIR Act is a fiscally responsible, targeted response to the chaos caused by Biden’s student loan scam,” Foxx and the other co-sponsors said in a joint statement. “This Republican solution takes important steps to fix the broken student loan system, provide borrowers with clear guidance on repayment, and protect taxpayers from the economic fallout caused by the administration’s radical free college agenda.”
The FAIR Act is the latest proposal from congressional Republicans aimed at showing a different path forward to address the student debt crisis. Senate Republicans introduced their proposal earlier this week.
“The president’s radical guidance and reckless executive orders have left schools, servicers, and students uncertain about the future,” the joint statement says. “The pandemic is over, and borrowers need concrete guidance on a pathway forward to repayment.”
In fall 2012, Unity College had fewer than 600 students. Now, a decade and a name change later, Unity Environmental University counts more than 7,500 students. Administrators attribute the explosive enrollment growth to a hard online pivot centered on high-demand environmental programs.
Unity began rethinking its offerings in 2012, leading to the launch of its first fully online program in 2016. Since then, the college has welcomed a larger class each year, with an estimated 95 percent of students taking courses online.
The Pivot
Unity’s online expansion began in 2016, with a master’s of professional science in sustainable natural resource management and sustainability science. Twenty students enrolled and completed their coursework entirely online. The college later added additional master’s programs and undergraduate programs with a focus on the environment.
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In 2018, a couple of years into its experiment, Unity had 71 online students and around 700 on campus. But since then, Unity’s enrollment has spiked, which President Melik Peter Khoury attributes to growing interest in its environmental programs at a time when “the climate crisis continues to accelerate,” he said.
Unity first began exploring online programs back in 2012, when officials took a hard look at the college’s offerings. The review forced them to rethink the institution’s organizational structure, course delivery, tuition costs and academic calendar.
“What we realized is our mission as an environmental institution and our curriculum was very relevant for the 21st century, but we really only served one audience well, which was residential, coming-of-age high school graduates in a very traditional approach,” Khoury said.
Administrators soon recognized there were many students who were place-bound or had time constraints, including adult learners unable to attend due to distance or the demands of work and family. While interest in environmental studies was growing, such programs were often inaccessible to far-flung students outside central Maine, where the college was founded in 1965 as the Unity Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Thirty-nine students enrolled in its first class.
In 2017—between Unity’s launch of online graduate programs and its expansion into online undergraduate offerings—the college restructured its organizational and financial model to introduce what it calls Sustainable Education Business Units—“SEBU” for short. So far, four such units have been established: one for purely online programs, one for hybrid learning and one focused on generating auxiliary revenues; the fourth SEBU is the Technical Institute for Environmental Professions, which adopts the community college model to offer associate degrees and certificates. It will deliver a mix of online and in-person programs when it opens this fall.
Unity’s website notes that its four SEBUs “utilize centralized shared services but operate independently from one another,” allowing them greater flexibility to adapt to immediate needs.
The college also invested $3 million in hardware and software to launch online programs. Faculty members were crucial in developing online classes and allowing Unity to keep instructional design in-house rather than tapping an online program manager, which would eat into revenues.
“Everything we have done we have done with our own faculty and staff,” Khoury said.
And as enrollment has grown, so, too, have investments in staff and faculty to build online capacity. But that growth has come with some points of tension—including when the college laid off about 30 percent of staff after if went fully online during the coronavirus pandemic, which officials said caused a revenue shortfall of around $12 million or more.
At the time of those layoffs in 2020, Khoury argued that breaking free from a fixed campus was exactly the “type of innovation needed to succeed in today’s economic and educational environment.” By doing so, Unity was better able to meet students “where they are,” he said. College officials envisioned a future untethered from a campus-based instructional model.
Since then, Unity has pressed hard into the online world, even with a curriculum focused on environmental topics. Khoury said Unity has partnered with local zoos, aquariums and national parks to help deliver hands-on course content to students across the U.S. Many of those students are already in the workforce; the average age of Unity’s online students hovers around 29.
College officials have also focused on increasing accessibility, flexibility and affordability.
Beyond launching a variety of online programs, the college has slashed undergraduate tuition from an average of $28,000 in 2018 to $13,000 today. Unity has also ditched the semester model, repackaging courses into eight five-week terms at the bachelor’s level and five eight-week terms for master’s students. Unity will also be experimenting with two-week terms when it welcomes the first cohort to its new Technical Institute for Environmental Professions SEBU.
An Uncommon Success Story
Online education experts say Unity’s enrollment boom is a rarity in a crowded online marketplace where many colleges play but few emerge as big-time winners. They note that it’s hard to stand out in a sector dominated by a handful of big institutions, including the University of Phoenix, Southern New Hampshire University, Liberty University and Arizona State University.
“I think there’s a tendency to underestimate the competitiveness of the market,” said Megan Adams, managing director of strategic advisory services at the consulting firm EAB. She added that many colleges also underestimate the infrastructure and expertise needed to compete in the digital realm, which can make it difficult for them to succeed.
Then there are the up-front costs.
“It’s not inexpensive to launch online programs, and it can take a while to break even,” she said.
Sean Gallagher, executive director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University, noted that online enrollment is booming—as is competition among the institutions that cater to it.
“Generally speaking, online continues to outpace the in-person enrollment trend. But what’s changed, especially in the last few years, is that it’s much more competitive,” Gallagher said.
Finding a niche can be especially helpful to such institutions since the national reach of online programs lends itself to expansion opportunities. In Unity’s case, that niche is environmental programs, which Gallagher noted the college has done a good job of promoting nationally.
Unity’s hard online pivot comes as numerous small, private colleges across the U.S. are struggling. Looking at Unity’s neighbors in the Northeast—which have traditionally focused on residential experiences, as Unity previously did—many colleges have closed due to declining enrollment. And amid difficult economic headwinds, experts expect more colleges to close in the future.
Khoury doesn’t believe that Unity’s online pivot has saved it from succumbing to such a fate, but he suspects that if it hadn’t made the shift, it would—like many of its neighbors—be struggling to make ends meet.
“I think that we would have been like every other struggling college looking to make cuts to survive, dipping into our endowment and asking people to do more with less,” Khoury said.
He added that Unity wasn’t at the point where it was overleveraged or facing a structural deficit. Oftentimes, he argued, colleges wait until it’s too late to make major changes. And if there’s a lesson to be learned from Unity’s success, he suggested that it’s thinking ahead before times are dire and not waiting for a financial crisis to compel a change of course.
“I think many leaders wait until there is an exigency before they start to make these changes,” he said.
But the fact that his “frequent efforts to connect with the full-timers” were a “waste of time” invites a question.
Why are tenured professors, a famously liberal group, complicit in this injustice in their own institutions, where action on their part could make a real difference? The professor described below, although partly made up, illustrates the problem.
His conscience has lately arisen To make him teach people in prison. He still snubs the adjuncts who seek to advance. The wrong kinds of underdogs don’t rate his glance.
–Felicia Nimue Ackerman Professor of Philosophy Brown University
Teaching professor of engineering Justin Shaffer seriously misleads readers with his question, his source, his logic, and his arithmetic in his June 7 essay “How Much Do Students Pay to Attend Your Class?” Over all, he actively trivializes teaching while succumbing to a fallacious context free fall into simplistic economics.
First, the effort itself to calculate the cost of minutes (3 minutes in his introduction) debases teaching and learning themselves.
Second, he seems unaware that U.S. News and World Report is the least reliable of all sources about colleges and universities. All data is self-reported, unchecked by any outside parties. This is why knowledgeable people turn to Times Higher Education, Washington Monthly, and now DegreeChoices for more reliable, comparable data.
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Third, it is also well-known (and publicized in Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere) that all reported “costs” not only vary from institution to institution but include all matters of fees that have no relation to the actual costs for time spent in either in-person, online, or hybrid instruction.
Thus, the exercise is not only misguided but fallacious.
But why, at a time of an incoherent wave of “skepticism” about the “value” of college education, would any educator wish to calculate what amounts to a misleading and in fact counter-productive “cost per minute” of something or other? I do not understand that. Is that the engineering teaching professors understanding of “catalyzing” instructors and students?
Relatedly, in his June 9 “Higher Ed Gamma” blog post, Steven Mintz errs first in referring to lack of knowledge about higher education as “illiteracy” and misunderstanding early American colleges as places for the sons of the wealthy. They were primary vocational schools for future clergy and a much smaller number of administrators. More than a few studies are accurately titled “paupers and scholars.”
–Harvey J. Graff Professor Emeritus of English and History Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Academy Professor Ohio State University
This month’s episode of the Pulse podcast features an interview with Darren Catalano, CEO of HelioCampus, a data analytics provider. In this conversation with Rodney B. Murray, host of The Pulse, Catalano discusses how the company’s tools help institutions make decisions, assess their performance and serve students.
Columbia University is dropping out of the undergraduate rankings of U.S. News & World Report.
The university’s law and medical schools earlier announced that they would not participate, but the undergraduate rankings get more attention.
A statement noted that much of the information conveyed in the rankings may be found in the university’s Common Data Sets, which the university just released for this year.
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“We remain concerned with the role that rankings have assumed in the undergraduate application process, both in the outsized influence they may play with prospective students, and in how they distill a university’s profile into a composite of data categories. Much is lost in this approach. The combined population of our three schools, along with the presence of students from affiliate institutions, in classrooms and across many aspects of student life, is intrinsic to the undergraduate experience at Columbia. We are convinced that synthesizing data into a single U.S. News submission for its Best Colleges rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional,” said a letter from Mary C. Boyce, the provost.
The Juilliard School fired a professor after it found “credible evidence” that he had “engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” according to a letter sent to students and faculty members, The New York Timesreported.
The professor was Robert Beaser, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018. The letter said he had behaved in a manner that was “inconsistent with Juilliard’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students.” Juilliard did not provide details but said the investigation had found evidence of a past “unreported relationship” and that Beaser had “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.”
The concerns involved incidents from the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
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The investigation started after VAN Magazine reported in December that students said he had sexually harassed them.
Richard C. Schoenstein, a lawyer for Beaser, said the relationship in question took place 30 years ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the school’s findings “unspecific and unattributed” and said that Beaser would “pursue his legal rights in full.”
“Dr. Beaser is shocked and dismayed by Juilliard’s conclusions and actions,” Schoenstein said.
Telecounseling for college students isn’t going anywhere. That’s one takeaway from a new report on critical considerations for partnering with teletherapy vendors from the American Council on Education, says co-author Nance Roy.
“The current landscape suggests that teletherapy is here to stay and can be a useful and effective offering for colleges to consider,” says Roy, chief clinical officer at the Jed Foundation and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University.
While traditional in-person, group and individual therapy remain “excellent treatment choices,” she adds, teletherapy can provide services and support to those “who may never access in-person counseling or are more comfortable with a digital option.” Offering a variety of treatment options can allow colleges and universities to reach “the largest share of students and best support their mental health.”
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Virtual counseling by on-campus providers became commonplace during the pandemic, as did partnerships with third-party teletherapy vendors. But even as pandemic mitigation efforts have relaxed, campus-based providers continue to offer students telecounseling in some cases. And as the collegiate mental health crisis grows, more institutions are partnering with vendors to boost counseling capacity and offerings.
How do students rate telecounseling options on their campuses, from either campus-based or third-party counselors? New data from the recent Student Voice survey on health and wellness provide insight.
Some background: the survey, conducted by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse in April and May, asked 3,000 two- and four-year college students at 158 institutions about their own health and wellness and about related campus services.
Of those 3,000 respondents:
1,110 have used any of a series of mental health offerings provided by their institutions.
350 students have used telecounseling provided by their college, with half of those also having used on-campus counseling.
172 have used telecounseling provided by their college but not on-campus counseling.
Among the 172 students who’ve used telecounseling but not on-campus counseling, nearly half approve of the quality of care they received and of appointment availability. About a quarter say that follow-up care went well. Same for “ability to schedule with a counselor I could relate to.”
The survey also asked about what could be better. Not quite half of these students say that quality of care needs improvement. Over three in 10 say that follow-up care, appointment availability and ability to schedule with a counselor they could relate to all need improvement.
For some additional context and comparison, 734 students in the survey have used on-campus counseling. Some 555 of those students haven’t used telecounseling. These 555 students have higher approval rates than the telecounseling-only group for appointment availability (55 percent) and comparable approval rates for quality of care, follow-up care and ability to schedule with a counselor to whom they could relate.
As for what needs work, relatively more telecounseling group students than on-campus counseling group students cite quality of care (43 percent versus 29 percent, respectively). The on-campus counseling group students also are slightly more likely to say that nothing needs improvement.
The data come with some caveats, including that COVID-19 may have inflated the overall share of students in the survey who’ve experienced telecounseling (12 percent) relative to students who’ve experienced on-campus counseling (24 percent). That’s because telecounseling was the main method of campus-based counseling early in the pandemic.
Still, 7 percent of freshman survey respondents say they’ve experienced telecounseling arranged through their institutions, as do 12 percent of sophomores. This means that students who weren’t necessarily enrolled in college at the height of the pandemic approach or match the overall telecounseling rate. (According to the most recent annual report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University, from 2020–21 to 2021–22, the frequency of in-person appointments increased from 2 percent to 37 percent of all engagements, while video appointments declined from 83 percent to 51 percent.)
There is no significant difference in telecounseling use rates between Student Voice survey respondents at public and private institutions or at two-year and four-year institutions. Some 16 percent of LGBTQIA+ students and 10 percent of straight students have accessed telecounseling, but relatively more LGBTQIA+ students have accessed mental health care in general at their institutions.
Marcus Hotaling, director of the Eppler-Wolff Counseling Center at Union College and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, says that the association’s own internal data suggest that students increasingly prefer in-person appointments, possibly because students already spend so much of their time on screens.
“When they can have 45 to 50 minutes where the focus is completely on them, they really want that,” he hypothesizes.
“Face-to-face can help the therapeutic relationship,” he adds.
That said, Hotaling—who has written for Inside Higher Ed about how he’s cautiously optimistic about collegiate partnerships with teletherapy companies—says he remains so today.
“There is a lot they can offer, but it has to be a relationship based on both partners being honest about what they need and want.”
Hotaling adds that he approves of ACE’s new recommended considerations for colleges weighing contracts with outside teletherapy companies. These considerations include:
Is the clinician-to-student ratio within a normal range? The International Accreditation of Counseling Services recommends that that college counseling centers have a minimum of one full-time professional for every 1,000 to 1,500 students.
Does the counseling center offer services outside of normal business hours? Student surveys can reveal whether there is demand for after-hours care.
Does the counseling center provide 24-7 on-call services for mental health crises and emergencies? It’s “imperative” that on-campus staff provide this if the outside service does not.
Is the clinical staff diverse by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Comparing student body demographics with those of the counseling center staff is a good place to start.
Does the counseling or health service offer psychiatric evaluations, prescribe psychiatric medications or offer medication management? If yes, what is the wait time for these? If psychiatric services are not available on campus, telepsychiatry can be a viable option for filling that gap.
Hotaling says he’d add just one more consideration to ACE’s list: What is vendor staff turnover like? This is certainly a concern for continuity and quality of care. Anecdotally, however, some institutions report that partnering with teletherapy actually has increased staff retention within their own campus counseling centers.
Nicole Ruzek, director of counseling and psychological serves at the University of Virginia, for instance, says that partnering with a vendor has contributed to center staff retention by relieving some pressure on providers. Ultimately, she says, the arrangement “allowed us to create more access to mental health care.”
Returning to ACE’s recommendations, Sarah Ketchen Lipson, assistant professor of health law policy and management at Boston University and principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network, says that she’s also interested in whether platforms include providers who can deliver care in languages other than English, and whether providers are trained to support LGBTQIA+ students, particularly trans and nonbinary students.
Lipson, who advocates that institutions promote mental health across campus spaces, says she’d also consider opportunities for integrating the teletherapy vendor into existing institutional resources. To what degree can services be tailored, and is data sharing possible, for example? And what is the crisis response protocol?
Roy, who wrote ACE’s report, “totally” agrees that promoting student mental health is a campuswide responsibility, even though not everyone needs clinical care.
“Everyone on campus has a role to play. Coaches, faculty, students, academic advisers—all staff—need to be educated on how to recognize when a student may be struggling, know how to reach out and offer a warm hand, and know when and where to refer to professional help if or when needed.” The goal “is to create a culture of caring and compassion on campus where there is no wrong door for a student to walk through for support.”
Eric Boynton, provost and dean at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, has been named president there.
Kristie Fisher, president of Iowa Valley Community College, has been appointed president of Kirkwood Community College, also in Iowa.
Nerita Hughes, interim associate vice president of academic affairs and workforce innovation and the dean of the School of Business, Careers, Education and Workforce Innovation at North Hennepin Community College, in Minnesota, has been chosen as president of Bay College, in Michigan.
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Vini Nathan, interim provost and vice president of academic affairs at Auburn University, in Alabama, has been appointed to the job on a permanent basis.
Diane Prusank, provost and vice president of academic affairs at Westfield State University, in Massachusetts, has been named provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
Chae E. Sweet, dean of liberal studies at the Community College of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, has been selected as vice president for academic affairs at Montgomery County Community College, also in Pennsylvania.
Ben Vinson III, provost and executive vice president at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, has been appointed president of Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Stacy H. Young, president of Montcalm Community College, in Michigan, has been selected as president of Manchester University, in Indiana.
President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a congressional resolution that would have struck down his loan-forgiveness program. The veto was expected.
The House and Senate passed the measure with overwhelming Republican support and modest Democratic support. There was not enough support for the resolutions to override Biden’s veto.
The Biden plan, currently on hold pending a Supreme Court review, would forgive $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning up to $125,000 annually, or $250,000 for married couples. Recipients of Pell Grants are eligible for $20,000 in forgiveness.
“The demand for this relief is undeniable,” President Biden said in his veto message. “In less than four weeks—during the period when the student debt relief application was available—26 million people applied or were deemed automatically eligible for relief. At least 16 million of those borrowers could have received debt relief already if it were not for meritless lawsuits waged by opponents of this program.”
He concluded the message by saying, “I remain committed to continuing to make college affordable and providing this critical relief to borrowers as they work to recover from a once-in-a-century pandemic. Therefore, I am vetoing this resolution.”
Chinese universities are instituting tuition increases of as much as 54 percent, Reuters reported.
The universities blame a financial crunch among local governments after three years of disruptive COVID-19 policies and a sluggish economy.
East China University of Science and Technology raised tuition fees by 54 percent, to 7,700 yuan ($1,082) for freshmen majoring in science, engineering and physical education, and by 30 percent in the liberal arts, according to statements issued Sunday.
On Monday, Shanghai Dianji University announced that tuition for science and engineering would increase by 40 percent, while students majoring in management, economics and literature will have to pay 30 percent more compared with a year earlier.
I have been following conversations surrounding AI generation of writing with a wait-and-see attitude since the beginning of the year but recently had cause to reconsider the urgency of the subject following an incident in one of my own classes. I agree with Ali Lincoln’s recent piece “ChatGPT: A Different Kind of Ghostwriting” that the ethics of AI text generation are gray but disagree with her premise that we currently know enough to conclude that it is a valuable tool for editing and writing—I suspect there are more questions that need to be answered first.
This past spring semester a student in one of my literature courses submitted an annotated bibliography project of six journal articles which at first glance looked like a good submission with the exception that all the article citations were missing URLs and none of them were articles I had encountered previously—and I am familiar with the topic the student was researching. After some checking I discovered that every single one of the six sources was invented and did not exist. When confronted, the student confessed to having used an AI service to create the submission. What is particularly noteworthy about this instance of AI plagiarism is that all the citations included in the submission listed the titles of real, high-quality journals that have published articles on similar topics previously and most of the names listed for the authors of these imaginary articles were the names of real literary scholars.
Following this incident, there are two questions which have stayed with me: How much of what is produced by these services is scraped from copyrighted works without acknowledgement or compensation to the authors and publishers? What happens when texts full of invented information and imaginary citations attributed to real authors and journals proliferate across the web?
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The first question is not easy for the average member of the public without AI expertise to elucidate but what I have found has serious implications for intellectual property rights. Furthermore, both questions raise the possibility we are entering a world where ownership of intellectual property rights for authors is diluted to the point of meaninglessness and the reputations of scholars and journals are degraded even further, erasing conceptions of credibility from the mind of the public. Educators who have wholeheartedly embraced AI technology in the classroom—even just for brainstorming and drafting purposes—are asking students to use technology which could possibly be stealing the ideas of others or simply inventing things wholesale.
Conversations around AI in the classroom need to be more explicit about addressing the opaque nature of technologies such as Chat GPT—particularly in the wake of the revelations of the data breach at OpenAI. Most of these AI generation services state in their terms of service that users should provide attribution to the AI for work created through the service but these services themselves do not provide clear attribution for the many sources across the web that are used to generate these texts—nor do they clearly denote invented material. My ask here is that we bring these questions to the forefront as we consider the form that responsible use of AI in college classrooms should take.
–Mary Nestor Senior Lecturer Department of English Clemson University
I think we need to start a new adage: never take teaching advice from an administrator. Whatever expertise they had in teaching has been buried under their administrative goals, and whatever humility they had as faculty about the limitations of their own understanding has disappeared now that they’ve been chosen to lead and therefore must know more than all those of us who haven’t been. Dean Darroch provides an object lesson in this in her piece on student engagement.
Darroch assumed her current position as dean in March 2020, which means she’s been in administration since the beginning of the pandemic, not in the classroom. So it’s not surprising that she doesn’t see COVID to blame for the engagement issues we’re seeing — she doesn’t understand that this isn’t some slow generational shift or the tired “digital native” trope, but rather a dramatic change from fall 2019 to fall 2021. (And it’s utter coincidence that in the intervening period we had the unprecedented social experiment of forcing everyone into online learning, or masked and distance learning, for an extended period…)
Darroch is an expert in something, but it’s not pedagogy or the cognitive science of learning, as she makes clear when she buys into the thoroughly discredited idea of learning styles. So why are we paying attention to her thoughts on teaching? (Well, in part because IHE puts bios at the ends of articles…)
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And she pushes farther than people normally do in pandering to students, going so far as to say that faculty should “Provide clear expectations as to the outcomes you expect of students but let students identify the tasks they believe are required of them to achieve those outcomes.”
This is sheer nonsense. The entire reason we employ faculty is so that they can guide students through the tasks that are required to gain knowledge and skills, because students — and I cannot stress this strongly enough — do not have the expertise to figure this out on their own. If I gave Darroch one of my student learning outcomes (say, “demonstrate understanding of angular momentum in quantum systems”) and asked her what activities would lead to that, I suspect she wouldn’t know where to start. Well, neither do my students (nor did I, as a student). I’m not paid to generate learning outcomes; I’m paid to structure and guide an entire experience that will lead to students satisfying them.
But still Darroch argues that we should “Empower students to create a learner-led, self-organized, independent learning environment.” In a very limited way this can be useful. For example, in my field of physics, there’s been a movement towards inquiry-based labs where students play a role in designing their own experiments. However, this nonetheless requires a lot of structure and guidance from the faculty member, because otherwise the students will just be lost, confused, and frustrated. No student is going to independently discover, over the course of one year, what it took the most brilliant minds in history four centuries to work out. Labs that lean too much toward structure are still somewhat effective, but labs that lean too far towards independence are a disaster.
And guess what? While inquiry-based labs have been demonstrated to be far more effective in teaching students expert attitudes towards experiment in science, students don’t believe they’re learning as much in them. Because students are not great at assessing what activities are most effective for their learning. (Witness the modern student who believes they learn very well from watching videos, regardless of clear demonstrations that they don’t.)
Darroch relies heavily on Peter Drucker, who apparently worked in the 1950s on the topic of knowledge workers. It feels relevant that the science of teaching and learning has advanced by leaps and bounds in the many decades since then, and also that students are not being employed for their knowledge and skills. Rather, they’re employing us, the faculty, to teach them knowledge and skills.
Glasgow Caledonian University, which created a New York City campus in 2013 and won the right to award degrees four years later, is selling its campus in New York City, the BBC reported.
The university said the campus had “not reached its potential” and that the university would look to exit New York.
A university statement said, “Following a discussion at the university court in February, it was agreed that the university would actively seek a partnership with another educational organization, with a view to the partner ultimately acquiring GCNYC. Whilst a partnership is our preferred option for the college, in the event a partnership cannot be established, we will initiate a process to exit from New York.”
The university awarded its New York campus $32.5 million in loans and grants.
Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, proposed the resolution to block the Biden administration’s plan for student loan forgiveness.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Senate voted Thursday to block President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for eligible Americans.
The resolution, proposed by Louisiana Republican senator Bill Cassidy, also would restart student loan payments. Biden has said he would veto the measure. The resolution didn’t pass either chamber with enough votes to override a presidential veto.
Two Democratic senators joined with Republicans to support the resolution, which passed with 52 votes. Forty-six senators voted against it.
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“It is unfair to the hundreds of millions of Americans who will bear the burden of paying off hundreds of billions of dollars of someone else’s student debt,” Cassidy said in a statement. “Our resolution prevents average Americans, 87 percent of whom currently have no student loans, from being stuck with a policy that the administration is doing not to be fair to all, but rather to favor the few.”
The resolution is one of several ways congressional Republicans are trying to block one of the president’s signature policies. House Republicans previously voted to block the debt-relief plan and other changes to the student loan program as part of a bill that would raise the country’s borrowing limit and make other spending cuts to the federal budget. The final bill to avert default and raise the debt ceiling requires the administration to resume student loan payments later this summer.
The Supreme Court is set to say this month whether the debt-relief plan is legal.
The Government Accountability Office said in March that the plan meets the definition of a rule under the Congressional Review Act, setting the stage for the resolution. Under the act, a simple majority of lawmakers in the House and Senate can vote to block the administration from carrying out the rule.
Student Borrower Protection Center executive director Mike Pierce said student loan borrowers will not forget which politicians voted for the resolution, which he said would cause “irreparable damage” to the student loan system.
“Today’s vote makes crystal clear exactly who stood up and fought to protect the economic livelihoods of millions of people with student loan debt—and who schemed to keep them drowning in the debt despair of our nation’s student loan crisis,” Pierce said. “The American people are watching and expect President Biden to keep his promise to veto this horrendous bill and deliver on his promise of student loan debt relief once and for all.”
The SBPC and the American Federation of Teachers previously found that the student loans of more than 260,000 public servants would be reinstated under the resolution. Another two million workers would lose progress toward debt relief under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
House Republicans have said the resolution is not retroactive.
The resolution cleared the House with 218 votes—the minimum needed—after two Democrats sided with Republicans.
Washington State representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the Democrats who voted for the resolution, said in a statement that expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar for dollar with investments in career and technical education.
“I can’t support the first without the other,” she said. “I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much and the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it, and the system needs a total overhaul.”
In the Senate, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, Montana senator Jon Tester and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema voted for the resolution. Manchin and Tester are Democrats, while Sinema is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
“Today I voted to repeal the Biden Administration’s student loan cancellation proposal because we simply cannot afford to add another $400 billion to the national debt,” Manchin said in a statement. “There are already more than 50 existing student loan repayment and forgiveness programs aimed at attracting individuals to vital service jobs, such as teachers, health care workers, and public servants. This Biden proposal undermines these programs and forces hard-working taxpayers who already paid off their loans or did not go to college to shoulder the cost.”
The Association of American Universities on Thursday announced that it would add six new research universities to its selective membership—institutions with a decided tilt to the West and South.
They are:
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Membership in the AAU, which now numbers 71, has historically been coveted by many public and private research universities as a signal of national and international prominence and excellence. Leaders often strategize about how to shape their institutions to meet the association’s criteria; the University of South Florida, for instance, built its 2012 strategic plan around earning its way into the AAU.
The association’s evolving criteria have resulted in the exclusion of some longtime members, especially, in recent years, some land-grant institutions in the Midwest that favor agricultural research over biomedical and other forms of research.
AAU leaders called out in their announcement that two of the new members, Arizona State and UC Riverside, are Hispanic-serving institutions.
Stevens Institute of Technology will give each graduate $250 to make up for a “chaotic experience” during the commencement ceremonies, NJ.com reported.
“While this gesture does not make up for the irreplaceable moments that were missed, we hope that graduates and their families will accept our acknowledgement of our mistakes and our promise to do better,” said Nariman Farvardin, president of Stevens Tech.
New Jersey 101.5 reported that the ceremonies started off normally, with a speech by New Jersey governor Phil Murphy. Then the graduates moved to two other facilities to receive their degrees, and “that’s when things began going downhill.”
There were delays of more than two hours for some of the graduates and their families; some of the ceremonies ended early, without all of the student speakers; and one speaker who did get the chance to speak couldn’t finish because of boos (over the situation, not the speech).
Most Americans support affirmative action in college admissions and do not want the Supreme Court to ban it, according a new poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
However, they do not believe applicants’ race should play a major role in whether they are admitted.
Of those polled, 63 percent said the Supreme Court should not bar all affirmative action in college admissions.
Those polled said high school grades should be the most important factor in admissions decisions, and 68 percent said race and ethnicity should not be a significant factor in admissions decisions.
