The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Best Books About Higher Education In 2011

What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices,"Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College"by Andrew Ferguson.  Read more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/best_books_of_2011.html

Women Heading Back To College For Better Opportunities

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/business/young-women-go-back-to-school-instead-of-work.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

IHEs Cut Remedial Education To Balance The Budget

The annual price tag for remedial education in American colleges and universities is at least $3.6 billion, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national advocacy organization in Washington. It's also a reason that many college students quit in frustration, contributing to high dropout rates. In a largely overlooked but precedent-setting move, cash-strapped Ohio has said it'll soon stop footing the bill for remedial courses. At least 13 other states, including Florida, Missouri and South Carolina, have tried to slow the spiral of spending on remedial education, typically by restricting funding to colleges and universities that provide a lot of it. Changing the systems, however, won't be easy. Read more at:

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/29/4150721/cash-strapped-universities-look.html#storylink=cpy

Partnership With University Helps Prison Inmates Obtain College Credits

On a recent morning inside Missouri's largest state prison, a class of students patiently waited for the professor to arrive. They had a pile of books each, and a collective pile of some of society's worst offenses. Never mind the gray uniforms, the rattling keys, the chirp of a guard's radio. When St. Louis University professor Stephen Casmier got through security, and the day's lesson in literary studies began, the men were in college. The class of 19 inmates, a small sampling of the 30,000 offenders in the Missouri Department of Corrections system, is part of the SLU Prison Program, an effort that educators and prison reformers are watching with hopeful, yet cautious, eyes. Read more at:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-university-program-in-missouri-prison-helps-set-minds/article_a06b052a-064f-5ef4-bce9-d60036f1ac59.html#ixzz1hrEvZjCT

Why All The Scrutiny For A Course About Jay-Z

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson's course "The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z" has drawn national attention. Any course focused on a figure like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter), given his contemporary Horatio Alger narrative, and his reputation as an urban tastemaker, was bound to generate considerable attention, but the nature of the attention that Dyson's class has received and some of the attendant criticism, suggest that much more is at play.  Such narrative slippages speak volumes about the widespread belief that courses that focus on some racial and cultural groups, are created in slipshod fashion and lack rigor. Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-anthony-neal/jay-z-college-course_b_1134761.html 

New Laws Are Designed To Keep College Students From Voting

Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote. Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/opinion/keeping-college-students-from-the-polls.html?src=me&ref=general

Becoming The University Of Everywhere

After a century firmly anchored in Boston, Northeastern University is branching out — becoming Southeastern, Northwestern and perhaps Western and Midwestern as well. The goal is to offer master’s degrees in industries like cybersecurity, health informatics and project management, matching programs with each city’s industries and labor needs, through a mix of virtual learning and fly-ins from professors based in Boston. While higher education has long been seen as a local enterprise, with universities deeply enmeshed in their communities, the explosion of online institutions, particularly for-profit career colleges like the University of Phoenix and theEducation Management Corporation, has changed that dynamic. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/education/northeastern-university-expands-its-geographic-reach.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

College Students Should Obsess Less About Grades And Spend More Time With Faculty

Something has changed in higher education. These days most of my students complain about not having enough time to do the course readings, let alone a series of moments to do more than a cursory amount archival research for a paper. Some of them hand in assignments after the due date. Most of them avoid my office and any kind of serious face-to-face social interaction. Every semester over-worked students have a limited amount of time to study. Professors are "too busy" to refine their teaching or pursue their research. Here's a New Year's resolution for college students: make a habit of visiting your professors and discussing the world of ideas. Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stoller/winter-break_b_1170241.html

Mexico's UNAM Will Digitize All Of Its Documents For Open Access

It is one of Latin America's best-known and biggest schools, with five times more students than UCLA and a treasured spot in Mexican life as the people's house of higher learning. But to prove it really matters, the 100-year-old National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, is placing its work on the Internet. UNAM hopes to upload everything it has — from 18th century newspapers and vintage films to hundreds of thousands of student theses and a still-to-be-gauged sea of classroom teaching items — and let the world have it free of charge. The project, called Toda la UNAM en Línea. Read more at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/la-ca-culture-mex-20111225,0,1242708.story 

The Secret Deal Behind The New York City Technology Campus

The two universities waited until Oct. 18 — 10 days before the city’s deadline for proposals — to announce the union publicly. Last Monday, when their joint bid was crowned the winner of the city’s year-long, international competition, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made it clear that the synergy between the two institutions was a critical factor.The unsuspected marriage, according to interviews with university and city officials, was one of many juicy pieces of the proposal that its architects unveiled strategically, to keep competitors in the dark and make the maximum impression on city officials. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/education/in-cornell-deal-for-roosevelt-island-campus-an-unlikely-partnership.html?src=me&ref=general