A college degree on the cheap
Getting a college degree doesn’t have to break the bank, notes the Hechinger Report. Increasingly, cost-conscious students seeking a bachelor’s degree are living at home and starting at a local community college. Those who complete an associate degree may benefit from transfer agreements with state universities. University of Virginia guarantees admission to transfer students from [...]
No more service iguanas on campus
Disabled students can bring service dogs on the Pima Community College campus, but no service iguanas, pigs, snakes or parrots, reports Campus Correspondent in the Arizona Daily Star. In a memo to students, PCC announced that the federal definition of “service animal” has been narrowed to dogs and miniature horses. The new rules exclude emotional [...]
JFF links colleges to real-time jobs data
With up-to-date labor market data, community colleges will be able to align training to employers’ needs in their regions, reports Jobs for the Future. The Credentials that Work initiative, funded by the Joyce Foundation and Lumina Foundation, uses new technology to aggregate and analyze online job ads. Colleges can follow hiring trends, employer demand, and [...]
More degrees, but not enough
More Americans — especially Latinos and women — will enroll in college and complete degrees through 2020, predicts a report by the National Center for Education Statistics. However, the increase won’t be enough to meet President Obama’s goal: 60 percent of young Americans with a college credential. NCES projects a 26 percent increase in associate degrees [...]
Elitism limits higher ed access
Higher education must discard elitism and broaden access said panelists at Charting the Future of Higher Education, reports Diverse. Education Sector hosted the conference, which was funded by the Lumina Foundation. Discussants contrasted Washington Monthly‘s college guide, which looks at how colleges encourage social mobility, with the U.S. News guide, which ranks colleges on selectivity. [...]
Reinventing higher ed in California
California needs to reinvent its higher higher education system, writes John Aubrey Douglass, senior research fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, in the Los Angeles Times. California’s leaders should set an ambitious goal: “that the state match or exceed the access and degree-production rates of the highest-achieving states or, better yet, international [...]
Few Baltimore students earn degrees at 2-year college
Baltimore high school graduates increasingly go to community colleges rather than four-year colleges, according to a Johns Hopkins report (pdf). It reported in the Baltimore Sun. Only 5.8 percent of those who started at a two-year college earned a degree in six years compared with 34 percent of those who started at four-year-colleges, reports the [...]
Alignment can break the remedial cycle
A majority of community college freshmen and a third of four-year students must take at least one remedial class. Aligning high school teaching with college demands can slash the need for remediation, writes Brad Phillips, president of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change, in GOOD. In San Diego, 95 percent of West Hills High graduates — [...]
Arizona college to require 7th-grade skills
Pima Community College in Tucson will restrict admission to high school graduates or GED holders with at least seventh-grade proficiency in reading, writing and math, starting in 2012. The new admissions standards will encourage success, writes Roy Flores, the college president, the Arizona Star. “Students who test below this level have little chance of succeeding [...]
A new focus on near-completers
Near-completers — people who’ve earned most but not all credits needed for a degree — are a key to meeting President Obama’s college completion goal, said participants in an Institute for Higher Education Policy meeting covered by Inside Higher Ed. IHEPs Project Win-Win has helped nine institutions award nearly 600 associate degrees in only seven [...]
