It is incumbent on all of us who work at MSU to make sure we create realistic pathways so that our students from all backgrounds can meet the learning objectives the faculty have established for MSU programs. At MSU, we believe that all students whom we admit have the ability to learn, persist, and graduate …
Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an essay of mine describing my experience as an interim dean. It covered several practical, task-oriented topics: identifying one’s core mission for the interim period, allaying colleagues’ fears, acquiring reliable information and triaging the issues that land in your inbox. But leading a college that includes a department of theater helped me recognize …
Several years ago, I served as the acting dean of Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters — one of our institution’s three core colleges with 20 departments, programs and centers, 250 faculty members, and a mix of graduate and undergraduate offerings. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know another part of …
A crucial marker of the success of a university is the academic standing of freshman students after the end of the first semester. Perhaps no stage of the college career is more critical to the success of traditional undergraduate students than the first year of college. Students arrive from high school having, for the most …
Troy Simon, a student at Bard College who was homeless as a child, is greeted by President Obama at a White House summit on college access in January (Chronicle of Higher Education) The Chronicle of Higher Education website this morning had a feature article titled “The $6 Solution,” which focuses on a college access issue known as …
Yesterday, I charted the trends in Bachelor’s degrees conferred to women in the U.S. using the NCES 2013 Digest of Education Statistics, and found that there has been a glaring gender disparity in Computer Science and Engineering majors for more than 40 years. In that post, I focused on the gender disparity in CS&E, but …
One oft-cited problem with Computer Science is its glaring gender disparity: In a given Computer Science class, men will outnumber women as much as 8 to 2 (20% women). This stands in stark contrast to most other college majors, which have women outnumbering men 3 to 2 on average (60% women). This observation made me …
I’ve written in the past about the hysteria surrounding student loans, and the focus in the media about how student loans are the next “bubble.” I recently published an op-ed in the Answer Sheet blog on education of The Washington Post in which I attempted to counter some of the rhetoric with facts about student loans. The piece received a number …
This article describes surprisingly effective interventions that improve college success rates for low SES/SAT students. Let’s hope they can be broadly replicated. NYTimes: … Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to think they …
There is a paradox in high education On the one hand: college increases the earning power of students; people who graduate from college make significantly more money than people who do not. (The Payscale numbers discussed in the second post in this series quantify the degree to which this is the case for US colleges …
With rise of student debt and many recent college graduates having a hard time finding good jobs, there is a lot more attention focused on the cost-effectiveness of education. What do students get out of their years on campus and the money they pay to attend college? Payscale recently released its 2014 study of the …
Earlier today, I ran across a conversation about how the cost of tuition at Michigan State University (MSU) has changed over the years. I had just finished talking with my grandpa over the phone, and he had spent the latter half of the talk extolling the virtues of working your way through college (without family …