increasing access and success
It's not very often the Queen of Jordan comes to Boston, but she was here last month to announce a new education partnership with Harvard and MIT's non-profit online learning initiative, edX.
The goal is develop a new platform called Edraak, which is designed to bring online courses to Arabic-speaking students.
A single public school counselor in the United States has a caseload of 471 students, on average, according to the American School Counselor Association, or ASCA. In high schools, where counselors are often the primary source of information about college — especially as increasing numbers of students become the first in their families to consider it — each one is responsible for an average of 239 students, the ASCA says.
At a time when research shows that academic advising is a key to helping college students graduate on time, most say they aren’t getting it.
Sixty percent of students say someone other than an academic advisor is a primary source of information about their schoolwork. About a third of freshmen and 18 percent of seniors rely on friends and family, and another 18 percent on faculty who are not assigned as their advisors.
For the second time in two years, Congress is trying to close a loophole that allows for-profit colleges and universities to collect billions of federal dollars in tuition from veterans. Over the past five years, veterans have spent nearly $30 billion on tuition and related higher-education costs, most of it at for-profit schools.
A select group of colleges and universities, responding to the public outcry over the skyrocketing cost of college, are cutting their tuition.
In Cambridge, Lesley University will slash its sticker price beginning next fall. Lesley’s new tuition plan comes as many families are rethinking the value and quality of a college degree.
A report released Wednesday by the College Board shows tuition increases at public colleges have slowed slightly, but the cost is still out of reach for most low-income students because government aid has dwindled.
Published tuition and fees spiked nearly 3 percent for in-state students at four-year public schools. The College Board says that’s the smallest one-year increase since 1975.
I opened the door to see my best friend from childhood, Randall, chewing on a pen top, facing me in his baggy jeans. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a decade. As kids our lives seemed like mirror images and we were inseparable skateboarding, biking, and playing basketball on our block of South Central Los Angeles. But something changed in middle school. In eighth grade, while I was worrying about which private high school would give me a scholarship, he was getting arrested for the first time.
American college students’ worldviews affect what they value, the way they behave and potentially how they learn. We have found that today’s students are divided not dichotomously, between religious and secular, but rather among three distinct worldviews: religious, secular and spiritual. Institutions of higher education need to understand the distinctions among these three worldviews and design curricula that respect students’ diversity.
