How can the Ed Department better review accreditors? - Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive

The U.S. Department of Education should go "beyond a box-checking exercise" when assessing whether accreditors are adequately doing their jobs, contends a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP).    Antoinette Flores, associate director for postsecondary education at the left-leaning CAP, writes that the Ed Department needs to spend more time assessing accreditors that oversee the largest share of federal funds and conduct more open-ended investigations. The report comes as the Ed Department is rewriting the regulations around accreditation that would ease its review of accreditors.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/how-can-the-ed-department-better-review-accreditors/563418/

'Transaction Man': The Rise of Disposable Professors and Insecure Institutions - Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Anyone who thinks about the future of higher education is likely to find themselves in a state of unease. The trends are worrying. A decade from now will witness unprecedented declines in the numbers of new high school graduates, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest. These demographic headwinds, combined with continued public disinvestment and rising costs, have pushed many schools to various levels of financial instability. The decline of tenure-track positions, in favor of adjunct faculty, is one strategy that colleges and universities have pursued to bring their revenues and costs in line with one another explain the current postsecondary reality of concentrated privilege and system-wide anxiety?

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/transaction-man-rise-disposable-professors-and-insecure-institutions?mc_cid=c87d143421&mc_eid=879d6835e3

Choosing Employers Over College for More Education - Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

Roughly half of American adults without a college degree (46 percent) said they need additional education to advance in their careers, according to new survey data from the Strada Education Network and Gallup. Employers were the first-choice providers for this group, with 33 percent saying they are most likely to participate in additional education and training from employers. Community colleges were next (23 percent), followed by trade schools or programs (21 percent), and traditional four-year colleges (17 percent).
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/09/23/choosing-employers-over-college-more-education

Communicating science online increases interest, engagement and access to funds - Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, the Conversation

Scientists are active on social media, discussing everything from methods to the latest developments in research. They even use social media to raise funds. Scientists sometimes provide mentoring online and have conversations with more junior researchers about their careers. Social networking tools also provide a space to build both social and professional networks, allowing scientists to develop new collaborations. Dismissing online science communication as trivial to the intellectual work of scientists would be a mistaken position.
https://theconversation.com/communicating-science-online-increases-interest-engagement-and-access-to-funds-122102

New study: Towards a do-it-yourself learning style - Financial Express

This was revealed by Pearson’s Global Learner Survey, the findings of which were released last week: DIY mindset is reshaping education: When they have to retrain for work, 42% of learners in the US and 50% in China and India taught themselves using internet. Digital and virtual learning are new normal: Globally, 76% people believe college students will be taking online courses within 10 years, and 78% Indians believe students today have the benefit of using technology to support their learning. Lifelong learning is the new reality: Globally, there is wide agreement that people need to keep learning throughout their career to stay up-to-date in their careers—today, 60% of Indians believe that the world is shifting to a model where people participate in education over a lifetime.
https://www.financialexpress.com/education-2/new-study-towards-a-do-it-yourself-learning-style/1714218/

Keys to an Analytics Future: Governance, Collaboration, and Communication - Betsy Reinitz, EDUCAUSE

Additionally, as analytics initiatives get underway, colleges and universities will need to make decisions about how to allocate resources to sustain and grow analytics. Not everything can be done, and these decisions about what to do and what not to do can be difficult. As one summit presenter, San Cannon, Chief Data Officer at University of Rochester, said, "Everybody gets a say but not everybody gets their way."3 Having all of the appropriate stakeholders participate in that conversation through a governance process is necessary for making resource decisions that ensure the analytics initiative addresses the goals set out for it.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/9/keys-to-an-analytics-future-governance-collaboration-and-communication

Student Debt and the Class of 2018 - Institute for College Access and Success

Student Debt and the Class of 2018 is TICAS’ fourteenth annual report on the student loan debt of recent graduates from four-year colleges, documenting changes and variation in student debt across states and colleges. Unless otherwise noted, the figures in this report are only for public and nonprofit colleges because virtually no for-profit colleges report what their graduates owe. Nationally, about two in three (65%) college seniors who graduated from public and private nonprofit colleges in 2018 had student loan debt, the same share as the Class of 2017. Borrowers from the Class of 2018 owed an average of $29,200, a 2 percent increase from the average of $28,650 in 2017.
https://ticas.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/classof2018.pdf

What are Digital Credentials and What Do They Mean for Education? - Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Digital credentials can be found in a variety of places. In educational games, a learner may get a badge after reaching a certain level or mastering a certain skill within the game. In the workforce, a digital badge certifies that a person has taken a professional development course and demonstrated mastery of a set of related skills. In higher education, universities are using digital credentials to give students a head start in acquiring skills for their future careers.  Because of the way they connect the workplace with education, digital credentials are poised to have a profound impact on the way students plan their futures both in and outside of the classroom. 

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/what-are-digital-credentials-and-what-do-they-mean-for-education/

To keep up with blockchain, colleges look across disciplines - Hallie Busta, Education Dive

As fintech expands, institutions are adding classes in cryptocurrency and digital ledgers to equip students with practical skills. To tap into emerging industries, colleges often have to break through the walls that separate academic disciplines. One of the latest barriers they're addressing stands between their business and technology programs. The emergence of artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain and cryptocurrency is changing how money moves between people and organizations. That's created a new industry — financial technology, or fintech — around which colleges are being asked to create new curriculum as employers seek hires with these specific skill sets.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/to-keep-up-with-blockchain-colleges-look-across-disciplines/563031/

Preparing for Tomorrow With Online Professional Development - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

We are entering the fourth industrial revolution, in which jobs and careers are changing at a dizzying pace. The impact in the working world is profound. Overall in the U.S., the average number of years that an employee stayed with an employer as of last year was 4.2. For most people in this emerging fourth industrial revolution, professional development is not an option; it is a necessity. But that doesn’t mean it should be chore. In fact Mary Shindler, senior program manager on the learning and development team at LinkedIn, says, "Data is showing that team members who engage in learning are found to be happier and feel more satisfied in their careers."
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/preparing-tomorrow-online-professional-development

Taking IT Way beyond Accessibility: 5 + 4 = 1 Approach - Thomas Tobin, EDUCAUSE Review

The colleges and universities that are furthest along in their accessibility efforts tend to have IT leaders and staff who share certain practices. They typically chop off the end of the word "accessibility," focusing their efforts on expanding access, regardless of the ability profiles of their learners.20 They shift their goals away from making content accessible and look instead at making interactions easier to engage in.21 And they have largely moved beyond the mental model of universal design (UD) in the physical environment, which is static, bounded, and predictable—instead designing interactions according to UDL, which sees interactions as dynamic, open, and emergent.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/8/taking-it-way-beyond-accessibility-5-4-1-approach

Forecasts, FlexchainEdu, and the Promise of Future Horizons - Taylor Kendal, EDUCAUSE Review

Berners-Lee's oft-quoted view of the future-past of the web applies equally well to the higher education ecosystem: its future is so much bigger than its past. I believe that in just a decade, the postsecondary education ecosystem will be both utterly unrecognizable and strikingly familiar. It will consist of bootcamp-university hybrids, algorithm-driven space-sharing agreements, discipline-specific micro-schools, AI-driven instruction/courses, and perhaps most noticeable and widespread, entirely new means of validating the knowledge and skills that such an ecosystem is providing or was meant to provide its students. Yet while surrounding pressures will necessitate some degree of adaptation, this landscape will still be dotted with legacy systems, slow-rotting code, and familiar conversations regarding how we plan to prepare future generations for the ever-changing technological revolution looming just over the horizon.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/8/forecasts-flexchainedu-and-the-promise-of-future-horizons

Policies and Payoffs to Addressing America's College Graduation Deficit - Christopher Avery,Jessica Howell,Matea Pender, Sacerdote; Brookings Papers

We consider four distinct policy levers available to states for raising bachelor’s degree completion rates in the U.S. through their public colleges and universities. We simulate these policies using elasticities from the existing literature and a matched College Board-National Student Clearinghouse dataset on enrollment and degree completion. Increasing spending at public college and targeted elimination of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges with an income cutoff are projected to be the most effective of these policies in terms of cost per additional BA degree. Reducing tuition and fees at public colleges and a distinct policy of moving students to the best available in-state public college (BISPO) are next best on a cost-benefit basis. Free community college policies are significantly less cost effective.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Avery-et-al_conference-draft.pdf

At these colleges, students begin serious research their first year - Nancy Stamp, the Conversation

While about one out of every five undergraduates get some kind of research experience, the rest tend to get just “cookbook” labs that typically do not challenge students to think but merely require them to follow directions to achieve the “correct” answer. That’s beginning to change through First-year Research Immersion, an academic model that is part of an emergent trend meant to provide undergraduates with meaningful research experience. The First-year Research Immersion is a sequence of three course-based research experiences at three universities: University of Texas at Austin, University of Maryland and Binghamton University, where I teach science.

https://theconversation.com/at-these-colleges-students-begin-serious-research-their-first-year-117959

It’s Time To Act: Congress Needs to Reauthorize the Higher Education Act - Young Invincibles

Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act should be the first major and immediate step in addressing our higher education problems. It’s truly shocking to realize that such a consequential piece of legislation has not been reauthorized in more than 11 years. With our national student debt rapidly increasing, now more than $1.6 trillion, and in-state tuition for a 4-year public college having increased by 41% since 2008, there is an urgency for Congress to take action now.

https://younginvincibles.org/its-time-to-act-congress-needs-to-reauthorize-the-higher-education-act/

Chatting with Chatbots - By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

More and more colleges are deploying virtual assistants or chatbots to communicate with students on all aspects of college life, creating a virtual "one-stop-shop" for student queries. Colleges initially were deploying this technology only in specific areas, such as financial aid, IT services or the library. Now institutions are looking to deploy chatbots with much broader capability. For the companies that make this computer software that conducts text or voice-based conversations, this changing usage on campus marks a significant shift.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/06/expansion-chatbots-higher-ed

Seventeen Questions Every College Should Be Asking - Ben Sasse, US Senator/former college president, the Atlantic

Here’s the problem: Higher education is in the middle of multiple, massive disruptions—and it isn’t clear that the leaders of the sector grasp the magnitude of the waves of change breaking on their ivy-covered gates. As just one example, it is decreasingly clear what purpose a four-year degree should serve when technology is changing the nature of work. These tidal economic and cultural changes should be prompting serious soul-searching in every board and faculty meeting, but most universities are deliberating with the urgency of 1951 becoming 1952.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/17-questions-every-college-should-be-asking/597310/

Introducing the Coursera Global Skills Index - Emily Glassberg Sands, Coursera

Urgency around upskilling is a global one, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each country has a unique set of circumstances – economic, political, social – that shape their skills landscape today. Industries, too, face challenges unique to their verticals that require tailored talent strategies. This first edition of the Coursera Global Skills Index looks closely at these trends, benchmarking 60 countries and 10 industries across Business, Technology, and Data Science skills. The findings draw from an innovative data methodology that uses machine learning to map skills to the content that teaches them and then robustly measure skill proficiencies based on the assessment performance of the millions of learners on Coursera.
https://blog.coursera.org/introducing-the-coursera-global-skills-index/

What Really Works: A Review of Student Success Initiatives - Civitas Learning

The landscape in higher ed is changing. Today more than ever before, institutions are serving increasingly diverse students, each with unique needs — and doing it with less money. With limited resources and growing accountability pressures from high-level stakeholders, colleges and universities are grappling with the challenge of knowing what's working for which students.

https://go.civitaslearning.com/clarity

Colleges Face Growing International Student-Visa Issues - ALIA WONG, the Atlantic

Amid tightening immigration restrictions, higher-education institutions find themselves swamped with paperwork. After steadily climbing for more than a decade, the number of new international students enrolled at U.S. colleges has declined in recent years. According to survey data collected by the Institute of International Education during the 2016–17 school year, enrollment of these students fell by 3 percent from the previous year. Results from the institute’s 2017–18 survey, the most recent data available, show that it fell again—this time by close to 7 percent.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/how-harvard-and-other-colleges-grapple-student-visa-problems/597409/

We Desperately Need a Merger between Education and Work - Brandon Busteed, Scientific American

School currently focuses too exclusively on knowledge and not enough on skills.  There’s a pile of evidence about the most effective “education.” Summarized, it points to relationship-rich and work-integrated learning experiences. The most important aspects include working on long-term projects that take a semester or more to complete and having a job or internship where you can apply what you are learning in the classroom. Both experiences double the odds that graduates will be engaged and successful in their work later. And graduates who had an internship during college are twice as likely to have a good job waiting for them upon graduation, too.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-desperately-need-a-merger-between-education-and-work/

IBM Study: The Skills Gap is Not a Myth, But Can Be Addressed with Real Solutions - Yahoo Finance

In the next three years, as many as 120 million workers in the world's 12 largest economies may need to be retrained or reskilled as a result of AI and intelligent automation, according to a new IBM (NYSE: IBM) Institute for Business Value (IBV) study. In addition, only 41 percent of CEOs surveyed say that they have the people, skills and resources required to execute their business strategies. The study, which includes input from more than 5,670 global executives in 48 countries, points to compounding challenges that require a fundamental shift in how companies meet and manage changing workforce needs throughout all levels of the enterprise.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-study-skills-gap-not-121500889.html

Success at Scale: The growth of large-scale online programs - Stephen G. Pelletier, Unbound

In an era when many colleges and universities struggle to meet their enrollment targets, a few institutions have leapfrogged over that calculus by adding large online programs that quickly enroll hundreds—or sometimes thousands—of new students. That kind of success warrants a closer look.  [ed note: This is an especially important and under-reported movement in higher education!]
https://unbound.upcea.edu/leadership-strategy/credentialing/success-at-scale-the-growth-of-large-scale-online-programs/

The most cost-effective ways to increase college graduation rates - Lauren Bauer, Brookings

In “Policies and Payoffs to Addressing America’s College Graduation Deficit,” Christopher Avery, Jessica Howell, Matea Pender, and Bruce Sacerdote perform a timely, relevant, and illuminating cost-benefit analysis among competing proposals to increase college-going and completion. In their analysis they are clear about the question and the goal: what is the most efficient way to increase graduation rates at public four-year institutions? The short answer is: raising per-pupil instructional spending at public institutions. Relevant to current policy debates, providing free community college does not have the downstream effect of raising BA graduation rates.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/09/05/the-most-cost-effective-ways-to-increase-college-graduation-rates/

Moody Report: 'Hypercompetitive' higher ed market will limit revenue growth - Hallie Busta, Education Dive

A "hypercompetitive" market for higher education along with a continued focus on affordability will constrain tuition revenue in the coming year even as state funding stabilizes, Moody's analysts wrote in a report released this week. Low-to-negative net tuition revenue growth is likely for many regional public and private colleges, which will spur continued cost containment that pushes them to streamline programs and even merge, collaborate or close. While potential federal and state policy changes around student aid are the "greatest uncertainty" for higher ed, programs such as free college or loan forgiveness would "take several years to devise and implement," the analysts wrote.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/report-hypercompetitive-higher-ed-market-will-limit-revenue-growth/560924/

5 issues college leaders will confront this year - Hallie Busta, Education Dive

Enrollment, finances, immigration, free speech. Many of the issues expected at the top of college presidents' work lists are carryovers from last year, with a few new wrinkles. Higher ed watched this summer as one public system reacted to drastic cuts in state funding. And college leaders raised yet more flags that the current political climate is threatening the supply of international students. Meanwhile, issues around Title IX are likely to heat up again with the expected release of new regulations this fall. "It's in many ways more of the same as well as a bunch of new complications," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education (ACE).
https://www.educationdive.com/news/5-issues-college-leaders-will-confront-this-year/562057/

Seventeen Questions Every College Should Be Asking - Ben Sasse, US Senator/former college president, the Atlantic

Here’s the problem: Higher education is in the middle of multiple, massive disruptions—and it isn’t clear that the leaders of the sector grasp the magnitude of the waves of change breaking on their ivy-covered gates. As just one example, it is decreasingly clear what purpose a four-year degree should serve when technology is changing the nature of work. These tidal economic and cultural changes should be prompting serious soul-searching in every board and faculty meeting, but most universities are deliberating with the urgency of 1951 becoming 1952.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/17-questions-every-college-should-be-asking/597310/

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Badges - EDUCAUSE

Digital badges are validated indicators of skills or competencies, often representing the completion of a microcredential. Badges typically represent competencies not shown on a transcript, including learning from internships, volunteer work, and other co-curricular activities. Increasingly, badges conform to the Open Badges standard, and many are stackable, meaning that they can be credited toward an advanced badge, a certificate, or a degree.
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/7/7-things-you-should-know-about-digital-badges

With badges, colleges take a hard look at teaching soft skills - Shailaja Neelakantan, Education Dive

Employer demand for new hires with skills like critical thinking and communication has pushed colleges to find ways to show that students have those abilities.  Microcredentials are a trend du jour in U.S. higher education, and while tech-related ones are still the most popular, those pertaining to so-called "soft" skills — such as initiative, oral communication, resilience, empathy and critical thinking — form a considerable share of the offerings. That's at least in part because multiple recent studies cite company executives lamenting the lack of such skills in the recent college graduates they hire. Many colleges around the country have begun to offer soft skills badges, either as new courses or by embedding them into existing curricula.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/with-badges-colleges-take-a-hard-look-at-teaching-soft-skills/559657/