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Debating the Value of College in America

Debating the Value of College in America
My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing. At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. I could have answered the question in a different way.

Graduates on the Value of HigherEd Degree By Eric Hoover Scholastic skepticism is contagious. Pundits and parents alike continue to second-guess the value of a college degree. After all, the recession has changed the way many Americans look at big-ticket purchases; plenty of families worry that today's expenses will not pay off tomorrow. Not surprisingly, today's cost-conscious public views college price tags with a wary eye. A curious thing happened when college gradu­ates were asked about the value of their own degrees, however. Why? In the Pew survey, all respondents were asked about the "main purpose" of college. These findings echo the words graduates often use to describe the benefits of their college experi­ences. Evan Bloom's diploma will tell you only so much about him. After graduating, in 2007, Mr. Mr. Mr. More than once, Mr. "My classes were great, but it was really everything else I was doing that mattered the most," Mr. 'Basic, Fundamental Training' Still, Ms. Ms. Jane Knecht can relate. Soon, Ms. As Ms. Ms. Mr.

Presidents on Signifiers of College Quality By David Glenn In a year when public concern about the cost and purpose of college education is rising, a new survey has revealed an undercurrent of anxiety among college presidents about the quality of teaching and learning on their campuses. More than a quarter of the presidents in the Pew Research Center survey, done in association with The Chronicle, said they worried that their faculty members were grading too leniently. More than half said students spent less time studying than they did a decade ago. "It's surprising to me how relatively low the numbers were for any kind of assessment measures or surveys of engagement as effective gauges of college quality," said David C. "Presidents clearly don't think there are surveys or tests out there that really get them to effective assessment," said Mr. Barbara Couture, president of New Mexico State University, agrees with Mr. Ms. Other college leaders are not so enthusiastic about using the labor market as a bellwether of college quality.

Most Presidents Favor No Tenure for Majority of Faculty - Surveys of the Public and Presidents By Jack Stripling The deteriorating number of tenured positions in higher education is a common source of concern for faculty, but few college presidents seem perturbed by the trend. Less than a quarter of college leaders who responded to a Pew Research Center survey, done in association with The Chronicle, said they would prefer full-time, tenured professors to make up most of the faculty at their institutions. Leaders of private four-year institutions were less enamored of tenure than were their public peers. At four-year public institutions, half of the presidents surveyed said they preferred tenured faculty. Advocates of tenure say it is the surest protection of academic freedom, creating a system of due process in which the burden of proof is upon administrators to demonstrate that a professor's dismissal is for cause, rather than a response to controversial scholarship. Cathy A. Benefits of Contracts "Nobody comes to Olin because they're looking for job security," he said. Mr. Mr.

Comment on the Future of College Eduation By Daniel Yankelovich This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge. In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. Troubling increases in student plagiarism. But these decidedly nontrivial problems somehow fade into the background as the college presidents express their satisfaction with today's higher-education system. That is not what higher education has to deliver in the world of the "new normal." At its core, the social contract that binds Americans together is amazingly simple.

Higher Education in 2011 - Surveys of the Public and Presidents 2 Major Surveys of the American Public and College Presidents Download both surveys as .PDF files: Presidents | The Public How the Surveys Were Done The findings shown on these pages came from two surveys by the Pew Research Center—one of college chief executives, conducted in association with The Chronicle, and one of the public. The list comprises degree-granting institutions with total enrollments of at least 500 in the fall of 2009, and which a recognized accreditor had accredited or given pre-accreditation status. Pew contacted a total of 3,324 college and university leaders who met those conditions. The breakdown by type among the 1,055 respondents’ institutions, before this weighting was applied, was four-year private nonprofit, 39 percent; two-year public or private nonprofit, 30 percent; four-year public, 24 percent; and two-year or four-year for-profit, 7 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points for results based on all college leaders who responded.

Web Caspar - Data Resource System Table Builder: Create a data table This section contains a selection of WebCASPAR data sources. You can select one or more to use as the basis for your table. Click on the checkboxes next to the data sources (e.g., NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates/Doctorate Records File) to select the data sources of interest, then click on Select Data Source(s) to continue to the Modify Analysis Variables screen. From there you will begin making the other selections for your data table. Saved Tables: View predefined tables and tables that you have saved Frequently Requested Tables: The Frequently Requested Tables pulldown box contains a selection of predefined data tables. Your Saved Tables: If you are logged in as a registered user, the Your Saved Tables pulldown box will display a list of the data tables previously saved under your user ID and password. This is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Federal Government computer system. Your session will expire after 60 minutes of inactivity.

Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities Posted on Harvard Business Review: March 31, 2011 12:34 PM How many people in your organization are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to assure that employees are engaged at work? If the answer is "not many," welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems—or even get their heads around them. This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare's poetry, or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can't be analyzed in conventional ways. Complexity and ambiguity. Innovation. Communication and presentation. Customer and employee satisfaction.

Humanities+ Future of Liberal-Arts Colleges Easton, Pa.—On Monday morning, a group of accepted applicants heard Daniel H. Weiss, president of Lafayette College, describe the virtues of residential liberal-arts institutions. Hours later, in the same auditorium, dozens of college presidents and provosts heard Mr. Mr. These days, more students and parents, as well as pundits and politicians, are questioning the value of a college degree. Mr. In recent years, many colleges have drastically increased their spending on financial aid, which Mr. Other challenges transcend finances. Another challenge: shifting demographics. “The challenge for us is not that diversity is not a great thing—it’s a great thing,” Mr. And then there’s technology. On the heels of those warnings, Eugene M. Mr. There are also plenty of opportunities, he suggested, for liberal-arts colleges to collaborate with research universities. Mr. Return to Top

The Foundation Center: Higher and Graduate Educational Institutions Maggie Morth Communications Manager The Foundation Center e-mail: Web: Foundation Giving for Higher, Graduate, and Professional Educational Institutions Totaled Nearly $7.3 Billion in 2002 —U.S. foundation support for colleges, community colleges, universities, professional schools, and graduate schools totaled an estimated $7.27 billion in 2002, up from $4.2 billion in 1997. "In the current economic climate, many foundations have cut back on the number of extremely large, multi-year commitments they make," noted Loren Renz, vice president for research at the Foundation Center. The can be accessed at no charge from the "Researching Philanthropy" area of the Foundation Center's Web site, . Report Documents Trends in Foundation Giving for Higher and Graduate Educational Institutions Among key findings from the report: More than nine out of ten foundations (94 percent) in the 2001 sample awarded grants to higher and graduate educational institutions. Return to Press Releases

Research Studies - Special Topic Trends Our funding trends reports provide the latest data available on every aspect of U.S. foundation philanthropy. Our team of research experts analyzes and interprets the data on foundations that we collect — providing a national data source unique for its scope, depth, and historical value. Reports available for download are provided in PDF format, which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States November 2013 According to Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States, foundation support for media is growing at nearly four times the rate of domestic giving in other areas, with 1,012 foundations making 12,040 media-related grants totaling $1.86 billion 2009-2011. - Read the press release - Download the report Free - Explore the data mapping tool Free - Visit the knowledge center Free Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better Advancing Human Rights: The State of Global Foundation Grantmaking May 2011

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