Blogs

Institutions are announcing their admissions data, and it’s another year of record highs and lows. With these record highs and lows revealing themselves in the form of acceptance and rejection letters and emails, what does this say about the current state of higher education?

The last few weeks of the semester have a feeling of both desperation and joy about them. Joy comes for me at the approach of spring—the cherry tree outside my office window just bloomed, so I know it’s really here now. But there’s desperation at the amount of work that remains to be done. My students are tired. Some are sick—I have received emails from the hospital emergency room, the doctor’s office, the dorm room, requesting extra time for papers due to illness or explaining an absence from class. Some are just experiencing the normal stresses of the end of the semester—the realization that, yes, all those papers really are due all at once, and the reading really does need to be done before class.

By their words shall ye know them. The Princeton graduate getting global attention for warning current undergraduate Princeton women to gather ye assortative rosebuds while ye may isn't the April Fool's joke people are calling her. She's got a certain take on things... Things having to do with the importance of physical, rather than virtual, campuses, for instance...

Next week I’m doing my first accreditation visit. I’ve been on the receiving end of three ten-year visits in my career -- you’d think that wouldn’t be mathematically possible, but it is -- but this will be my first time on the visiting side. I spent a chunk of this weekend plowing through the self-study, pen in hand.

I was sitting at my desk in the late hours of the night, trying to write a paper and I was absolutely where I did not want to be at that moment. Instead of having to write that paper, I would have preferred to have spent these hours watching a good film,or listening to some music while I read a good book.

Does the following situation sound familiar to you? Your supervisor gave you some papers to start exploring your topic. You start reading, excited to learn more about the subject. Then you start looking up all the references and continue reading from there. You follow a few journals in your field and print out all the recent relevant publications on this topic. Meanwhile, the number of publications you want to look at keeps on growing

Let me begin by stating my biases about for-profit education. I believe in the potential of for-profit education to be a force for good. I believe that the profit motive is not antithetical to the larger societal goals of higher education.

Where I announce THATCamp Kentucky and reflect on my experience at THATCampSE2013.