Opinion

Are more expensive colleges better? Working at a community college, I’d have to say “not necessarily.” They could be, and sometimes they are, but it depends on how they use that money. That’s why this piece -- about a study of liberal arts colleges showing little relation between cost and value -- didn’t especially surprise me.

Step one: annoy the composition professors. Step two: the foreign language professors.

When I decided to enter graduate school, I was attracted by the prospect of studying topics deeply and having the time and the space in which to do so.

The success of an academic IT department depends largely on that unit's alignment to the culture of the larger academic organization. Actions, behaviors, and a general outlook that may be appropriate for another industry (and in fact may be recognized as "best practices" within the larger IT world), may result in complete failure within higher ed.

Some of you reading this article are about to start your first round of graduate school interviews this spring. Many of these interviews will take place during what is known as recruitment weekend. However, this is a much different process than your standard job interview and you should be aware that there are some key differences between the two.

As we reported earlier this month, we have started rolling out the results of our fall surveys with those newer-to-higher ed (“newbies”) and those that have been in higher ed for a longer period of time (“veterans”). Today we’ll let you know what respondents told us the most significant change (positive or negative) that they have seen since they started working in higher ed.

In the past, when the University of Michigan (U-M) hosted a reception in Shanghai for admitted students and their families, about 80 people attended. Last year, the university used its profile on the popular Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo, to promote the event and 200 people showed up. With 400 million users, Weibo is similar to Twitter.

Contrary to what Dr. Reisberg implied in her recent blog, successful cross-border partnerships do exist. In fact, the overall percentage of unsuccessful projects is very low. The Observatory for Borderless Higher Education indicates that of over 200 international branch campuses currently in operation around the world, only a handful have “bit the dust.” Some may be surprised by this low rate of failure, considering the steady coverage of failed branch campuses, faculty discontent over efforts to internationalize across borders, etc. Stories of successful cross-border initiatives, though far more common, do not make for sexy headlines.