Research Shows Increase in Full-Time Students

The Digest of Education Statistics offers useful context information for projects you might wish to pursue, and some of the data reported may surprise you. For example, between 1994 and 2004, the number of full-time college students increased by 30 percent, compared to an 8 percent increase in part-time students (surprising). During the same time period, the number of men enrolled rose 16 percent, while the number of women enrolled increased by 25 percent (not surprising)...

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Commission Reports on the Future of Higher Ed

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has published a compendium of State Education Reforms. This is particularly germane as we await the Spellings Commission’s Report, A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education sometime this fall. We learn that in 2006, only five states (California, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, and Wyoming) have policies to align high school standards with college and workplace expectations...

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Seeking an Upgrade to GNU

Under the guise of the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source community is in the process of upgrading the GNU General Public License (GPL) for version 2 to version 3. The goal of the rewrite states: “The success of the GPL is due to its fundamental design principle: the protection of users' freedom to work individually or together to make software do what they wish. To carry the GPL into the future, we have undertaken [an initiative] to adapt the license to uphold this principle through the opportunities and menaces of today's technological and legal environment.” This article carries the draft and a variety of perspectives and comments that will influence final form of version 3...

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