The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and College Consortium recently hammered out an online course-sharing initiative. The program is intended to help the private schools increase course access to students, with all kinds of benefits.
For the second year running, library collections in higher education now contain more digital items than physical. According to preliminary numbers issued by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, of the 2.5 billion items in colleges and universities in 2017, 59 percent were digital — books, databases, media and serials — and 41 percent were physical.
The share of college students taking online courses has grown, up by about 6 percent, even as the overall number of people enrolled in higher education institutions dropped by about half a percent. According to preliminary numbers issued by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, of the 20.1 million students enrolled in fall 2017, 6.7 million were taking at least one distance education class, representing 33 percent of the total — a boost from 31 percent in the previous year.
A recent project found that low-cost advising techniques can help disadvantaged students increase the number and selectivity of colleges they apply to. "Find the Fit," as the initiative is called, is intended to address the continuing problem of "undermatch," in which students don't go to college at all or choose a college that's less selective than their academic credits warrant.
A new report from the Association for Computing Machinery asks whether there's anything to be done for the lack of diversity in the tech field, which seems to arise in high school and college and percolate into the workforce from there. The research project called on university representatives and industry experts to examine questions of diversity in computer science. They offered two big conclusions: First, retention in CS is a major issue; and, second, data collection about retention in CS is poor.
Upcoming events include EdgeCon 2019, the Association of American Colleges and Universities 2019 Annual Meeting, and LearnLaunch Across Boundaries Conference.
A paper published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute suggested that the country may be putting too much emphasis on STEM and obscuring the "noncognitive skills" that are really needed, such as persistence and "character."
Campus IT leaders aren't wildly enthusiastic about the investments in technology their institutions are making. In just a single area — student recruitment — do at least half of these individuals (52 percent) rate the IT investment "very effective." That's according to the latest the Campus Computing Survey, produced by Kenneth Green.
A Freedom of Information Act project to measure the number of FOIA lawsuits filed against federal agencies has added the Department of Education to the top-10 list for the first time.
A Chicago-based school is implementing an application intended for managing faculty affairs. DePaul University adopted Interfolio to merge faculty affairs processes under a single system designed to support the lifecycle of faculty careers, including hiring, promotion and tenure and accreditation reporting.