Thẻ: Higher Education

U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

gallup.com by Jeffrey M. Jones

Nearly as many U.S. adults have little or no confidence as have high confidence

WASHINGTON, D.C. — An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none.

The latest results are based on a June 3-23 Gallup survey that gauged Americans’ confidence in various institutions. A follow-up story reporting on the remainder of institutions will be published in the coming days.

This year, Gallup and Lumina Foundation partnered to better understand the nature of confidence in higher education. The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members.

A review of the historical trends shows that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. Americans who lack confidence in higher education today say their concerns lie in colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and being overly expensive.

A separate article in the Gallup-Lumina series will report that Americans are significantly more confident in two-year colleges than four-year colleges when evaluating the two types of institutions separately.

Republicans’ Confidence Has Changed the Most

Confidence in higher education among Republicans today is nearly a mirror image of what it was nine years ago. In 2015, 56% of Republicans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence, and 11% had little or none. Now, 20% are confident and 50% have little or no confidence.

Republicans are not alone in having reduced confidence in higher education, as 35% of independents, down from 48% in 2015, and 56% of Democrats, down from 68%, are confident.

In the past year, all party groups have shown at least some increase in the percentage with very little or no confidence, and a decrease in the percentage saying they have some. None of the party groups shows meaningful change in high confidence over the past year.

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Higher Education’s Donor Problem

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

time.com

University Presidents Testify In House Hearing On Campus Antisemitism
Dr. Claudine Gay testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. She has since resigned from her post as President of Harvard University.Kevin Dietsch—Getty Images

BY NICHOLAS DIRKS JANUARY 11, 2024 2:02 PM EST

Dirks is currently the president of the New York Academy of Sciences and author of the new book CITY OF INTELLECT: The Uses and Abuses of the University

The end of Claudine Gay’s brief and turbulent presidency at Harvard has hardly put an end to controversies about elite university leadership and governance. Bill Ackman, the “activist” donor and Harvard graduate, is calling for further resignations from the Harvard Corporation, while baiting MIT’s President, Sally Kornbluth, with the Shakespearean query: “et tu?” Meanwhile, Mark Rowan, the board member who engineered the takedown of the University of Pennsylvania’s erstwhile president, Elizabeth McGill—the first of the Washington three to step down—has now been pressing his advantage in calling for major reforms of an academic nature at Penn. Philanthropy and academic freedom are colliding in ways that have the potential to undermine the true purpose and mission of our universities.

As much as these, and some other, donors have appeared to embody popular discontent with those at the pinnacle of higher education, it is easy to forget that not long ago the scandals around these universities had to do with donors who used their gifts as leverage to secure admission for their children, making visible the problematic relationship between some individual philanthropy and private interests. We all called for firewalls then but seem now to have forgotten those critiques of the relationship between private interests and higher education.

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.612.0_en.html#goog_765384836

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What matters in global education: Big Questions for the New Year

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này
getrevue.com

Photo by Rachael Ren
Photo by Rachael Ren

It’s been a bumpy few years for international education — and 2022 could bring more of the same. Later in this newsletter, I’ve got predictions from readers about what this year holds for the field.

Here are three big questions I expect to be asking in my reporting. Will a hybrid approach to international education stick? 
Even more than the rest of higher education, international ed prioritizes the experiential. Global mobility, both inbound and outbound, has prized immersion in culture and place. Covid-19 disrupted that: Many international students were forced to study remotely from their home countries. Virtual education abroad and internships replaced semesters in Barcelona and Rome.Let’s be blunt: Many of these experiences were not ideal. But as the pandemic has worn on, we’ve all become better at virtual. It also offers opportunity: Virtual exchange can open international study to the 90 percent of U.S. undergraduates who don’t go abroad. Transnational education may bring an American education to students who can’t spend four years here. At the same time, concerns about sustainability have led students and educators alike to approach international travel more deliberately. In the post-pandemic future, will virtual and hybrid compliment the in-person? Or will they continue to be viewed, and resourced, as second class?

Can international education diversify? For a field that is global, it can sometimes look homogenous: U.S. colleges draw students predominantly from a handful of countries and send them out to a relatively small number of nations. Partnerships are clustered in certain parts of the world. Some institutions are deeply global, while many others have minimal international programming. We want to diversify participation in international experiences, but those of us drawn to this work don’t necessarily look like the students we hope to attract. (And yes, I include myself among the “we.”)Change has been coming, but it’s been incremental. Will the pandemic jumpstart diversification and transformation? Or, under pressure to do more with less, will the status quo be reinforced?

Will the pandemic help make the case for internationalization? Back in 2019, I wrote about whether the “golden era” for international education was over — if there had ever been one. The pandemic may offer even more of an inflection point. On one hand, it underscores the importance of the global connections made on campus — the swift development of Covid vaccines simply would not have been possible without multinational teams of researchers, many of them former international students. As international enrollments tumbled, the absence of foreign students made visible their critical importance to campus diversity and to college budgets. Even the Biden administration has recognized the value of international education and pledged to take a more proactive and consistent approach to sustaining it.Still, there will undoubtedly be college leaders who see the disruption to international mobility as a litmus test and decide that it is a discretionary activity that their students can do without. Belt-tightening and burnout has forced thousand of international educators from the field, and many won’t be back. Even some veterans have told me how discouraged they are by Washington policies that work as cross-purposes with attracting international students as well as their struggles to make the case to administrators. Which vision will win out?Your forecasts for the year ahead are below. But first some news…

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Professors need to know What Students Want from online learning during the pandemic

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

chronicle.com

In recent months there’s been no shortage of surveys in which students describe the challenges they faced during the pivot to remote education in the spring and summer. Many struggled to secure consistent Wi-Fi access and a quiet place to learn. They felt overwhelmed, not just by the pandemic, but in trying to keep track of assignments, deadlines, and communication with their professors. They missed the routines and relationships of campus life. Motivation was a real challenge.

So what do they want their professors to know, in order to make the experience better this fall? I put that question to a panel of experts — students and faculty members — this week in a Chronicle webinar. I encourage you to watch it here because they had many great ideas and insights. But if you’re short on time, here are a few key takeaways.

Connections are crucial to learning. To prime students to learn, ensure that they feel connected to you and to the class. That’s not easy to do online, but consistent outreach, regular office hours, and a wise use of synchronous class time will help.

One panelist in the webinar, Vikki Katz, an associate professor in Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, surveyed 3,000 undergraduates across the country about their remote-learning experiences last spring. A crucial factor in students’ developing a sense of confidence and competence in a remote-learning environment, she and her co-author found, was whether they felt faculty members were accessible to them. Tiếp tục đọc “Professors need to know What Students Want from online learning during the pandemic” →

Open Call: ESAA Projects

~ Chau Bui ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

Bạn nào là thành viên của Erasmus (vd: từng được hoặc đang nhận học bổng Erasmus Mundus của EU…) thì nhanh nhanh apply nha! Deadline: 12/12/2018

For those who are members of various Erasmus organisations, please consider to apply! 

Minh Châu

Open Call: ESAA Projects

The ESAA is excited to launch its first call for projects for 2018-2019.
ESAA, Call, OYOE, Worldwide Activities, Social Activities, Career Opportunities, E+ Promo, 

The ESAA Projects scheme aims at encouraging collaboration across ESAA Member Organisations and advance ESAA’s mission.

KEY DATES
  • Launch of application call: November 23, 2018
  • Application deadline: December 12, 2018 (23:59 CET)
  • Plan to implement all activities in your project no earlier than 1st of February 2019 and no later than 31 May 2019.

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Higher Education in Vietnam

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

By Nick Clark, Editor, World Education News & Reviews

ACCESS WES WEBINAR ARCHIVE: “EDUCATION IN VIETNAM”

Enrollment at the tertiary level has grown dramatically in Vietnam over the last decade, with the national gross enrollment ratio (college enrollment as a percentage of the total college-age population) rising from 10 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2005, and 25 percent last year, according to data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. However, the system faces a raft of challenges in responding to the employment needs of Vietnam’s growing economy, especially as it seeks to climb the value chain away from a focus on low-wage manufacturing towards modern industry and innovation.

In this article, we offer an overview of the Vietnamese higher education system, the challenges it faces, and the reforms needed to improve. In addition, we touch on the current mobility trends of Vietnamese students abroad, finishing with a look at some of the most commonly seen academic credentials, including a file of sample documents and advice on what credentials to request when evaluating Vietnamese files and how best to convert grades.
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STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này
 theconversation.com
From biotech to climate change, advances in technology raise significant moral questions. To engage responsibly, our next generation of scientists need training in the arts and ethics. 

In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups — scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics. Tiếp tục đọc “STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training” →

Why Developing Countries Should Not Neglect Liberal Education

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

AACU

By: David E. Bloom and Henry Rosovsky

Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts….
(Thomas Jefferson, addressing the benefits to society of a liberal education, in an 1813 letter to John Adams)

Introduction

Western civilization is home to a long tradition of liberal education, defined as an emphasis on the whole development of an individual apart from (narrower) occupational training. The beginnings of this philosophy can perhaps be traced back as far as ancient Greece and more clearly to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) of medieval times. That tradition has continued, and today liberal education is an important segment of higher education in all developed countries. Its role in nurturing leaders and informed citizens is recognized in both the public and private sectors. Global statistics are difficult to obtain, but our impression is that interest in liberal education is growing in many parts of the West. Tiếp tục đọc “Why Developing Countries Should Not Neglect Liberal Education” →

Germany claims success for elite universities drive

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

Report praises US$5-billion scheme for making leading universities more competitive — but some smaller institutions have done just as well.

04 September 2015 Article tools

Heike Zappe/ Humboldt University

Humboldt University in Berlin, one of the ‘elite’ institutions favoured by Germany’s Excellence Initiative.

Nature – For a decade, Germany’s government has tried to explode the myth that all the country’s universities are equal. In 2006, it launched an 11-year, €4.6-billion (US$5-billion) programme that aimed to make the best German universities more competitive with the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. The campaign, called the Excellence Initiative, led to 14 institutions gaining the common — although unofficial — label of ‘elite’. Tiếp tục đọc “Germany claims success for elite universities drive” →