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June 6, 2013
By Davide Savenije
Are college students losing interest in the humanities? That's what Harvard University is worried about. On Thursday, Harvard released The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future, a report that analyzes the decline in students' interest in the humanities and what the school's Arts & Humanities Division needs to do to stay relevant going forward.
Like most other universities, Harvard University has seen a drop in Arts & Humanities majors in recent years. 20% of Harvard students majored in the humanities in 2012, but that number pales in comparison to 36% in 1954. 14% of graduates nationwide majored in the humanities in 1966, but that number has fallen to just 7% in 2010.
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June 2, 2013
By AMY YEE
Prashanth Vishwanathan for the International Herald Tribune
Ghaziabad, India — In a simple classroom above a storefront on a bustling street, four young men crowded around the colorful innards of an open computer hard drive while their teacher explained in Hindi how it all worked.
The computer repair course was among 25 offerings at Gras Academy, a private institution with 58 skills training centers across India, including this one in Ghaziabad, a city on the outskirts of New Delhi.
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June 2, 2013
By CORINNE DILLON
BN Vocational School
BEIJING — When he was 14, Li Yangyang’s prospects were grim. A middle school graduate who moved to Beijing with his parents from the countryside in 2009, he worked long hours in a restaurant for less than 700 renminbi a month.
Then a fellow rural migrant, who had also moved to Beijing, introduced him to BN Vocational School, China’s first tuition-free, nonprofit vocational secondary school.
Now 17, Mr. Li is studying hotel management and hoping to enter an industry in which the starting salary is more than triple his old wage of about $100 a month. “I feel lucky to be at B.N.V.S.,” he said, as he prepared to apply for internships at the capital’s luxury hotels. “My future is much brighter, and I have more opportunities because of it.”
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29 May 2013
By Scott Jaschik
Fifty-eight faculty members have called for Harvard University to create a new faculty committee to consider ethical issues related to edX, the entity created by the university and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses.
The letter urges the creation of the committee to consider “critical questions” about edX and its impact on Harvard and also on “the higher education system as a whole”. And the letter calls for the new committee - unlike two faculty panels that now exist - to come entirely from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That faculty, which has primary responsibility not only for teaching undergraduates but also for training PhDs in a wide range of disciplines, is the largest at the university. The letter was sent last Thursday and published on Friday by The Harvard Crimson.
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May 29, 2013
By MOTOKO RICH
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Time
TROY, N.Y. — David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.
A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, “you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it,” he said.
Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.
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May 27th 2013
by W.W. | HOUSTON
LECTURE halls can seat only so many students, but it's easy enough to broadcast lectures online to tens of thousands. Ventures such as EdX, a non-profit consortium involving a dozen universities, and Coursera, a for-profit business, are now focused on making courses taught by outstanding instructors available to millions of students. Some universities are using these so-called MOOCs, short for "massively open online courses", to supplement their standard curriculum, and the possibility that these offerings may in time replace flesh and blood university professors has become a source of distress among academics.
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May 27, 2013
By CALVIN YANG
The University of Hong Kong. The Women's Directorship Program at the University of Hong Kong.
HONG KONG — Asian universities are beginning to do what has long been practiced in the West: offer short courses specifically for women who are leaders in business and politics.
While the business schools at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others have established courses for female executives, such offerings are just starting to make their mark in Asia.
Last month, the University of Hong Kong held the first part of a course meant to prepare Asian women for the boardroom: The Women’s Directorship Program.
Offering a certificate upon completion, the program is sponsored in part by the executive search firm Harvey Nash and had the first of two three-day sessions in April. Another is planned for June. Participation costs $10,000, and the course covers strategic leadership, stock exchange regulations, conflict resolution and ethics.
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May 27, 2013
By YENNI KWOK
Lam Yik Fei for the International Herald Tribune
Angelika Lisek at the University of Hong Kong, where she is studying after completing an internship in Shanghai.
HONG KONG — Angelika Lisek, a Polish finance student at the University of Glasgow, is no stranger to working during the holidays: waiting tables, selling books door to door or helping her mother at her architecture company. But she knows that her two-month internship in Shanghai last year is what will give her a competitive edge.
“We are ambitious — we don’t want to relax,” said Ms. Lisek, describing students like her who seek internships abroad. She was in her second year at the university when she saw a work opportunity in China.
“I had never been to Asia, and it was a new challenge,” said Ms. Lisek, who is 23 and is now attending a one-year exchange program at the University of Hong Kong.
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May 23, 2013
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Students at community colleges increasingly come from low-income families, as I mention in an article for Thursday’s newspaper about a new report. The trends, in their simplest terms:
 Source: Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do About It,” in “Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College,” ed. Richard D. Kahlenberg (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2010), 136–37, Figures 3.6 and 3.7. |
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May 22, 2013
By DAVID LEONHARDT
WASHINGTON — Community colleges have received a declining share of government spending on higher education over the last decade even as their student bodies have become poorer and more heavily African-American and Latino, according to a report to be released Thursday.
“Many community colleges end up receiving minimal federal support,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which is publishing the report. “The kids with the greatest needs receive the fewest resources.”
The report argues that colleges have become increasingly separate and unequal, evoking the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which barred racial segregation in elementary and secondary schools. Higher education today, the report says, is stratified between four-year colleges with high graduation rates that serve largely affluent students and community colleges with often dismal graduation rates that serve mostly low-income students.
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