In the United States, just 6% of college faculty members are Black. It’s a really tough career pathway for anyone, but as we’ll learn from my guest today, there are so many additional hurdles to clear if you are Black. Marlene Daut is Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia, is the author of many books and articles about Haiti as well as a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education where she shares her own tenure-track truth called “Becoming Full Professor While Black.”
The humanities are in a tough spot these days, and the discipline of philosophy often ends up in the crosshairs as an exemplar of Undergrad Majors That Will Waste Your Time and Money. Good news though: it isn’t!
Dr. Andrew Moe is the Director of Admission at Swarthmore College and has been leading a national effort to focus the eyes of his colleagues more on students coming from rural communities.
In the summer of 2016, a Facebook group emerged to quickly become the primary space in which professionals on all sides of college admissions would gather to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to some really hard problems.
Soon children everywhere will be saying goodbye to their parents and to their communities and the times and the places that made them into the adults they’re on their way to becoming in college. Dr. Susan Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, UT, wrote a book called “Homesickness: An American History.”
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If you pay attention to the world of college admissions, then you not only know this guy, chances are he’s helped you form your understanding of what goes on in said world. Eric Hoover has been writing about admissions for about as long as current college freshmen have been alive. What has changed over that period of time? What are the constants? If I give him enough beers, will he tell me who the next big names are that will be going “test optional”???
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Professor Marybeth Gasman is the Director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions and a professor of education. Soon she’s moving herself and her center to Rutgers University in New Jersey. Continue reading
Temple University Economics Professor Doug Webber does some fascinating research on the impact of our academic choices in college. In a world plagued by a lust for prestige, how much does it really matter in terms of your ability to earn a good living?
The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success emerged 3 years ago to provide an alternative application platform for, at first, 32 colleges, and now over 150 of them. Executive Director Annie Reznik is helping this group of colleges execute a mission to improve the college attendance and graduation chances for more of the kinds of students who don’t go and don’t graduate.
Reach Higher is former First Lady Michelle Obama’s college access initiative, operating under the leadership of my guest this episode, Eric Waldo. Continue reading
6 million people attend community colleges in this country, and yet we somehow don’t tend to consider it as “college.”
Bart Grachan earns his keep doing everything he can to help students succeed at LaGuardia Community College, and also to helping us all change the conversation to include these students, their concerns as well as their successes.
It’s a company with a loyal following to rival almost any brand, and everyone in college admissions is buying it. Slate is the technology of choice that admissions offices use to read applications and manage every interaction that students make with that office, from mailing list subscription to every click on an email to admission notification.
Stanley Nelson has been making movies for a long time, and his latest film – airing Monday, February 19th on PBS – called “Tell Them We Are Rising” is the first of its kind fo explore the topic of Historically Black Colleges and Universities or HBCUs.
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Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez visited the island of Puerto Rico to see how people were recovering at its most important institution of higher education, the University of Puerto Rico.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) is a group of over 150 private schools that have coalesced around an idea that our current model of grading students is not only outdated, but harmful to their development. Scott Looney is the Head of School at the Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the driving force behind the Mastery Transcript, a brand-new way to consider how we assess student achievements in high school. Continue reading
Akil Bello is a friend of mine who is also one of these odd sorts who concerns himself in life with all things Standardized Test. Following up from Episode 4 where I pledge to take the SAT, I finally sit down to register to do it, which in itself can take up to an hour. Naturally, I thought this would make for gripping radio. We document this epic experience of simply registering for the exam and attempt to read the minds – and fine print rivaling the iTunes terms of service – of the College Boarders who’ve put this experience together.
So we have literally all of humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the Internet, and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are making it easier to get more education to more people for free. Dr. Andrew Ho has done research on MOOCs and their impact and assessing the knowledge obtained in a MOOC such that any credential you receive after passing a class matters in the marketplace.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo recently championed and passed the nation’s first plan to offer free college tuition to state residents attending state public colleges called “The Excelsior Scholarship.” Free always sounds good, but does it make for good policy? Professor Doug Webber, a labor economist at Temple University who has contributed to fivethirtyeight.com, Fortune, and has testified before congress on matters of higher education, helps us understand what about this plan is good, and what about this plan might actually be really bad policy. We use NY Times columnist David Brooks’ scathing 8-point critique (“The Cuomo College Fiasco” NYT 4/14/17) as a frame for this discussion. Continue reading
I needed to go back to something that I think Oregon State Representative Lew Frederick is uniquely qualified to talk about and something that’s been on my mind almost every day since about the 2nd presidential debate: and that is, is Donald Trump racist? And if he is, how should we feel about that? More specifically what does it mean if you vote for him? What does it mean if I know people who are voting for him, does that make them racist? I veered from the path of this podcast’s mission of discussing higher education in this one instance because the opportunity presented itself and in my mind and placed it into it’s own “part 2” and I called Lew back to ask him some of these questions.
As a candidate running unopposed for the State Senate of Oregon from a Portland district, Lew Frederick stands to be one of the most if not the most influential black politicians in the state of Oregon, which makes him one of the most influential black politicians in this country. I wouldn’t normally use the qualifier “black” but Lew is one of two elected officials in the state legislature who are black and that characteristic is particularly meaningful especially in this day and age as we consider the direction of society and the politicians who want to direct it. He’s been active in politics his whole life, and active in the politics of Oregon – and apropos of this podcast, Oregon’s systems of education – for decades.
Learn more about Lew and his work here: http://www.lewfrederick.org/
Here is an article referenced in the episode: “This is why finland has the best schools.” http://www.smh.com.au/national/this-is-why-finland-has-the-best-schools-20160324-gnqv9l.html
Maria Maisto is the Executive Director of the New Faculty Majority, an organization fighting to improve working conditions for adjunct and contingent faculty at American institutions of higher ed. The name grew out of the reality that only in recent history has higher ed leaned on adjuncts to the degree that they comprise 75% of the teaching workforce.
They’re members of the “faculty,” at 75% of the teaching labor force in higher education they are the “majority,” and it’s “new” because a combination of factors have only recently made them the unstable majority of the teaching workforce. Continue reading
Dr. Denise Pope is a professor of education at Stanford and a founder of “Challenge Success,” an organization that “partners with schools and families to provide kids with the academic, social, and emotional skills needed to succeed now and in the future.” She’s out to reduce stress among teenagers through a variety of methods including a reduction in homework and more sleep. These were two of my favorite concepts when I was in high school, but for some strange reason even the students are pushing back.
Follow me on Twitter @crushpod – visit www.crushpodcast.com for more info – Subscribe and rate The Crush on iTunes! Continue reading
On March 30th, Ben Casselman blew up a Facebook group I’m a part of with about 10,000 members in it, all of them college admissions professionals in one way or another, high schcool, college, independent consultants, all of ’em. He blew it up with an article titled: “Shut Up About Harvard.” Continue reading
Students always talk about the “feel” of a college campus being that indescribable and critical deciding factor that influences their decision to apply and eventually to enroll at a college. Are colleges supposed to feel a certain way? Why? Where’d this feeling come from and what are today’s designers thinking about when designing spaces of higher education? Nader Tehrani, former head of the architecture department at MIT and current Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union helps me answer these questions and more.
Tests suck and they suck real bad. I know because I cried the day I got my SAT scores in the mail. BUT- we need them in our lives in the college admissions world…or do we? Adam Ingersoll, is the co-founder of the west coast’s leading test prep company, Compass Education Group, and he helps us think about the value of these tests, their present and future, and whether grownups like me should take the new SAT. And then cry about it for old time’s sake. Continue reading
Bob DeMars lived the dream of kids in streets and backyards everywhere when he played college football for the University of Southern California. He paid a heavy price, and entered into a fraternity he didn’t see coming. With the release of his new documentary “The Business of Amateurs,” which has been met with wide-ranging acclaim, which includes being used in John Oliver’s absolute The People’s Elbow-ing of the NCAA on “Last Week Tonight,” Bob hopes to spread the word to kids before they make the decisions he and the film’s subjects did.
Emily Harris has an incredible job as the Jerusalem correspondent for National Public Radio. How do you get a job like that, and how do you prepare for it in college? (Hint: You kind of don’t.) Being a radio correspondent in Jerusalem requires a pretty diverse skill set. How did college prepare Emily for her job? (Photo credit: Ahmed Abuhamda for NPR) Continue reading
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