Higher education faces an increasingly dire crisis of underfunding. We turn now to look at one of the consequences of this crisis: the growing threat to academic freedom. Academic and author Henry Reichman takes on this threat in a new book, out this week, titled The Future of Academic Freedom. In it, he writes, “Academic capitalism—or, as many term it, ’corporatization’—has greatly impacted academic work and the ability of the faculty to unite in defense of professional norms, including academic freedom,” he says. Academic capitalism is just one of a number of topics Reichman tackles in this book, which starts by asking what academic freedom is, and expands to look at the loss of public funding for institutions of higher education, and the harassment of faculty members for political speech.
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by Henry Reichman, Amy Goodman, Juan González, Democracy Now.
Posted: April 10th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
When states disinvest in higher education, their universities respond by putting a higher priority on students who will bring in the most money. Colleges facing the biggest budget crunches are the likeliest to aggressively recruit wealthy out-of-state students… A few public universities bucked the trend. For example, most of the University of California at Irvine’s public-high-school visits in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were to predominantly minority communities. Only a few visits were in predominantly white communities. But like the University of California at Berkeley and North Carolina State University, which also emphasized in-state recruiting, the reasons may have as much to do with nonresident enrollment caps as with a philosophical commitment to home-grown talent.
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by Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: March 26th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
While the wealthy are spending tens of thousands of dollars making sure their children are accepted to the elite university of their choice, millions of college students are at risk of dropping out because they can’t afford $300 for books… According to a new study, half of California’s community college students don’t have enough food, and 19% are homeless. Several other studies show these challenges are pervasive, both across the country and at 2-year and 4-year colleges alike.
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by Jennifer Tescher, Forbes.
Posted: March 14th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
UC claims to generate nearly 10% of all published research in the United States. The university also has been a significant partner of Elsevier, which has published about 18% of all UC output and collected more than 25% of the university’s $40-million overall subscription budget. But the open access issue is the reason their battle has drawn the attention of academics all over the world. UC’s goal is a direct challenge to the business model of academic publishing that earns Elsevier more than $1 billion in operating profit per year.
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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: March 1st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California would add financial protections for students at for-profit colleges under measures that Democratic legislators introduced Wednesday in response to the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era regulations. The seven bills would place restrictions on college programs if graduates cannot find good-paying jobs, limit aggressive recruiting measures that target veterans and allow students to recoup more of their costs if their schools shut down. “We are here today to say students come first, not shareholders,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco.
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by Alexei Koseff, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: February 27th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
[T]he field seems to have converged on a consensus: A free-college proposal—or an answer about why they don’t have one—is something of a prerequisite for Democratic candidates hoping to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The consensus is long in the making… In recent years, in the absence of ambitious federal efforts to deal with college costs, states, both red and blue, have been introducing their own college-affordability plans. “Anybody who wanted to do anything big or bold on college affordability had to do it at the state level,” Huelsman told me. More than 20 states have adopted free-college models since 2005. New Jersey, West Virginia, and Virginia look to be the next three states to implement free-college plans…
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by Adam Harris, The Atlantic.
Posted: February 26th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Each year, thousands more qualified students apply to Cal State L.A. than the campus has the funding or space to accommodate. Now campus officials want to raise admissions standards and shrink the fall 2020 class. If officials decide to do so and the Cal State chancellor’s office approves, Cal State L.A. will join six other Cal State campuses — Fresno, Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego, San Jose and San Luis Obispo — that declared themselves fully “impacted,” meaning they have too many qualified applicants for all levels and programs, and made similar changes… Campus enrollment has increased by 25% since 2012 while funding for expanding enrollment has gone up only about 2%.
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by Suhauna Hussain, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: February 25th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
According to a new survey from CollegeVine, a Cambridge, Mass.-based consultant group that helps college-bound high-school students, San Jose State is ranked the most underrated school in America… CollegeVine, who says it has worked with more than 6,000 students so far, found “about 10 schools that are consistently underrated, but which students and parents shouldn’t discount.” The survey’s authors say that while “the traditional college rankings do a decent job of ranking the best universities … because of how these formulas are constructed, there are some serious factors that get left out. When we look to advise families on colleges that are underrated, our primary focus is on outcomes — more specifically financial outcomes like starting salary and ROI (return on investment), as well as qualitative outcomes like job placements.”
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by Patrick May, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: February 22nd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
With this large new investment in higher education, Newsom’s budget proposal said that that he was trying “to increase access to higher education, improve student success and timely degree completion, and to better ensure that college remains affordable by freezing tuition at current levels.” And yet, despite the commitment of over a billion dollars of new revenue to the U.S.’s largest community college and public university system, little of that money is likely to go where it is most needed: to reducing class sizes for introductory college courses, and to replacing poorly-paid temp job for college instructors with professional positions at living wages. The reason is simple, and ideological: today’s higher education administrators— in California and around the U.S.— are committed to a version of what they call “student success” that marginalizes questions of class size, teaching load, and the working conditions of faculty from their definition of success.
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by Trevor Griffey, PhD, Remaking the University.
Posted: February 22nd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
In a report released Feb. 12, California State Auditor, or CSA, Elaine Howle said that although the UC Office of the President, or UCOP, has made strides in implementing financial transparency reforms, its current state still allows the UCOP to maintain “virtually an unlimited amount” of money. Howle’s most recent report was released after the results of her 2017 audit on the UCOP in which she discovered an accumulation of unaccounted funds, including $175 million that was hidden from the UC Board of Regents. In response to the 2017 findings, Howle requested that the UCOP implement transparency reforms by 2018.
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by Sasha Langholz, The Daily Californian.
Posted: February 18th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
