Whereas there were about 250,000 administrators and professional staff members in 1975, about half the number of professors, by 2005 there were over 750,000, easily outnumbering tenure-stream professors. The chief difference from medicine is the steep drop in pay, benefits, and job security for those who hold beta positions. Over the past 40 years, we have witnessed the rapid growth of contingent professors—part-time, adjunct, nonpermanent—who now account for three-quarters of college teachers. While health-care professionals in beta positions earn decent wages—nurses average about $65,000 a year, and nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants over $90,000—and usually have secure jobs, the majority of college teachers hold part-time appointments, typically paid $2,000 to $3,000 per course, and have no job security.

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by Jeffrey J. Williams, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: December 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Cal ranks last in graduation rates for those two sports among the nation’s 72 major intercollegiate athletics programs, according to the NCAA. A look at some of Cal’s closest public and private competitors – Stanford, UCLA and the University of Michigan – reveals how the culture and practices at those universities support student athletes’ academic achievement… Over and over, however, schools that successfully graduate football and men’s basketball players say the university fosters a culture that values academics as much or more than athletics.

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by Nanette Asimov and Ann Killion, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: November 22nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

When prominent universities began giving free access to courses online, some proponents hailed it as a way to open education to the vastly underprivileged in countries around the world. But a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published Wednesday by the journal Nature says that isn’t what has happened. Instead, the researchers found, a vast majority of students enrolled in “Massive Open Online Courses” – commonly known as MOOCs – already hold college degrees and are taking the courses primarily to advance in their jobs. “MOOCs are not providing this revolutionary access that some have claimed,” said Gayle Christensen, executive director for global initiatives at Penn.

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by Susan Snyder, The Inquirer.

Posted: November 20th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The union that represents 22,000 employees at UC campuses and medical centers began a one-day strike early Wednesday morning at the system’s nine campuses and five medical centers… At the UCLA campus, AFSCME Local 3299 spokesman Kevin Brown said hundreds of supporters had already turned out and they were prepared to picket until 7 p.m. “We’re out here rallying for our rights,” Brown said.

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by Larry Gordon and Ari Bloomekatz, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: November 20th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Mohammad H. Qayoumi, president of San Jose State University, has spent much of the year turning his campus into a testing ground for new online-teaching tools. But apparently he’s also been testing the patience of faculty members, who say the idea of shared governance has been all but forgotten as he has sought technology that might eventually help the university teach more students for less money… Last spring, professors at the university redesigned several mathematics courses for Udacity’s platform and offered them for credit to a number of students, some of whom were enrolled at the university. Some professors involved in the experiment praised the Udacity platform, but the results of the spring trial were not promising; students in the “Udacified” versions of the courses performed significantly worse over all than did their classroom counterparts.

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by Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: November 18th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

UC Berkeley, the world’s top-ranked public university, is admitting student athletes with shockingly low grades and scores if they show promise as revenue-generating football or basketball players, say two Cal scholars whose new study helps explain why athletes on campus have the worst graduation rates in the country. While the highly competitive university routinely turns away applicants who earn straight A’s in high school, it has also been admitting student athletes on full scholarship even if their average high school grade was a B-minus. Its policy, in fact, permits a C average.

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by Ann Killion and Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: November 15th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“Imagine,” an investor in the Professor’s company says, “you can hand a kid in Africa a tablet and give him Harvard on a piece of glass!” The wonky term for the Professor’s work, massive open online course, goes into such wide use that a New York Times headline declares 2012 the “Year of the MOOC.” … But there’s a problem: The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype. “I’d aspired to give people a profound education–to teach them something substantial,” Professor Sebastian Thrun tells me when I visit his company, Udacity, in its Mountain View, California, headquarters this past October. “But the data was at odds with this idea.”

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by Max Chafkin, Fast Company.

Posted: November 14th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

UC expects $142 million from the state for 2014-15 — a 5 percent increase over this year — but is asking for $121 million more, including money for pensions and enrollment expansion. Brown says don’t count on it. “I don’t have a Nobel Prize, but I know the political climate in California probably better than anybody else,” Brown said. ” … the 5 percent we’re going to give you is pretty much all you’re going to get.” … UC Regent Sherry Lansing said she was “not ready to give up” and that she believed in the system’s “power of advocacy.” Those advocates will likely start with a fairness argument: The state supports the California State University and the community college pension funds, but not UC’s.

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by Katy Murphy, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: November 14th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

New UC President Janet Napolitano marked her first regents meeting Wednesday with a vow to make the university more affordable and calling for an undergraduate tuition freeze in 2014-15. And that was only the first bullet point of an ambitious policy agenda after six weeks on the job. Napolitano also said the university must find a way to move researchers’ inventions from the lab to the market more quickly; make it simpler for community college students to transfer to UC; expand enrollment; cut administrative costs; and become a better steward of the environment, using no more energy than it produces by 2025.

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by Katy Murphy, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: November 14th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Access to a community college education may narrow this year as legislation from the state community college chancellor’s office limiting class repeatability takes effect… However, lifelong learners, especially in the arts, will be effectively cut out of the student population due to these limits, Mangin said… Lifelong learners, or people who perhaps have their degree and want to enrich their lives with continued classes, were an original part of the 1960 master plan for community colleges, Mangin said.

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by Kara Guzman, The Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Posted: November 12th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.