Painting a Post-Election Picture: Higher Education Policy After November 5

A good, thought-provoking article (PDF) from Public Purpose:

By the end of the next President’s first term:

✔ the United States will have three million more jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree and not enough college graduates to fill them;

✔ 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs, 60 percent of all new jobs, and 40 percent of manufacturing jobs will require some form of postsecondary education; and

✔ global competition will demand research and innovation on a scale that even the U.S. is not yet prepared to sustain.
Yet little has been said at the hustings. In July, William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said, “I am disappointed that the candidates have not spent more time on higher education, and in particular on the issues of access to higher education and the urgency of having a much higher percentage of our young people go to and succeed in college.”

Politically Ignorant Americans: Whose Fault Is It?

Do we really need one more book telling us how ill-educated Americans are? Maybe. This essay, poorly titled "Citizen Stupid" is by the author of Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. Only 20 percent of Americans know how many Senators there are? Only 40 percent can name the three branches of government? (That's an improvement.) Fewer than half of Americans know who dropped the first nuclear weapon in war.

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who's in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country's long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter—

The Changing of the Professoriate Begins . . . Baby Boomers Retiring

This interesting article examines the potential impact of a professoriate that is "less liberal," but doesn't fully take into account changing mores - especially with regard to cultural changes that used to be considered liberal but are now mainstream. For example, is "work-life balance" liberal or conservative?

At a conference titled “Generational Shockwaves,” sponsored in November by the TIAA-CREF Institute, Joan Girgus, a special assistant to the dean of faculty at Princeton, underscored how these sorts of concerns were increasingly on the minds of younger faculty members. Universities need to focus more on the “life” side of the work-life balance “because faculties historically were almost entirely male and the wives took care of the family side,” Ms. Girgus said. “I don’t think we can do that anymore.” Ask Ms. Goldrick-Rab if she believes there is a gap between her generation and the boomers, and she immediately answers yes.

For-Profit Universities in the Political Economy of Higher Education

This worthy read by Brian Pusser is from International Higher Education and is a concise brief of the state of the relationship of for-profits and and traditional institutions in the current American political framework:

Can states preserve regulations that protect the public and private benefits of higher education while satisfying the profit demands of an evolving postsecondary market? As with most political contests, much will depend on the ability of a variety of postsecondary stakeholders to become involved in the political arena shaping higher education. Future research on the tension between states and markets will benefit from turning attention to the evolving balance of political legitimacy, lobbying, and policy challenges evidenced in the rise of for-profit degree-granting colleges and universities.

Following the 2008 Election and Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new blogging site, Campaign U: Higher Education and the 2008 Candidates, which should be a nice place to follow the latest on what the candidates do and say with regard to a wide range of issues important to college and university planning. Like all of the Chronicle's blogs, it is not password protected.