Aspire A blog about the present and future of higher education

Minority students face a number of challenges as they enter higher education (including entering it, as this recent New York Times item highlights)—not the least of which are the economic hurdles. Two recent articles focus on the uphill battle faced by minority students as they engage with higher education—from weighing the decision to apply, to enrolling and matriculating, to successfully ... Read More »

…or, Why joining the Shelby dissent and the Windsor majority doesn’t make you a hypocrite. What a week for the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices handed down a pair of much debated and long-awaited decisions, whose controversial ramifications will be felt for years to come. In my professional role (as well as from a personal interest), I tend to perk ... Read More »

According to Merriam-Webster, a compromise is “something intermediate between or blending qualities of two different things.” In politics, it’s often defined as a result in which both sides are unhappy. By either of these standards, the U.S. Supreme Court compromised in its surprisingly narrow ruling in Fisher v. Texas. Most observers, myself included, expected a bitterly divided ruling, 5-3 or ... Read More »

Imagine the city of New York—all 8 million people. Take a moment to appreciate how many people that is: every skyscraper, apartment building, housing project; every subway, plus Times Square and Grand Central Station, all packed to capacity. Next, add another two million people; suddenly, New York City is bursting at its seams, teeming with 10 million people. Now, put them ... Read More »

The Indiana-based Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to improving higher education, specifically by increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality college degrees, certificates and credentials to 60 percent by 2025. A report Lumina released last week examines a rise in the annual number of American college graduates since the end of the last century. In 1995, less than a quarter of ... Read More »

In a previous post, we linked to this item from the Boston Globe, which noted that a number of high-profile higher ed institutions were hopping on board the edX bandwagon. And now the story’s getting bigger; not only moving from local to national (hi, HuffPo), but looping in the online education company, Coursera. This Huffington Post piece points out that 10 large public university systems, including the ... Read More »

Not long ago, I posted an entry on my own blog about the ways in which the instructor’s role might be able to be reinvented, rather than undermined, by the assimilation of online tools and process. 
My hypothesis was that with some readjustment, continued focus on quality and a research mindset, instructors who embrace innovations and look seriously at available ... Read More »

In my last post, I shared the results of my inquiry into what motivates faculty to teach online. To quickly recap: Based on my research conducted at St. Bonaventure University, the following factors heavily influence faculty’s interest in teaching online: • The ability to reach more students • The flexibility of teaching online • A belief in the effectiveness of ... Read More »

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, author Karin Fischer discussed the concerns that international students and their parents have about safety as they consider attending schools in the United States. These worries are particularly relevant in Boston because one of the three casualties of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings was Lingzi Lu, a Boston University graduate student ... Read More »

Based on data collected from USA Today, the U.S. Census Bureau and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, more adults are returning to college to obtain advanced degrees and are earning more than their bachelor’s degree counterparts. By 2025, employers are expected to need 23 million more college graduates than the nation’s colleges and universities will have conferred at ... Read More »