Education

EDU news curated by Kiosk: For-profit colleges…and other higher ed news

Holding executives responsible

From Inside Higher Ed: “In the Education Department’s latest move to ramp up oversight of for-profit colleges, it outlines its authority to hold individuals who control risky institutions financially responsible. The guidance also applies to private non-profit colleges. … Department officials said the guidance, which requires those who ‘exert significant control’ over private institutions to assume personal liability, is aimed at the riskiest institutions as well as intended to protect students and taxpayers. Associations representing nonprofit and for-profit private institutions said the guidance was an overreach, exceeding the department’s authority.”

 

This controversial, for-profit college has received $1.6B in GI Bill funds, the most of any school

From USA Today: “The University of Phoenix has continued to receive more GI Bill funding than any other institution of higher learning, despite its history of government scrutiny for misleading military veterans. The Veterans Affairs Department sent the for-profit school $1.6 billion in GI Bill funds from 2013 to 2021 for students who enrolled in online and in-person classes. The GI Bill is intended to help veterans get a college education, but it’s also an attractive form of revenue for colleges. Of the top 10 recipients of GI Bill funding, seven are for-profit colleges while two are private colleges, and just one is a public institution, based on a review of federal data that independent researcher Brett Herda shared exclusively with USA TODAY.”

 

Arkansas faculty opposes purchase of U of Phoenix

From Inside Higher Ed: “The Faculty Senate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville said last week that it opposes acquisition of the University of Phoenix by a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Arkansas system, The Arkansas Times reported. Stephen E. Caldwell said, ‘As chair of our Faculty Senate, it is my duty to represent and express the concerns of that body on all matters effecting our campus. I cannot think of any other issue that has so universally bound our faculty into a singular voice, and I am proud to represent that voice.’”

 

In other news…

The role of politics in where students want to go to college

From Inside Higher Ed: “When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Constitution did not guarantee a right to abortion, many expected the result to influence where students chose to enroll at college. … a new study from the Art & Science Group, being released today, found that nearly one in four high school seniors ‘ruled out institutions solely due to the politics, policies, or legal situation in the state’ where the college was located. Further, the study found that ‘this behavior was statistically true across liberals, moderates and conservatives.’”

 

Spring enrollment steady, but not for all institutions

From Inside Higher Ed: “Community college enrollment increased by 2.1 percent this spring compared to a year earlier, and undergraduate enrollment at private four-year institutions also increased, rising by 0.8 percent at nonprofit institutions and 2.2 percent at for-profit institutions. But four-year public universities’ undergraduate enrollment fell by 0.9 percent … roughly 45 percent of all students in higher education attend such institutions.”

 

The child care barrier

From Generation Hope: “In December of 2022, Generation Hope surveyed its current 140 student-parent Scholars in an effort to better understand their child care needs and experiences. … 92% of respondents did not have access to or were unaware of on-campus child care options. 71% of respondents relied on informal and/or un-paid child care (i.e. family, friends, neighbors, public school programming, etc). … 74% of respondents were providing 30+ hours per week care for their child/children whilst also attending school.”

 

Despite TikTok bans, colleges are thriving on the app

From Inside Higher Ed: “According to a 2022 Pew Research study, two-thirds of teenagers use TikTok, making it a vital recruiting tool for colleges. In recent months, however, some state governments and university systems have banned TikTok, restricting student and employee access to the app—typically by blocking it on campus Wi-Fi networks and university-owned devices. Now the Biden administration is threatening to ban the app in the U.S. unless ByteDance, its Chinese owner, sells it, NPR reported.”

 

Why are prices rising more for lower-income college students than their higher-income peers?

From The Hechinger Report: “Bradley is among nearly 700 universities and colleges that, over the last decade, have raised the prices paid by their lowest-income students more than the prices paid by their highest-income ones, according to federal data analyzed by The Hechinger Report. Lower-income students generally still pay less than higher-income ones. But the increase in college costs is falling more heavily on families that are likely the least able to absorb it, as federal and state financial aid fails to keep up with rising prices, and colleges shift institutional aid to wealthier families they know can pay at least a part of the tuition.”

 

If race-conscious admissions end, selective colleges would struggle to create diverse classes

From Higher Ed Dive: “Selective colleges would struggle to create diverse student bodies if they could not consider race as an admissions factor, according to new modeling from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Georgetown CEW studied six scenarios. In four of them, colleges were not allowed to employ race-conscious admissions, which the U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to restrict use of when it rules later this year in cases challenging the practice. In these CEW examples, colleges were extremely unlikely to put together a pool of admitted students that match the demographics of the nation’s graduating high school class.”

 

Can Turnitin cure higher ed’s AI fever?

From Inside Higher Ed: “Turnitin will release a ‘preview’ of its newly developed AI-detection tool, Originality. In doing so, the company will try to convince its significant subscriber base in higher ed and beyond that it has the solution—or at least an essential piece of the solution—to the latest technological threat to academic integrity. … But copy-paste plagiarism and generative AI are birds of radically different feathers. Some faculty members and institutional technology specialists are concerned about the speed of Turnitin’s rollout, as well as aspects of AI-detector technology more broadly.”

 

In UK education news…

Talk of humanities crisis ‘overblown’, UK sector leaders say

From Times Higher Education: “UK politicians may steer school-leavers towards STEM courses, but talk of a ‘crisis’ in the humanities is overstated, according to a report by senior leaders at mainly Russell Group universities. In 2020, UK arts and humanities research activity was 49 per cent higher than the global average, meaning that it ‘outperformed all other disciplinary research areas in the UK’, while ‘eight of the ten fastest growing sectors employ more [arts, humanities and social sciences] graduates than other disciplines’, says the report for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi).”