Education

EDU News Curated by Kiosk: Election focus and other higher ed news

Why Higher Education is a US Election Issue

From Kiosk: Currently, 36.8 million Americans have “some college, no degree,” and student loan debt in America has reached a staggering $1.753 trillion. These statistics create the perception of a higher education system that is failing many Americans. The overarching narrative this data provides is one of disillusionment and systemic inefficiencies. Challenger brands create empathy and cohesion with people by highlighting commonalities versus the prevailing leaders.

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J.D Vance is coming for Higher Education

From The Chronicle: “The title of Vance’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 was ‘The Universities are the Enemy.’ Colleges, Vance said, are ‘hostile institutions’ doing ‘research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas.’ He has pledged to ‘aggressively attack the universities in this country’. … When Donald Trump said, ‘We love the poorly educated,’ he was talking about a group of people he had little personal contact with. J.D. Vance is actually from the downwardly mobile white working class, victims of ‘deaths of despair,’ and he has spent enough time in the realm of elite higher education to be able to credibly report on how segments of it sneer at communities like his own.”
View the full article from The Chronicle.

 

Could Donald Trump close the US Department of Education?

From Times Higher Education: “A second Donald Trump administration in the US is expected to make a new push to close the federal Department of Education as a showcase for its more determined underlying goals of slashing student aid and setting academia’s educational and political limits. The shutdown idea is the theatrical centrepiece for education issues in Project 2025, the policy playbook crafted by Trump allies inside the right-wing Heritage Foundation as an outline for their potential return to power in November’s election.”
View the full article from Times Higher Education.

 

How a Second Trump Term Could Turn Up the Heat on Higher Ed

From Inside Higher Education: “Trump has already vowed to ‘fire’ accreditors and reclaim colleges from the ‘radical left,’ called for the creation of a free national online university paid for by taxes on wealthy colleges, threatened to deport campus protesters and backed extending green cards to college graduates. The Republican Party’s 2024 platform, which Trump’s team helped to write, calls for …creating more affordable higher education options, along with deporting ‘pro-Hamas radicals and [making] our college campuses safe and patriotic again’…’ There’s a good chance that higher ed could be front and center because it has made itself a target of populist frustration,’ said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.”
View the full article from Inside Higher Education.

 

How could Project 2025 change education?

From The Hechinger Report: “The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish. … Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to ‘focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’ … In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of ‘advancing education freedom.’”
View the full article from The Hechinger Report.

 

‘A Stunning Failure’: Latest FAFSA Delay Will Hinder the Most Vulnerable Students

From The Chronicle: “The U.S. Department of Education announced that colleges will not be able to submit corrections to students’ federal-aid records in bulk during the 2024-25 financial aid cycle. In June, the department announced that institutions would be able to do so in the first half of August — several months later than usual. The upshot: Some students might not get the money they need in time to pay bills and start classes.”
View the full article from The Chronicle.

 

GAO Report on Students’ Food Insecurity Highlights SNAP Gap

From Inside Higher Education: “Two-thirds of the 3.3 million college students eligible for federal food assistance in 2020 didn’t access it, the Government Accountability Office found in a report released Wednesday. … Nearly four million students have experienced food insecurity, and half of those had very low food security, according to the report. That means they have had ‘multiple instances of eating less than they should or skipping meals because they could not afford enough food.’ About 80 percent of food-insecure students are considered nontraditional, meaning they are financially independent from their parents, didn’t immediately enroll in college after high school or care for a dependent.”
View the full article from Inside Higher Education.

 

Arizona State U. Takes to YouTube to Offer a Low-Risk Taste of College

From The Chronicle: “Many students who might want to go to college face barriers. They don’t know how to apply. They’re not sure how much it will cost …. They can go on YouTube and try out college courses through Study Hall, a channel that hosts free educational videos produced by ASU and Complexly. A student who pays $25 for a companion ASU course unlocks a Google Classroom with readings, textbooks, peer discussions, and access to ASU instructors. After the final exam, if they’re satisfied with their grade, students can pay $400 for transferable college credit. Study Hall’s channel has had at least 6.2 million views and has 100,000 subscribers.”
View the full article from The Chronicle.

 

Two Major Academic Publishers Signed Deals With AI Companies. Some Professors Are Outraged.

From The Chronicle: “Two major academic publishers, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, recently announced partnerships that will give tech companies access to academic content and other data in order to train artificial-intelligence models, a move some academics see as just the latest way their work is being exploited. One of those tech companies, Microsoft, paid Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis, an initial fee of $10 million to make use of its content ‘to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems,’ according to a report released in May.
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Workers with 4-year degrees will hold most good jobs in 2031, report predicts

From Higher Ed Dive: “The number of good jobs will grow substantially by 2031, and the majority of them will require at least a four-year degree, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce predicted in a new report Tuesday. Researchers expect the number of good jobs for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher to increase by over 15 million from 2021 to 2031, according to the report. It defines good jobs as those offering a minimum of $43,000 per year and a median annual salary of $74,000 in 2022 dollars for workers aged 25 to 44.”
View the full article from Higher Ed Dive.

 

Funding crisis grabs headlines as student applications fall

From University World News: “Despite a rising population of 18-year-olds in the United Kingdom, there was a 1.6% decline in domestic applications reported by UCAS at the end of June and a 2% drop in international applications. … Worryingly for a new Labour government committed to reducing waiting lists for hospital treatment, there is another fall (from home and international students) in those applying to study nursing. These figures were down to 41,520, compared with 43,920 at the end of June last year, and significantly down from their peak in 2021 during the COVID pandemic when they reached 56,630.”
View the full article from University World News.