Blog: GradHackerSritama Chatterjee is a second year PhD student at the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh. You can find her on Twitter @SritamaBarna Congratulations! After going through a process which appears to be opaque from a distance, you have made it to graduate school in another country.  You also have your visa now. What happens next? When I arrived for graduate school in the USA last year, the thought of having to complete a lot of paperwork and taking care of more mundane, day-to-day activities of settling down before I could … [Read more...]

The artificial intelligence industry boom is draining academe of AI experts and professors, at the expense of graduates' start-ups, according to a new working paper. The faculty departures also reduce the early-stage funding graduates receive, says the study, describing professor-to-student knowledge transfer as the "main channel for the negative effect of the human capital reallocation for innovation." More than 150 professors have left North American Universities since 2004, along with 60-some professors taking on industry jobs while continuing to teach … [Read more...]

Students who engage in active learning learn more -- but feel like they learn less -- than peers in more lecture-oriented classrooms. That's in part because active learning is harder than more passive learning, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Based on their findings, the researchers encourage faculty members to intervene and correct what they call students' "misperception" about how they learn. "The article does not suggest that students don't like active learning," lead author Louis Deslauriers, director of science … [Read more...]

Blog: Technology and LearningThe Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits by Zeynep Ton Published in January of 2014. Why do three-quarters of professors in the U.S. work without the protections of job security and academic freedom that come with being on the tenure track? What are the reasons that almost every (although not all) colleges and universities have decided that the only way they can survive is to depend on adjuncts, part-time, and other non-tenure track professors to teach their … [Read more...]

Blog: GradHackerDeidra Faye Jackson earned her Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she teaches in the Departments of Writing and Rhetoric and Higher Education. You can find her on Twitter at @DeidraJackson11. Of all the TV commercials I’ve seen hawking prescribed medications to help relieve various mood disorders, the one that depicts depression as an ever-present nagging pest resonates with me the most. Over time and with therapy, it seems, according to the advertisement, the debilitating sidekick who prevents … [Read more...]

What keeps journal editors up at night? Inclusion issues, along with plagiarism and other kinds of fraud, according to a new report from the Committee on Publication Ethics. The report's authors first held focus groups with journal editors to discover what concerned them most. Among the 20 identified issues were addressing language and writing quality barriers while remaining inclusive and assessing contribution and co-authorship claims. Assuring fair representation of new voices and diverse perspectives, data or image fabrication issues and … [Read more...]

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, one of 20 Democrats seeking the party's presidential nomination, backed free community college and debt-free four-year public college in an education plan his campaign released Thursday. The plan also called for holding poor-performing colleges accountable by restricting access to federal student aid based on outcomes like default rates or high debt-to-income ratios. Bennett's plan notably rejects calls for broad debt cancellation, but promises $10,000 in loan forgiveness per year for up to four years for student borrowers in public … [Read more...]

Blog: Student Affairs and TechnologyOne of the biggest challenges with using social media for recruitment and enrollment growth in higher education has always been the ability for institutions to find ways to measure the return on investment of all of their digital engagement activities. There are plenty of examples of how social media have been used for brand building and awareness, but it can be tricky to keep track of a prospective students' recruitment journey due to the potential for multiple engagement points. Recently, an attempt was made to try to suss … [Read more...]

Blog: Technology and LearningLudicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer Published in August of 2019 Let us know if you’ve had these thoughts? Traditional colleges are like legacy auto manufacturers. The seat time based high-cost residential education and credentials that we provide are like gas-powered internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. The future belongs to electric self-driven cars, and competency-based lifelong mobile online learning. Following this line of reasoning, one might conclude that universities should try … [Read more...]

Blog: GradHackerIngrid J. Paredes is a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering at New York University. You can find her on Twitter @ingridjoylyn. Over the last year, youth around the world have gone on strike from school to demand climate action. On September 20, 2019, they have planned what they hope to be the largest global climate strike yet. And they’ve asked adults to join them. I am leaving lab that day to be there. I am striking because, to date, world leaders have failed to pass rapid and aggressive climate action. The climate crisis is a … [Read more...]