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A small industry of experts armed with data is ready to tell you if your college will survive. from The Chronicle of Higher Education https://ift.tt/2UdRDVd

Presidents must do more confront employer bias. from The Chronicle of Higher Education https://ift.tt/2tggqwS

Cristian Rubio, 18, prepares to start his physics homework in the living room of his family’s cozy home in Sioux City, Iowa. Photo: Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report SIOUX CITY, Iowa — The rolling backpack was grey with bright orange zippers. Made by Totto, a popular South American brand, the backpack had been 13-year-old Cristian Rubio’s hand luggage on his flight from Ecuador to the United States a week earlier. It was one of the few things of personal significance that he’d brought with him. “I had some crazy memories with it, like friends hopping on my backpack and racing each other,” said Rubio, now 18. He was glad he had something from home as he walked alone into North Middle School to start eighth grade in his new hometown of Sioux City, Iowa. Certainly, nothing else about his life was normal that November day. He and his older brother, Esteban, were staying with their grandmother, who had traveled to the states with them. The Rubios had decided to move to the U.S.

Bishop State Community College. Mobile’s two public community colleges had very low graduation rates, and those students who transferred to the local public university lost many of their credits. Photo: Fred Salinas for The Hechinger Report MOBILE, Ala. — Among other things, the boosters who pitched international companies to come and do business in this port city promised that its high quality of education would guarantee a steady supply of skilled employees. Lots of students appeared to be graduating from area high schools. Not just one but two public community colleges seemed to be feeding into a four-year state university, which was putting up lots of new buildings and staging big annual commencements. The pitches worked. Among the companies that took Mobile up on its offer were the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus and the Norwegian engineering company Aker Solutions. The Finnish stainless-steel producer Outokumpu built a state-of-the-art mill. Then a local education

Sarah Hubbard knew something was off about her interactions with a piano professor at the Berklee College of Music—they had a “haunting and unsettling” quality, she remembers. Hubbard, who studied violin at Berklee until she graduated in 2016, remembers that sometimes when they crossed paths, he seemed to be “deliberately trying to prolong” their interaction, and sometimes the professor, Bruce Thomas, gave her hugs that felt awkward. Sometimes he would show up near where she was, Hubbard says, lingering just at the periphery of her vision and then emailing her that he’d seen her that day but she’d seemed too busy to say hello. He sent her emails late at night, she says, and once when she didn’t respond promptly, he approached her boyfriend on campus to tell him to tell Hubbard to return his email. (Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.) Hubbard frequently worried, as she moved around campus, about surprise encounters with Thomas, who had been teaching at the school for some

College is designed for student to finish in four years, but for many students that timeline is more of a pipedream. Just 41 percent of first-time, full-time freshman graduate four years after starting , according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Students of all shades and backgrounds struggle to graduate on time, but black students often take the longest to get to graduation day. The median amount of time black students spend to obtain a bachelor’s degree is five years and four months – an entire year longer than the median for white students, according to a data analysis published this month by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Researchers there examined data from the National Center for Education Statistics on nearly 20,000 college alumni who graduated between 2015 and 2016. The median time for Latinx students was four years, eight months and for Asians it was four years. Higher education experts say there could be a number of