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The U.S. military is discussing a proposal to fund scholarships for college athletes in return for their military service, Sportico reported . Conceived by a defense contractor, the initiative proposes that the Department of Defense replace college-funded athletic scholarships for every sport except football and basketball. Athletes who receive scholarships would be required to serve for a yet-to-be-determined period of time after they graduate. The plan promises to be mutually beneficial to both the armed forces and college sports. It would ensure the military a steady stream of fit recruits while helping college athletic departments compensate for funding cuts to nonmarquee sports. Key leaders at the Defense Department have been briefed on the measure, but the NCAA only learned of the plan through Sportico ; a spokeswoman declined to comment. It’s unclear how willing high school athletic recruits would be to commit time to the military four or five years down the road. Univer...

The best scene in my favorite book as a child (which may explain my sense of humor—or lack thereof)—is the mad tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . It’s a series of epic skits that add up to the most wonderfully absurd passage in the English language. To wit, Alice is delighted when the Mad Hatter welcomes her to the party with a riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk? She says she thinks she can figure it out. He circles back to her a few minutes later. Mad Hatter: Have you guessed the riddle yet? Alice: No, I give it up. What’s the answer? Mad Hatter: I haven’t the slightest idea. Or when the sleepy Dormouse slowly launches into a story of three sisters who live at the bottom of a well: Alice: What did they live on? Dormouse: They lived on treacle [molasses]. Alice: They couldn’t have done that. They’d have been ill. Dormouse: So they were. Very ill. But the topper is when the Mad Hatter checks his pocket watch and finds it’s broken. Apparently the March...

Column:  Intellectual Affairs It seems I have gone a quarter century without understanding something very important—definitive, even—about Amazon.com. The founder, Jeff Bezos, did not launch the site out of any particular interest in books, only to see it grow and diversify its way into what it is today—namely, the world’s largest department store. That was how things looked to a customer, but an interview he gave in 1997 reveals otherwise. What drew his attention, rather, was the fact that, as he said, “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far.” Create an online vending platform able to handle that kind of inventory, and the world’s your oyster. Seldom a profitable undertaking in any case, bookselling was effectively a way to attract eyeballs and build the brand. And that explains a lot. Do a search for “oyster” on Amazon—taking care to limit the search to the books department—and you will be offered not just biologica...

The U.S. government is casting a skeptical eye on college policies that withhold academic transcripts and otherwise punish students because they owe the institutions money. This week's episode of The Key explores why some institutions use those policies and why consumer advocates think they're pernicious, even though they're only a small fraction of the $1.7 trillion student debt problem in American higher education. Martin Kurzweil, director of the institutional transformation program at Ithaka S+R, discusses research on what it calls “stranded credits” that colleges sometimes hold hostage from former students and a promising experiment that could offer a way out for students and colleges alike. Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, explains why many higher ed officials oppose potential federal regulation to ban such policies, but acknowledges the need for colleges to limit the kinds of d...

Blog:  Just Visiting When I was in my second fiction writing class in college, after presenting my stories to the workshop, hearing my colleagues’ feedback and receiving the marked-up copy from my professor, I would correct (some/most of) the typos and grammatical errors, print off a fresh copy, and mail it to The New Yorker . At the time, I was under the impression that this is what writers did—write stories and then send them off until someone said they wanted to publish them. While I knew that I was not quite in the league of Raymond Carver or Joyce Carol Oates or Bobbie Ann Mason, internally, it felt like we were at least in the same game, so what was the harm of taking my shot at the big leagues? This memory came back to me while reading Robert Talbert’s incisive reflections on his experiences ungrading his Modern Algebra class, published here at Inside Higher Ed . Talbert lays out the rationale and approach he takes to ungrading and then unpacks both the benefits ...

Blog:  Learning Innovation Savitri Tu is the Vice President of Marketing for Kaplan's University Partnerships & Innovation Team where she works closely with universities on online programs for high school students, an innovative way for both high school seniors to figure out what they want to study in college and universities to build relationships with prospective students before the admissions process begins in earnest. Prior to her role at Kaplan, she was the Executive Director, Marketing & Communications, at Columbia University's School of Professional Studies, which gives Savitri unique insights into these growing kinds of public-private partnerships. Savitri graciously agreed to answer my questions about the move from an academic institution to Kaplan as well as the programs she is currently working on. Q1:  Before we get into Kaplan, tell us a bit about yourself. You made the move from higher ed to Kaplan. What are some of the similarities or diff...

New York State attorney general Letitia James announced Wednesday that she has secured student debt relief for thousands of New York borrowers whose federal loans were allegedly mismanaged by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. In an agreement with the Office of the Attorney General, PHEAA is required to audit thousands of accounts to identify errors that may have caused borrowers to miss out on benefits, such as income-driven repayment plans or debt forgiveness for eligible borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. PHEAA, which operates as FedLoan Servicing and American Education Services, will correct errors identified in borrowers’ accounts and provide monetary relief as restitution for some borrowers as appropriate. More than 300,000 borrowers are eligible to have their accounts reviewed for free and are encouraged to request an audit. This agreement resolves an earlier lawsuit brought against the student loan servicer over allegations that ...

Harlan Sands is no longer the president of Cleveland State University. And while his sudden departure was reportedly the result of a mutual decision, it comes amid disagreements regarding the future of the college. “The Board recognizes that CSU has made significant advances during Sands’ tenure and is on solid footing,” David Reynolds, chair of Cleveland State’s Board of Trustees, said in an announcement to the university community on Tuesday, according to Cleveland.com . “Over time, however, it has become clear that this simply is not a good match for either party going forward. We thank President Sands for his contributions to CSU during his tenure and wish him well.” Laura Bloomberg, who was serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, will now assume the presidency. Sands’s departure is effective immediately. Though neither Sands nor trustees publicly mentioned the underlying issues related to the abrupt exit, Cleveland.com noted that the former preside...

The University of North Carolina system over all, and the flagship Chapel Hill campus in particular, suffer “from a governance structure widely perceived to be broken and from persistent and pervasive threats to academic freedom,” according to a report by a special committee of the American Association of University Professors. The 38-page report, released today, is based on interviews with more than 50 people throughout the 17-campus UNC system in November and December 2021. It highlights “detailed patterns of political interference by the North Carolina legislature into the administration of the UNC system, overreach by the board of governors and boards of trustees into specific campus operations, outright disregard for principles of academic governance by campus and system leadership, institutional racism, and a hostile climate for academic freedom across the system.” The special committee warned in the report that “the cumulative effect of these tumultuous events, especially s...

Today on the Academic Minute , part of Florida International University Week: Kenneth G. Furton, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, explores how dogs might be proving their mettle in the fight against COVID-19. Learn more about the Academic Minute here .   Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0 from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/UfRIJO9

An annual workforce survey analysis from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources finds that overall median salaries for administrators increased by 3.4 percent this year, far below the inflation rate of 6.8 percent. The story was the same for professionals and nonexempt staff, who saw annual pay increases of 2.9 percent, and for tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members, whose salaries increased by 1.6 percent and 1.5 percent respectively, year over year. A recent analysis by the American Association of University Professors had similar findings. CUPA-HR also says that the size of the full-time faculty and staff has declined for the past two years, bucking historical trends toward annual overall growth. Non-tenure-track faculty ranks, including adjuncts, declined in number from 2019–20 to 2020–21 but increased again in 2021–22. Ad keywords:  administrators faculty Is this diversity newsletter?: ...

A recent piece by University of Virginia senior Emma Camp describing her experience of feeling silenced in campus conversations about controversial issues created a bit of a firestorm. Conservatives saw confirmation of their concerns about cancel culture on college campuses. Liberals saw hypocrisy in Camp’s simultaneous desire for open, free debate and her frustration at negative responses from those who disagreed with her views. As a philosophy professor who has spent the past 15 years helping students navigate controversial conversations in the classroom, I saw a false dichotomy that commonly derails campus speech discussions. The belief seems to be that either students must feel free to speak their minds without concern for the impact of their statements, or students are silenced by chilling environments that only allow views that match progressive orthodoxy. Since 2017, I have taught a course that focuses on building skills for dialogue across difference. In this class, we ...

Universities, too often seen as elitist, have lost touch with the American people. This was the warning from Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, speaking earlier this month on a panel at the ASU+GSV Summit , the San Diego ed-tech event co-organized by his institution. Crow said there was a groundswell of “negative energy” toward universities, and things had gotten so bad “that the Congress of the United States is now taxing all the large university endowments” to send a clear message that universities need to do more to convince the public of their value. The problem, said Crow, was that universities had “failed at the job of communicating” their social impact. And the consequences were extremely grim: “If we don’t figure out how to communicate, this gap between the general public and the universities is going to accelerate until we get torches at the door. That’s possible. Torches at the door are now in the realm of possibility.” A large part of the blame for t...

Column:  Letters to the Editor To the Editor, The recent opinion piece " Remediation is Not the Enemy " makes the argument that reforming traditional remediation through adopting a corequisite model is depriving vulnerable students of important learning opportunities. The article cites research that shows many more students pass college-level courses when placed directly into them while co-enrolled in corequisite support classes than students who first must pass semesters of remedial coursework.  But the author uses the same data to argue that the same method also results in a higher percentage of students failing those college-level courses. Interpreting the data in this way requires us to make false equivalencies, because it does not account for the students who otherwise never would have made it to the college-level courses in the first place. By only examining pass rates of students who enroll in the college-level course, this analysis ignores students who fail...