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The nearly two-month-long search for the suspect in the gruesome homicides of four University of Idaho students came to an end Friday with the arrest of Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student at Washington State University who was arrested in Pennsylvania. Kohberger, a criminology student at WSU , allegedly used a fixed-blade knife to murder Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen in the early hours of Nov. 13 at the home in Moscow, Idaho, where three of the four victims lived. The murders launched a manhunt involving numerous state and local police officers as well as the FBI. Kohberger’s possible connection to the victims remained unclear as of Friday evening, though the distance between Washington State University and the University of Idaho is less than 10 miles. In a Friday press conference, officials noted that Idaho law allows the limited release of information until Kohberger is back in the state. They said they intend to extradite Kohberger

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma I’ve gotten a fair amount of pushback on my piece on K-12 school reform and the failure of grade schools, middle schools, and high schools, to close achievement gaps.  Those comments deserve a detailed response. As some of my correspondents have pointed out: 1. The standardized tests used to assess student learning don’t count toward students’ grades and may therefore provide inaccurate and misleading measures of student knowledge and skills. 2. Performance on the tests varies substantially among the states, with some, like Massachusetts, reporting much higher rates of student achievement and much smaller gaps in performance.  As the noted legal commentator who goes under the banner of Unemployed Northeastern puts it: “Some states are busy banning books, other states are busy educating students.” 3. It’s certainly true that college graduation rates have risen sharply in recent years even as student diversity has grown, suggesting that the purported

It’s "Best Of" Week on the Academic Minute. In our fifth most listened-to segment of the year, during Cornell University College of Engineering Week, Khurram Afridi, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, examined how to charge electric cars more efficiently. Find out more about the Academic Minute here .     Section:  Academic Minute Event's date:  Thursday, December 29, 2022 - 4:45pm Insider only:  from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/jx5BWbL

University of California graduate student workers voted Friday to approve new contracts with substantial wage increases, ending a strike that started in early November, the Los Angeles Time s reported. For academic student employees, the contract will raise minimum pay from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work by Oct. 1, 2024. The rate at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UCLA would be $36,500 because of the high cost of living in these cities and higher pay needed to compete for top talent. The United Auto Workers represents the graduate students. The union said those gains are among the highest ever won by academic workers. They represent a 46 percent increase in salary scales compounded over 2023 and 2024, compared with 6 percent for the 2018 contract at UC and 9 percent for Harvard University in 2021 and for Columbia University in 2022. Rafael Jaime, UAW 2865 president, said in a statement, “These agreements redefine what is possible in terms of

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma A recent correspondent shared a memorable quotation from the Nobel prizewinner Ernest Rutherford:  “That which is not Physics is stamp collecting.”  In other words, that which isn’t science is a trivial and inconsequential waste of time. Bored out of his mind by box checking introductory courses in the humanities, my correspondent wrote: “To many STEM students the truly “Great Books” were written by Physicists and Mathematicians.”  He added:   “A deep study of literature will not get you through a decent course on Differential Equations. Facile speech doesn’t get you through Physical Electronics.”  Those words give vivid expression to a deep divide between those who value creative writing and the arts and those who attach the greatest importance to scientific inquiry, I sense that my students tend to fall into one of two camps.  There are those, like my correspondent, who regard the humanities as lightweight, and consider STEM the only source of meanin

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma You may have read that Georgetown University is launching an online part-time bachelor’s degree completion program in liberal studies in partnership with Coursera. Georgetown already offers an on-campus version of this program through its School of Continuing Education to a student body that consists of 62 percent students of color and 40 percent military-connected learners.   The online program will be offered worldwide for $400 a credit hour, which would add up to $48,000 for a complete 120 credits – but which could be as “little” as $22,400 if transfer credits and military training were applied.  That figure is much cheaper than  average list price of $1,586  for an in-person education at a private institution.  But it’s substantially more expensive than the cost of face-to-face, interactive learning at a community college or at many broad access regional or urban publics.  The average per credit cost a community college is $158 and $266 for in-st

University of California graduate student workers voted Friday to approve new contracts with substantial wage increases, ending a strike that started in early November, the Los Angeles Time s reported. For academic student employees, the  contract will raise minimum pay from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work by Oct. 1, 2024. The rate at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UCLA would be $36,500 because of the high cost of living in these cities and higher pay needed to compete for top talent. The United Auto Workers represents the graduate students. The union said those gains are among the highest ever won by academic workers. They represent a 46 percent increase in salary scales compounded over 2023 and 2024, compared with 6 percent for the 2018 contract at UC and 9 percent  for Harvard University in 2021 and for Columbia University in 2022. Rafael Jaime, UAW 2865 president, said in a statement.: “These agreements redefine what is possible in terms o

The Juilliard School has placed a professor on leave and commissioned a new investigation of charges that he harassed students, The New York Times reported. A spokeswoman for the school said it had previously investigated the professor, Robert Beaser, who had been chair of the composition department. The spokeswoman did not say what those investigations found. An article published last week in VAN , a magazine about classical music, said he had sexual relationships with students and that, in one case, he tied a female student’s career opportunities to her willingness to comply. Beaser did not respond to a request for comment. “I am aware that there will be an independent investigation,” he told VAN . “I look forward to cooperating with it.” Ad keywords:  administrators faculty Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma The past’s meaning only becomes clear in hindsight.  Who would have guessed during the 1970s, a decade when it seemed like nothing happened, that a series of developments were underway that would transform the future:  the politicization of evangelical religion, accelerating de-industrialization, the deregulation and financialization of the American economy, a profound shift in the nation’s demographics. Even as we fixate on headline news, the true drivers of transformation occur out of sight. It’s these long-term developments, processes, and trends, which take place under the surface, that even the most powerful politicians or institutions must respond to. This is the case in politics, but it’s also true in higher education.  Shifts in demography, the economy, and cultural values have far greater influence than the stories that dot the higher ed press. What were the most important events in higher education in 2022?   The list would certainly includ

Former students are suing the University of Southern California over false rankings for its education school based on data submitted by the university to U.S. News & World Report , the Los Angeles Times reported. The class action suit was filed Tuesday. “People certainly paid a premium given how expensive the school is,” said Kristen Simplicio, a lawyer representing the students. “That ranking was one of the reasons that school was able to charge as much as it did.” An outside investigator released to the university a report on the rankings in May . The report found numerous instances in which false data were submitted. For instance, the university submitted data on Ph.D. students but not Ed.D. students, which resulted in higher rankings. USC had a ranking of No. 11 among education schools in May. USC told the Times that it had not received the suit and so couldn’t comment on it. Ad keywords:  admissions Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?: 

Blog:  Beyond Transfer The broken record of broken transfer seems to be on constant repeat in the higher education sector. Going back decades, many states, systems, and institutions have enacted sweeping policy changes and invested significant resources in supporting transfer student success. Yet student outcomes have shown little improvement, and appear to have even regressed during the pandemic. The question is not whether transfer remains a problem, but why it persists to such a degree despite extensive efforts to fix it. One key barrier to improving outcomes involves the way that higher education institutions typically identify and implement solutions, often derided by those working in the trenches as “solutionitis.” While well intentioned, too often change efforts proceed along the following sequence: a problem is identified, little or no data is collected to fully understand the complexity of the problem, a strategic planning meeting is convened, a “solution” is arrive

An independent panel that studied the “dormzilla” proposed for the University of California, Santa Barbara, has concluded that the project, even as modified recently, represents a safety threat, the Los Angeles Times reported. It should undergo a “robust redesign” with more windows, ventilation and bedroom space, said the report. The project was designed for 4,500 beds in small rooms—most without windows—in an 11-story warehouse-size building. The design is favored by billionaire Charles Munger, who donated $200 million for the residence hall that will be named after him. “Research and analysis weighed by this panel reveal significant health and safety risks that are predictable enough, probable enough, and consequential enough that it would be unwise for UCSB to proceed without significant modifications to the design,” said the report. The Munger Hall project team released a statement that said it was “actively working” with architects to add more windows where possible, addi

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma The word “unconscious” is much in the news. Just look at some recent headlines: Canadians Struggle to Curb Unconscious Spending Habits Amid Rising Cost of Living The lingering effects of unconscious parenting Unconscious gender bias more prevalent in men, survey finds How to Mitigate Unconscious Bias in Customer Service Interactions That’s not, of course, how psychologists use the term. But much of our common-sense understanding of human motivation and behavior relies on the concept of the unconscious—for example, when we speak of unconscious racism or implicit bias. I think it’s high time that we began to introduce our students systematically to the concept of the unconscious. In a now largely forgotten scholarly book published in 1960, entitled The Unconscious Before Freud , the author, Lancelot Law Whyte, a Scottish philosopher, theoretical physicist and historian of science, makes a point that scholars ignore at their peril: that major disco