News

The midterm elections in the United States brought a sort of victory for President Joe Biden and the Democrats, including the retention of a slim majority in the Senate and ceding only a marginal majority to Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Avoided was an expected much bigger electoral victory by Republicans and a clear majority in both houses of Congress. The net result for federal higher education policy is relative stability, although with some important caveats, including debates on raising the debt level of the federal government.

We may all hope that scientific and other forms of knowledge can drive or at least shape responsible public discourse on such important issues as climate change, clean energy and sustainability, poverty, racism, immigration and more generally the promotion of rational thinking and policy-making.

There is a large canon on this concept and its essential role in developing and supporting democracies. Over decades, political observers have extolled the power not only of rational thinking, but competent communications to bring about mutual understanding and social change for the good.

A Vietnamese undergraduate student (who spoke on the condition of anonymity) said she had never considered leaving Russia, even when the invasion of Ukraine happened at the end of her first year, because she received a scholarship that covered her tuition and living costs.

“Every year, there are hundreds of students from that kind of scholarship that come here,” she said. “And I also know people who work in the embassy and they just told me to stay put. So I was not too worried.”

The editors and authors of the UCL Press publication “Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education” invite to an online book launch event taking place on October 10, 2022 – 4 pm BST – 5 pm CET – 8 am PST.

The University of California isn’t done addressing the fallout over UCLA’s move to the Big Ten that set off a national furor and irked the powerful UC Board of Regents.

his is an era of new geopolitics. In this era, we find ourselves in a world that is increasingly multilateral, polylateral and de-Westernised – defined by the preponderance of Western powers and the transition of power from West to East. Some describe it as the emergence of a new Cold War, a period of new ‘great game’ competition between major powers such as Russia, but also increasingly China.

The Conditions for Admissions: Access, Equity and the Social Contract of Public Universities by CSHE researcher John Aubrey Douglass has just been published in Japanese by Kyushu University Press.

Students’ mastery of subject matter in science and mathematics declines as their lecturers become more involved in research, according to a study of thousands of learners.

The paper claims to be among the first studies to establish a causal relationship between teachers’ research publications and their charges’ academic achievement – and challenges the conclusions of past studies, many of which found no correlation between research and teaching quality or student learning.

April 22, 2022 – This week marks the 20th anniversary of the pilot launch of the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), the first survey of all undergraduates at the University of California. UCUES was initiated as part of CSHE’s Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) project.

The Student Experience in the Research University (SERU), a Consortium of Research Universities at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the SERU COVID-19 survey to analyse and understand the impact of the pandemic on the student experience.

Following the initiative, the Research Centre for Comparative and Global Education, under the aegis of the IIHEd, JGU, sought to conduct the same survey in India in collaboration with the Association of Indian Universities (AIU).

In its modern American form, the meritocratic idea owes much to James B. Conant, the Harvard president who, beginning in the 1940s, worked to eliminate the advantages of inherited status in Harvard undergraduate admissions. He began recruiting nationally and selecting for accomplishments rather than lineage, relying heavily on standardized tests. Harvard’s practices gradually spread throughout the Ivy League and beyond. Meritocracy was a revolutionary idea at the time it was introduced, and it worked as intended — at least for a while.

As if remote learning, quarantines and sick family members were not enough, hundreds of thousands of California’s most financially vulnerable college students now face an additional challenge: surprise debts owed to their community colleges and public universities.

When growing numbers of low-income students left college in the middle of the school year during the pandemic, their financial aid awards became “institutional debts” owed and due for payment to their schools effective immediately.

The invasion and brutal attack by Russian forces on Ukraine has brought tremendous suffering to millions of Ukrainians, including those in the higher education sector. Dozens of universities have been bombed and hundreds of thousands of students and academics have fled their homes.

Research and teaching have been disrupted almost everywhere across Ukraine. The global academic community stands in solidarity with Ukrainian scholars and is working together on initiatives to protect and support them.

Abstract

In the annals of American history, Benedict Arnold has held the title of the most infamous traitor. But he is about to be eclipsed by a more devious and consequential seditionist, Donald (“Benedict”) Trump. Such will be the judgment of historians and hopefully a mindful public, if not the current boosters of his autocratic desires.

Arnold served as an extremely successful military officer in the American Continental Army before switching sides to the British in a gambit to land on the winning side and to gain position and authority. He bet on the wrong horse.

The UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, or CSHE, published a study Dec. 6 showing that major restriction policies cause racial inequity and resource inefficiency.

The study analyzed major restriction policies at the 25 top public universities in the United States, according to Zachary Bleemer, co-author of the study and research associate at CSHE. The study found that 75% of the five most lucrative majors were restricted, and none or less than 10% of major restrictions were imposed at private and for-profit universities.

CSHE NEWS RELEASE
Center for Studies in Higher Education
University of California, Berkeley