Nov. 16, 2018

News

How the Modern Economy Pits Workers Against One Another

By Scott Carlson

Employers, crying of a skills gap, are using college degrees as a sorting mechanism, says the author of a new book about the unforgiving labor market.

Chronicle List

Which Colleges Had the Greatest Increases in Their Percentages of Underrepresented Minorities?

By Chronicle Staff

Collective representation of American Indian, black, and Hispanic students rose slightly from 2010 to 2016, with some colleges seeing large growth.

The Review

Enough With All the Innovation

By John Patrick Leary

Even if the growing number of centers and incubators actually worked, they’d be sending higher education in the wrong direction.

Paul LeBlanc (second from left), president of Southern New Hampshire U., confers with colleagues in the Sandbox, where the university tests technologies and evaluates markets for its courses.

News

Meet the New Mega-University

By Goldie Blumenstyk

Fast-growing Southern New Hampshire University represents a new breed of nonprofit institution driven by scale. Could it transform higher education?

Julia York thought that speaking up about sexism in her department could ruin her graduate-school career, and maybe her professional career as well. But she did it anyway.

News

How a Department Took On the Next Frontier in the #MeToo Movement

By Lindsay Ellis and Sarah Brown

It’s one thing to crack down on overt harassment, but dealing with subtle sexism is a different story. One grad student pushed her professors to try.

News

Transitions: Rush U. Selects New President, Chief of Staff Named at Cleveland State U.

Compiled by Julia Piper

Sherine E. Gabriel, Rush University’s next chief, is dean of the medical school at Rutgers. Jim Bennett will become chief of staff at Cleveland State in December.

Students voted on Tuesday at a polling station at the U. of California at Irvine. A surge in young voters nationwide was among the factors that helped defeat the incumbent Wisconsin governor and helped elect more than 100 women to Congress, exit polls suggest.

News

Young and College-Educated Voters Played Key Roles in Democratic Wins on Tuesday

By Cailin Crowe and Audrey Williams June

They helped defeat the incumbent Wisconsin governor and helped elect more than 100 women to Congress, exit polls suggest.

Rep. Bobby Scott (left), a Virginia Democrat, is expected to succeed Rep. Virginia Foxx (right), a North Carolina Republican, as leader of the U.S. House’s education committee since the Democrats took control of the chamber in the midterm elections.

News

A Divided Congress Is Unlikely to Compromise on Higher Ed. But What if It Did?

By Eric Kelderman

The long-overdue reauthorization of the Higher Education Act would seem to be an issue ripe for a deal. But the chances of that happening are nearly nil. Here’s why both of those statements are true.

Voters waited to cast their ballots in San Diego County on Election Day 2018.

The Review

For Colleges, an Election to Celebrate and Fear

By Kevin Carey

The Republicans who won are more conservative and Trump-aligned than those who lost, which means that colleges may have more to worry about than they did before.

Student Feedback

One University Asked Its Students: Would You Recommend Us to a Friend? Here’s What It Learned.

By Lindsay Ellis

Touch-screen kiosks, installed around the campus over the summer, have logged thousands of responses from hundreds of students.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin speaks to supporters at a rally on Monday night. Walker was ousted on Tuesday by his Democratic challenger, Tony Evers.

In the States

Scott Walker Is Out. Can a New Governor Save Higher Ed in the Badger State?

By Eric Kelderman

In Wisconsin and other states where Democrats won, don’t expect to see a major shift in thinking about colleges.

Tuesday’s elections gave Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives, a foothold in their efforts to stop the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, from reversing Obama-era higher-education regulations.

The 2018 Vote

What the Midterm Elections Mean for Higher Ed

By Dan Bauman, Lindsay Ellis, Steven Johnson, Eric Kelderman, Emma Pettit, and Brock Read

Betsy DeVos and the Education Department may soon face more oversight. Student voters turned out, but so did everyone else. Here are our notes from Election Day.

A lecture at Harvard U., which treated a trial over race-conscious admissions as if it was an all-out attack on the use of race in admissions everywhere.

From the Archives

Both Sides at Harvard Trial Agree on One Thing: The ‘Wolf of Racial Bias’ Is at the Door

By Eric Hoover

Students for Fair Admissions, which alleges that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants, forced the university to reveal the inner workings of its admissions process. But what did all the evidence add up to?

The flagship university is investigating the sociologist, who directed the department’s graduate program, for sexual misconduct and harassment of people she supervised.

Sexual Harassment

Students Accused a Colorado Professor of Harassment. Now She’s Been Placed on Leave.

By Katherine Mangan

The sociologist, who directed the department’s graduate program at the University of Colorado, is being investigated by the flagship campus for sexual misconduct involving people she supervised.