History News Network

higher education

Originally published 12/05/2013
The Great Stratification of Higher Education

What will the professors of 2020 look like?

Originally published 10/22/2013
America's Top Colleges and Universities Have a Hidden Legacy of Slavery [INTERVIEW]

MIT's Craig Wilder on the role slavery played in the founding and rise of the Ivy League.

Originally published 10/10/2013
Review of Craig Steven Wilder's "Ebony and Ivy"

Early American colleges were saturated by slavery.

Originally published 10/06/2013
Who Really Runs American Universities? And Who Should?

Lessons in higher ed. leadership from Harvard's Derek Bok.

Originally published 09/29/2013
Let's Drink to Good Grades

Students think of college as a opportunity to improve social skills and network, not study.

Originally published 09/24/2013
MIT historian Craig Wilder documents links between universities and slavery

"[The] economy was heavily rooted in the slave trade."

Originally published 09/19/2013
The Decline of College

The four-year campus experience is becoming a thing of the past.

Originally published 09/05/2013
What Is To Be Done About Higher Education?

You can’t have a race to the bottom when the bottom is gone.

Originally published 09/05/2013
Inside the Coursera Hype Machine

How will Coursera make money off of its free education-for-the-masses model?

Originally published 06/07/2013
Corporate Welfare or Education?

Credit: Wiki Commons.“Who needs the Cayman Islands?” That’s how a May 22 New York Times article began as it described “Tax-Free NY,” a plan zealously promoted by New York State’s Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Originally published 06/02/2013
HNN Hot Topics: MOOCs

Image via Shutterstock/Flickr.NewsCoursera contract with UT system released; history chair says no MOOCs at Knoxville this fall (6-3-13)Historians at MOOC partner schools say faculty not consulted (5-30-13)San Jose State professors fire back at online class offer (5-25-13)Profs get ready for tens of thousands of students in online courses (1-14-13)Commentary

Originally published 05/30/2013
Historians at MOOC Partner Schools Say Faculty Not Consulted

Image via Shutterstock.“When colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet,” Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State, wrote back in 2011, “most professors will lose their jobs.”With the proliferation of massive online open courses (MOOCs), Stross wrote in an email to HNN, that time may have come.On May 30, Coursera, the Silicon Valley MOOC provider founded by Stanford University computer scientists in 2012, announced that it had just signed agreements with ten state universities systems to produce and share online courses for credit.The signatories are the University of Colorado, the University System of Georgia, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska system, the University of New Mexico system, the State University of New York system, the University of Tennessee system and the Tennessee Board of Regents system, and West Virginia University.

Originally published 05/30/2013
Ten State University Systems Sign with Coursera

Image via Shutterstock.“When colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet,” Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State, wrote back in 2011, “most professors will lose their jobs.”With the proliferation of massive online open courses (MOOCs), Stross wrote in an email to HNN, that time may have come.On May 30, Coursera, the Silicon Valley MOOC provider founded by Stanford University computer scientists in 2012, announced that it had just signed agreements with ten state universities systems to produce and share online courses for credit.The signatories are the University of Colorado, the University System of Georgia, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska system, the University of New Mexico system, the State University of New York system, the University of Tennessee system and the Tennessee Board of Regents system, and West Virginia University.The ten state university systems serve a combined total of nearly 1.5 million students.

Originally published 05/26/2013
Jim Cullen: Review of Jeffrey Selingo's "College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students" (New Harvest, 2013)

Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His last book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. His next book, A Brief History of the Modern Media, will be published next year by Wiley-Blackwell.

Originally published 05/15/2013
At Universities, Too, the Rich Grow Richer

Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in March 2013.Although many Americans believe their universities are places where administrators and faculty members coexist on a fairly equal basis, the reality is that this is far from the case.According to recent surveys by the Chronicle of Higher Education, thirty-five private university presidents and four public university presidents topped $1 million in total earnings during the 2011-2012 fiscal year.