In a recent post on Education Week's blog, Debra Viadero offers a caution about President Obama's support for community colleges. Pointing to her recent article on community college research that indicated how much more we need to know about how best to improve completion rates in that sector, she questions whether the president would be wiser to place his bets on career colleges. She says that a recent study by the Educational Policy Institute (EPI) and an ongoing program of research by James Rosenbaum and colleagues support...

The end of last year was a busy time for me as I waited out the birth of my daughter, who decided to spend an extra 10 days lounging in utero before emerging into the Wisconsin winter. I was so focused on strategies to promote her exit (sidenote: Talk about an area in need of better research -- given gobs of data on live births for hundreds of years, docs still refuse to hazard a prediction of labor occurring on any given night!), I virtually shut out the world of higher education policy. Imagine!

Thankfully, others were hard at work around and over the holidays, thinking about ways to make sure that the substantial, timely, and hard-won investment which will (fingers crossed) soon come to higher education via the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) are most effective. Evidence of that work is contained in a December Lumina Foundation

Dear readers,

Throughout the fall I blogged infrequently on the challenges of being a pregnant parenting professor. Today I'm writing again, this time to acknowledge how truly lovely life can be, and just how lucky I am.

Last Saturday my family welcomed my daughter into the world. Annie is already a strong-willed young woman, and I look forward to the challenge of both integrating her into our hectic life, and to learning how we can fit into hers. 

I hope to rejoin you with some new commentary on higher education by month's end. Til then -- happy new year, and all the best to you and your family.

Sara

When the history of American higher education in the 21st century is written, I suspect the end of the first decade will be known for two resounding themes: the growing importance of community colleges, and a move from college access to a focus on college success. The vocabulary of this important time centers on words like efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. These are terms that, thanks in no small part to the work of foundations like Lumina and Gates, finally have traction among both administrators and consumers of higher ed. In a very real sense, this is nothing less than astounding progress for an institution built primarily to enroll students privileged enough to attend college -- and not necessarily to graduate them.

For the latest -- and greatest -- example of this sea change we can look to Indiana. Faced with ever-common declines in...

There's growing concern with higher education's affordability problem, as well there should be. It's hard to see how college will promote social mobility if a kid's ability to access it is increasingly linked to whether or not his family has money.

So it's heartening to see college leaders attempting to provide solutions. But it'd be even better if we first saw them earnestly attempting to understand where the real sources of trouble lie. I'm afraid that step's being skipped a bit too often, running the risk of making things worse.

Here's a recent example. At this month's regents board meeting, University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly was explicitly asked to name some solutions to promoting affordability at his institutions.  There were many ways he could...

I love a good controversy about an important higher-education topic. What better way to enjoy a Wisconsin snowstorm than to sit cozily inside, trading e-mail messages with knowledgeable folks who are trying to sort out why it appears college completion rates have declined in the United States over the last 30 or 40 years. I'm hard-pressed to think of one (well, maybe, after a long day of work having this  38-week fetus out of me would be nice). So, thanks to Sarah Turner, John Bound and Michael Lovenheim for giving us such a nice meaty analysis to chew over this week.

There's already been a good...

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it's about time that the "crisis with boys" in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.

But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw -- the oft-repeated claim that we "just don't know" what's going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete "mystery,"...

Community colleges have been called many things -- "junior," "second chance," "sub-baccalaureate," and one of my personal favorites: places of "continued dependency, unrealistic aspirations, and wasted general education." That last one dates back to 1968, in the heat of their growth period (the author is W.B. Devall, writing in Education Record).

Despite all the disparaging remarks, I have a strong sense that many community-college leaders are willing to be called just about anything, as long as they're "not called late for dinner." And this year, at least, they're at the table, and standing to enjoy a nice deal in the form of the American Graduation Initiative (part of legislation pending in the Senate).

But this period of sunshine provides only a modicum of comfort, given the longstanding backdrop of invisibility punctuated by insults. In 2005,...

Maybe I'm just a little too sensitive these days. After all, women at the end of their third trimester can be like that. But when I read about a new campaign, one to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students, I was a bit taken aback.

According to the nonpartisan group in charge, 48 percent of community-college students "have ever been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant." And this is a problem, the group contends, because dropout rates are higher among students who get pregnant while in college. So, presumably in order to increase degree attainment in the public two-year sector, we need to slow this trend and prevent unplanned pregnancies.

OK, on the face of it, this seems like a plausible argument and approach. After all, it's hard enough to get a degree while...

As I read the story in Friday's New York Times, my belly twisted with the sharp movements of the nearly 9-month-old fetus inside. My daughter's little hand punched forward when I came to this line: "Children often have to be trained to listen to questions from strangers and to sit still for about an hour, the time it takes to complete the two tests." 

It's ok, I found myself whispering to her (out loud): I won't let this happen to you.

But can I really protect Annie from the world outside, a world in which New York City toddlers are being raised by parents willing to spend $90 a session to prep their children for tests used to determine admission to KINDERGARTEN? When my highly educated counterparts...