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Higher Education News
World & Nation
A member of the Bush administration's Commission on the Future of Higher Education is suggesting that standardized testing be extended to colleges and universities.
“We must do a better job of measuring institutional performance of colleges and universities,” said commission chairman Charles Miller, during a commission meeting in San Diego on Feb. 2.
Miller's suggestion was just one of several odious proposals to emerge from the 19-member commission, appointed last fall by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, but it appears to have already found some support—including from one member who is chief executive of a major test-coaching company.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, finds that citizens with a college education were significantly better able than their peers to understand and analyze the information they confront in their everyday lives.
But the report also found the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, with just 25 percent of college graduates scoring high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, defined as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.”
In budgets adopted by states for the 2005-06 fiscal year, total general-fund appropriations for postsecondary education rose by 5.3 percent, to $66.6 billion, the biggest jump since 2001, when the increase was 7 percent, according to the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University .
Twenty-seven states increased college budgets by 5 percent or more, up from 14 states last year. Four states reported a decrease in appropriations from one year to the next, half as many as in 2004-5.
More on state finance at the center's Web site, http://coe.ilstu.edu/grapevine
Faculty & Staff
The number of people who work in higher education grew by about 4.4 percent from 2003 to 2004, to a total of more than 3.3 million, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2004, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Faculty, 2004-05. Of the more than 3.3 million employees in 2004, the report notes, about two-thirds worked full time.
The National Science Foundation's, All in a Week's Work: Average Work Weeks of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers, finds that scientists and engineers in education, including those with doctorates who work in elementary and secondary schools as well as those in higher education, work longer hours than their counterparts in government and industry. In education, those with doctorates report a 50.59-hour average work week. In industry, the work week was 47.61 hours, and for government workers 45.17 hours a week.
Professional News
The Arizona Senate has defeated legislation that would have allowed college students to opt out of required reading that they found personally offensive or pornographic.
The measure would have given students the option of completing alternative course work if an assignment conflicted with their “beliefs or practices in sex, morality, or religion.” College officials objected to the bill, criticizing it as overly broad and an intrusion by the legislature into the classroom. The bill's sponsor reworked the bill so that it applied only to materials considered obscene under state law, but it was still defeated, 17 to 12.
Community colleges are usually seen as a steppingstone to a four-year college, but an analysis by the American Association of Community Colleges, using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study of 2003-04, found that 32 percent of community college students had previously attended a four-year institution.
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