Higher education

How to teach critical thinking: an immodest idea

This entry is going to proceed through some maddeningly vague statements, so I will start with the bottom line: currently my best idea for teaching critical thinking in social sciences or related areas is to have students wrestle with an important substantive question or puzzle in a reasonably-well-bounded area of knowledge. The structure may be [...]

Brief review of Matt Reed’s “Confessions of a Community College Administrator”

I recently read Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, which was released earlier this spring. Bottom line: read it if you want a good description of community colleges today and an administrator’s perspective on the dilemmas of the public 2-year college sector.

Time enough for love … of learning: more on credit (hours)

Matt Reed has responded twice to my observations last month about competencies and credit hours. First, he directly responded to my proposal that we just strike the word “hour” from the phrase “credit hour:” If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal [...]

Stacked bar chart -- note how this chart stacks percentages for different populations.

How to kill a good report by using Excel

My brain is hurting this afternoon, because someone decided to use a stacked bar chart for two figures in the brand-new Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce report on employment and salary data for different undergraduate degrees, written by Anthony Carnevale and Ban Cheah. Here is the chart on unemployment data for different clusters of [...]

Quick review of Jeff Selingo’s “College (Un)bound”

Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound, came out last week. Very brief version of this post: buy it if you want a compilation of good reporting on higher education. You should expect to enjoy it as long as you bring the salt shaker for when Selingo becomes prescriptive.