Short Takes

First amendment rights regarding freedom of speech on college campuses nationwide has sparked significant debate and media coverage in recent months. In response, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges developed a set of guidelines intended to provide clarity on the role of institutions in upholding such freedoms.

The Wisconsin State Legislature has once again inserted a proposal from Governor Scott Walker to track the number of teaching hours that University of Wisconsin (UW) System professors spend in the classroom back into the state’s budget.

A recent news article by Matt Krupnick of the Hechinger Report focuses on the need for more tradespeople, occupations that are increasingly in high demand.

ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning recently released a report on working learners, Who Does Work Work For? Understanding Equity in Learner College and Career Success.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, president of LaGuardia Community College and ACE Board Member Gail O. Mellow offered her perspective on today’s college students. Namely, they aren’t who you think they are, and the higher education community could help remove barriers to their success by realizing that.

Equitable access to a higher education remains elusive. A recent New York Times article revealed that Black and Hispanic freshman are more underrepresented at the nation’s elite colleges today than they were 35 years ago.

Iowa’s public universities are presenting to the state’s Board of Regents Tuition Task Force this week on their five-year proposals for tuition pricing. The Tuition Task Force “was established to facilitate public discussion regarding the issue of tuition at Iowa’s public universities” and looks to foster collaborative solutions between the state’s legislators and public universities for minimizing tuition increases.

A recent blog post by Sanford J. Ungar in The Washington Post discusses the need to focus policy conversations around increasing college enrollment to those who have some college education, but no degree.

According to the 2017 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Business Officers, half of campus chief budget officers (CBOs) have significantly modified their budget model in recent years. The rationale: seven in 10 CBOs agree that media reports saying that higher education is in the midst of a financial crisis are accurate.

A report released this week by The Urban Institute finds that the food insecurity rate is 13.3 percent for households with students enrolled in two-year colleges. This means that nearly one in five two-year college students lives in a food-insecure household. By contrast, for households with students enrolled in four-year colleges, the rate of food insecurity is 11.2 percent.

A recent blog post from the Lumina Foundation discusses how frameworks act as blueprints to ensure all credentials are of high quality.

In their recently updated working paper, Mobility Report Cards: the Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility, authors Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan analyze the role colleges play in upward income mobility.